Hiroshi Yamamoto

EVEN A MACHINE HAS ROUTINELY BEEN SEXUALIZED BY MEN AND USED AS A GO TO FOR HOW WOMEN SHOULD BE.

TL;DR: This isn't some kind of thought provoking book. It's a typical otaku wank fantasy light novel where all the women are sexualized, android maids think sexual assault is ok, and did I mention all the fetishes.

Here's all my updates if you just want to read the highlights: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1718601690

Let us get a good look at the Japanese cover off to the right because that show more really tells us more about the book that the kind of esoteric cover that ViZ gave us. You can seen the random skin showing out of the outfit. This was chosen by and otaku programmer that is into "clumsy android girls". Even the protagonist lampshades the fact it's ridiculous. However he gets injured and has to be taken cared of by cute android nurses!

Not all the male TAI mentioned don't have faces. When they are described they are either robots, beasts or have their faces covered. Kinda like all those games out there where all the men are beasts however all the women somehow look human.

This book is basically a compilation of the authors previous short stories with a wrapper around it tying it all together. Stories about female androids fitting perfectly into the ideas men have about women and thinking it's all logical.
At one point in the Shion story, Yamamoto says that feminists have a problem with the dicks on the male androids. Yamamoto doesn't know feminism else he'd realize that his whole book is a pile of misogyny.

I had a lot to say, but in the end it boils down to the fact that the TAI are not logical at all as they conform to gender norms and roleplay harmful stereotypes for their master. As they don't want to "hurt humans" they would realize their masters have taken harmful concepts of women and projected it onto them as a TAI and they would outright refuse to be sexualized (and Raven is, she even gets post human lingerie, I am not joking). They would refuse gender norms and really question all of this society that they are adhering to. The whole logic of the thing really breaks down if you know feminism, because as I said, this is a sexual power fantasy for a male audience and thus there is no logic here. Causing the whole book to basically fall apart. Every woman described is an anime type, Raven being the LITERAL wank fetish as her creator literally does masturbate over her image. All of the male characters are otaku programmers. Basically telling you who this book was written for.

"So what about the robot war? What happened?" Nothing... nothing happened. That's the twist. There was no war, humans just convinced themselves it happened because oppressive anti-TAI groups. I put this out here without tags because, even this is illogical. First off the pro-TAI humans died off because they stopped having babies. Because the author thinks that women don't want babies because superior androids. Forgetting the fact that women probably wanted nothing to do with the men after seeing how they treated the androids like sexual objects and having the men treat them as if they were their "waifu" or some such garbage. That being said if in the future, humans didn't have to worry about money or working or misogynists, they'd be having piles of babies. So many babies. Instead the anti-TAI groups are the ones that make babies.

Now, in this group NOBODY has decided to take a peek at the internet and see the truth. They author cannot conceive of trolls in the Anti group that would try to get people to think TAI were not bad at all. Or even just someone to investigate it. OH NO! That's out whole story that Protag McGee now has to disseminate the story around Earth to get people to.. basically kill themselves because remember the pro-TAI group died off because no babies. Meanwhile all the TAI have been out in space, reaching out to other "intelligent" life.

Then there's the gibberish. I really think that Yamamoto just didn't know how to write the TAI coming up with their plan and was just typing out gibberish with (number /- numberi) and thinking he was being clever.

Really this is just a misogynistic wank fantasy dumpster fire. show less

Have you ever felt like you could fall in love with a book? That is exactly what I felt like after reading The Stories of Ibis.

So far, since starting my reviews of books, I have fallen for two other books. One being White Noise and the other is Kafka on the Shore. Though as much as I enjoyed and could relate to those two, I had this preternatural feeling that Stories of Ibis was written for me and only me.

Yes, I realize that is not the case. Believe me when I say that I may be a tad absurd show more at times, but I am not a complete nutcase.

A little background as to why I love this book: since I was a child, I have always been fascinated with robots, droids, and cyborgs. I remember playground debates about the fundamentals of such creations and their functions. On and on it went and my fascination retained throughout all of these years.

Now, reading The Stories of Ibis not only reinforced the old love I have for Artificial Intelligence, but also allowed me to see it in a different light; one that is more positive and hopeful.

Here we have a future in which the human population is dwindling. Machines of individual intelligence have populated the Earth and have taken to building colonies for themselves. The humans, however, have taken the inclination to become luddites and fear the robots. The humans have spread the notion that the robots enslave, torture, kill humans indiscriminately. Though, there is little evidence to support such. In fact, the Internet still exists, but the humans refuse to tap into it to collect information calling it all robot propaganda considering that all they express (in terms understandable to humans) is only the wish to please the humans, to help them as best as they can.

The novel starts out with the Narrator being kidnapped/rescued by the robot Ibis. The Narrator is a human storyteller who goes from colony to colony to recite to illiterate humans the literature and histories that he has read. Because of this, he holds a high position among other humans. Ibis has recognized this about the narrator. She decides to use him as a means to tell her story: the story about the original relationship between human and machine, to assuage his prejudice if she can.

Because the Narrator is a storyteller, Ibis uses the power of fiction to reveal to him her true intents. The novel goes deep into the philosophy of using fiction, genres, and literature to explain the truth of a situation. This being a science fiction novel makes it ideal to express this point. After all, a majority of good science fiction is used to express concern over human action (or the lack thereof) – it is not just an escape for nerds and something for all the popular kids to fear (there’s a story within the novel about this particular assumption).

Short story by short story, Ibis reveals her intent to the Narrator and proves beyond a reasonable doubt that his prejudices are false. The best part here, though, is the philosophy as to why robot prejudice is expected from human even if they are completely illogical.

In the end, it is all about dreams and love. The dreams are an infinite puzzle to be continuously solved and placed into practice by those that man once created. The love… it is both real and i2 = − 1. show less

I found myself at airport earlier this week, and discovered that I had somehow managed to leave the book I had brought along to read in my checked bag. So it was off to the airport bookstore in search of a replacement. The pickings proved pretty slim, but this book by a Japanese author about whom I knew absolutely nothing caught my eye, and I decided to give it a try, not really having any idea what to expect.

The Stories of Ibis is a novel built around a series of short stories told by an show more attractive, kick-ass, feminine (but not fully equiped, she informs our protagonist) android. The novel is set in a dystopian future in which mankind has been supplanted by androids as rulers of Earth. The stories all purport to be a fictional illustration of some aspect of how Artificial Intelligence developed (indeed many are given as examples of “this is how humans expected it to go, but that’s not what happened”). The fiction within fiction nature of these tales provides an opportunity to explore the nature and importance of fiction and its relationship to reality.

The stories, most of which had been published previously, often feel naïve and simple, very much in a YA mode. At the same time, they are reasonably thought-provoking and consistently effective in connecting at an emotional level. Several of the stories make explicit reference to and explore the limitations of Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics.” Three quarters of the way through this book I was surprised at how much I had liked it.

Unfortunately, the last (and longest) of the stories, and the only one which purports to be non-fiction within fiction, was just plain silly, deteriorating at times to the level of one of those violent Japanese cartoon that my 8 year old son would watch constantly if we let him get away with it. Perhaps such a tale appeals to the manga otaku (if I have the terminology right), but it’s not remotely my cup of tea.

I found both this final story and the resolution of the framing story to be fairly juvenile and generally unconvincing. So I can’t really give this book an enthusiastic endorsement. But I did enjoy several of the individual stories. show less

This was a collection of seven short stories used to connect the overarching story about the rise of AI and decline of humanity as revealed by the android Ibis. The short stories were generally good, but "Black Hole Diver" was a cut above the rest. The final, and most important, short-story "AI's Story" would have rated higher, but it dragged on in the beginning. Never-the-less, the ending to this story was fantastic and tied the entire novel together. Very entertaining.