Claire L. Evans

Terraform is Vice Media's speculative fiction arm, and these stories are internet age provocations, short, sharp, often intriguing. Divided into three sections, Watch on the panopticon, World with classic scifi alternative worlds, and Burn focusing on disaster, there are a lot of winners in this collection, and surprisingly little dross. My only overall thought is that with the stories coming in at around 7 pages (about 2.5 kilowords, if my memory is correct), at lot of these stories feel show more like the first acts of something bigger, trading a conclusion for a punchline. But on the other hand, I read them all, and any short fiction collection has at least one story that just doesn't vibe.

Some that stuck with me:
Busy - Omar El Akkad. The dystopia of make-work in a world where human labor is unnecessary, but dignity is still required.
Flyover Country - Tim Maughan. Maughan imagines an American maquiladora under a fascist regime, and the small risks that people will take for one moment of human contact.
Warning Signs - Emily L. Smith. A clever deconstruction of a vile main character in the age of #MeToo, app-enabled dating, and female-gendered AI assistants.
The Prostitute - Max Wynn. A new kind of tricking, with telepresence operated humans, and a very unusual client.
The Duchy of Toe Adam - Lincoln Michel. Dog-eared space opera with a punchline that lands!
An Incomplete Timeline of What We Tried - Debbie Urbanski. Climate fiction in the vein of J.G. Ballard on at his best. show less

Broad Band by Claire L. Evans is a successful attempt to restore women to the history of technology.
It is both informative and entertaining to read.

Going into the book, I thought I knew a lot about the history of technology; I knew about the Difference Engine and Analytical Engine by Charles Babbage, the Harvard Mark I, the ENIAC, and a great many other cases of Alphabet Soup. I also knew about Ada Byron, Countess Lovelace. I had heard of Grace Hopper. I knew that before computers were show more electronic they were mainly women.

Evans’ book does introduce a great many things that I did not think about or glossed over when I was younger. Most of the stuff I had not heard of was the efforts of women in the development of the Internet and Computer Games. I wouldn’t say I thought of programming as primarily a man’s job, or that I think women should be in the kitchen or anything like that, it is just that all of the sources I had read up to this point gloss over their contributions or outright ignore them. Colossal Cave Adventure is an excellent starting point. I had heard of Will Crowther, the man who programmed the game and mapped an entire section of Mammoth Cave by memory, but I had not heard of his wife, Pat Crowther, the woman who actually went into a lot of the narrow sections since she was so slender. Together they mapped out a great deal of the cave, and when she divorced him, he made the game to alleviate his sorrows and to entertain their two daughters.

When I was younger and frequented certain websites, there was a joke that there were no women on the internet. Heck, it was one of the ‘Rules’ of the Internet. However, I suppose I never realized how integral women actually were to the development of the technology. This book is really eye-opening in that sense. show less

Claire L. Evans takes us through a brisk tour of of women's contributions to computer science and the World Wide Web/Internet. She starts with Ada Lovelace and female computers (if you've seen Hidden Figures then you get it), going on to Grace Hopper and other awesome ladies programming and debugging computers etc. Then she goes on through the decades to talk about other awesome tech women, none of whom I had heard about. An English woman came up with working hypertext like a decade before show more Tim Berners-Lee did, but she used a different format of internet. It's all such fascinating stuff.

Evans covers all of this in an engaging way, neither too scientific nor casual/chatty. As a journalist, Evans (who interviewed just about all of these women personally) is great at telling the stories. My quibbles: there are hardly any pictures of the women featured/interviewed, and I'd have loved a recommended reading list as well. There are endnotes, but no little numbers in the body of the text to indicate which citation or quotation goes to which endnote, which I personally think is irresponsible in a nonfiction book. Regardless, I really enjoyed this book and want to learn more about the awesome band of broads who gave us the internet/WWW. Thanks for everything, ladies.

Read this book's non-condensed review and trigger warnings at https://fileundermichellaneous.blogspot.com/2022/03/book-review-broad-band-untol... show less

A fascinating account of women programmers, designers, pioneers in ways that you might not imagine. The early days of the internet were of most interest to me, before commercialization took over, before social media turned us into the products sold to advertisers. As the author describes it: "this sprawl, this refractory, intractable explosion of information, connections, and people". Other than the first two chapters which focus on Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper, none of these women are show more household names but that in no way lessens their achievements and accomplishments. A fast read and one does not need to be a "techie" to understand the book. show less