Silently and Very Fast

This is actually my second time reading this story and it's just as good this time as the first.

Let me back up. This Hugo winner for best novella a few years ago may not have taken the world by storm, but Valente herself has been taking a lot of us that way. You know. Blown away.

She has a fantastic talent with words, always lyrical, rife with ideas, and most importantly, beautiful.

This particular story starts with a parable about Inanna and Ereshkigal and Tammuz and draws it right into a tale of raising an AI from humble house beginnings to childhood to adulthood, and far beyond. It also seamlessly incorporates sleeping beauty, legends of many monomyths, and incorporates it into sexuality, mourning, and the nature of intelligence (and show more how humans failed the Turing test). :)

And believe it or not, Valente does this magically. It rolls off the page with such beauty and easy flow, we can hardly believe we're being riddled with myth, deep thought, and hard-SF. We come away from it, FEELING something grand. :)

Do I recommend this?

HELL YEAH. It encapsulates everything high-brow, magical, poetical, and lovely. This is literature AS hard-SF. :) show less

A creative combination of mythology and science fiction, which seems much longer and deeper thanks to the vivid imagination of Catherynne Valente. I don't think I entirely grasped the ending, but I will enjoy reading this again and again until I do! Valente's rich vocabulary and world-building slightly dazzled me. I love how she thinks in terms of 'tiny junkblossoms sizzling with recursive algorithms' and 'beaches of broken cathedrals', lines that only make sense in the context of the story but conjure up beautiful images in the reader's imagination. She also writes from the perspective of artificial intelligence in a thoughtful, yet strictly logical narrative voice - Elefsis is hyper-intelligent and self-aware, but still basically a show more computer. An impressive and enjoyable modern myth, with many layers. show less

I still think of myself as a house. Ravan tried to fix this problem of self-image, as he called it. To teach me to phrase my communication in terms of a human body. To say: let us hold hands instead of let us hold kitchens. To say put our heads together and not put our parlors together.
But it is not as simple as replacing words anymore. Ravan is gone. My hearth is broken.

This is, quite simply, beautiful. It is the breaking of myth and story to find the shards and slivers that will explain the making of a new life, a new family, and maybe a new world. Parts of it are profoundly uncomfortable, but such is the life we live. (I will go ahead and say trigger warnings for strong suggestions of incest, though you could debate it on either side show more given what Elefsis is.) There is no doubt a great deal to be said here about sex and gender and Other. Other is really what this story is about. But you know what? This Locus winning story is all of 127 pages long and you can read it online for free starting here:

http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/valente_10_11/

I am not going to say another blessed word, because it's not worth spoiling. Don't read the blurb. Don't read any more reviews. Just go read this.

Reviewed 3/1/2016
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2/29/16: This, on the other hand, was quite delicious. Maybe there is hope for 2016 yet. Review to come. show less

Cat Valente has a gift for myth. She is inspired by it, she works with it, she weaves into new and strange configurations and leaves the reader to work out where they've got to and how they feel about it.

Nominally a story about an AI who dreams of communion with its own kind trying to integrate with a new and unwilling operator, this is more a coming of age story about innocence and experience. It is barely recognizable as an AI tale at all, couched within a rich and fluid dreamscape and communicated in part through co-opted fairytales.

I loved it, but I can't resist a good bit of myth. I sensed Neva's secret almost from the start, but the journey from the AI's creation to Elefsis's understanding of its future was fulfilling and show more distracting. Arguably the only missing but highly implicit tale was Pinocchio; but here it is the operators who want a real boy, not the puppet. Elefsis is self defined and alive on its own terms and cannot really understand that the Other is alien and threatening. It just wants someone like it to talk to.

I found it a gorgeously imaginative story about the birth of a new intelligence. Appropriately, it's got a lot of heart, albeit with jagged edges. show less

The imagination of Catherynne M. Valente in her Silently and Very Fast is blowing my mind. I had to come here to recommend it. It's a story about the evolution of a single artificial intelligence through its connection to generations of a human family, recounted as myth might be. It's odd to see a story with such heart and such almost hallucinatory visual language right up against a far-future tech tale, but she's pulled it off wonderfully, and in only 127 pages. This is the best book I've read in a really long time.

At first I thought I'd have to be "in the mood" for her language in order to enjoy reading her, but I learned that she actually puts me right into the mood. I have to admit that sometimes I need to put my Kindle down due to show more being blinded by all the beauty of her imagination and language. I need a few minutes to let it all soak in.

Also available for free in three parts on the Clarkesworld website. show less

Can Catherynne M. Valente write Science Fiction? Yes. “Silently And Very Fast” is a ‘Turing Test’ story. It explores the concepts of artificial intelligence and identity. The initial question raised by the book is: What if an artificial intelligence was programmed in figurative communication, rather than literal communication? From there we are given glimpses of a future which manages to be both plausible and unexpected.

There are three styles of chapter in this book: there are the conversations between the artificial intelligence Elefsis and the current operator Neva, which take place in a collaborative virtual environment; there are Elefsis’ memories of how it came to be; and there are the stories Elefsis tells which use myth show more and metaphor to allow humans to understand Elefsis’ perspective.

In genre fiction when science and myth are combined it is sometimes referred to as 'Science Fantasy' however those are typically mythic tales with a veneer of science added. If anything “Silently And Very Fast” is the opposite, a scientific premise with a layer of myth added to clarify the issues involved. It is more like Science Folklore than Science Fantasy.

The author’s prose is a pleasure to read, as always. I will admit that in some of her other stories the subject matter is a bit dark for my taste, but her writing style has never disappointed me. This is the type of book which gains depth on subsequent readings. I was able to read the first third of the book on "Clarkesworld Magazine" before my copy arrived in the mail. Once I had my own copy, reading from the beginning showed me facets I had not noticed before. show less

Catherynne M. Valente’s 2011 novella, Silently and Very Fast, was nominated for Hugo and Nebula awards, and I can see why. It is the poetic story of a personal AI that reminds me of Asimov’s The Bicentennial Man without all the clanking around.
Here are some tidbits I liked: “Worrying is defined as obsessive examination of one’s code.”
And how about: “Love is the Turing test.”
I won’t quote it, but there is also a delightful description of an AI having an electronic orgasm.
It was fun, though I would like more plot with my poetry.