Just Finished Reading: Man Vs Machine edited by John Helfers and Martin H Greenberg (FP: 2007)

I’ve thought for a long time that, considering the advances made in robotics, computers and AI, there should be more SF stories modelling our future conflict with the products of our own technology. But apart from the Terminator series (movies and TV), the Borg in Star Trek, the Replicators in Star Gate and the Cylons in Battlestar what else is there – precious little even in novels and short stories. So I was very glad to stumble across this collection – so much so that I even did that rare thing and bought it second hand.

The pleasure of having the reasonably sized book (all 308 pages of it) in my hand was to discover that not one of the stories was really all that bad – which is unusual in itself in most collections of short stories. As well as the uniformly reasonably quality I was impressed by the breadth of storytelling. It wasn’t all post-apocalyptic Terminator style scribbling. Must as I like such scribbling it can get a bit wearing after the 10th such story in a row. Of course such stories did make their way in between the covers but the machines normally turned out to be aliens rather than killers from our own future. Two of the best here where ‘Last of the Fourth’ by Bill Fawcett and ‘Cold Dead Fingers’ by Loren L Coleman. There’s a reasonable, if rather predictable, Berserker story ‘Servant of Death’ by Jane Lindskold and Fred Saberhagen and a much better post end-of-the-world story ‘The Unplug War’ by Brendon DuBois which is quite creepy especially at the end. An interesting story that flips the whole idea of man vs machine on its head is ‘Partnership’ by William H Keith and an investigation into exactly how we would react to the accidential emergence of AI is played out in ‘The Difference’ by L E Modesitt Jr. Finally I’ll mention two stories that warmed my gamer’s heart, ‘Killer App’ by Richard E Dansky where a top class gamer defends the world from a AI that can’t be switched off and ‘Reiteration’ by Simon Brown where aliens try to learn about human weaknesses through war simulations that, no matter what, humans seems always to win.

As you can probably tell, as a fan of the man vs machine genre I was impressed by this collection of 15 stories. If you like that sort of thing I can certainly recommend this book – especially for those with too little time on their hands.