Kim Miller
A collection of short stories on post humanism, and what might happen if the far future is populated by robots who don't remember the existence of humans. I thought the stories to have a weird edge but as I got further into them they started to form a more cohesive theme. The writing style and thought processes probably highlight a Korean manner that I found difficult to engage with until about half way into the book.
Firstly there is a short dissertation on the nature of breasts. It's something of a metaphor for 'some people write SF and some don't.'
There's a story about a person in a role playing game, trying to figure out if he's really human. A story about the nature of time passing, and the incongruity of thinking of time travel. The author asserts that there will never be time travel into the past simply because there has never been anyone from the future who has come back to warn us about anything. And then the stories form an exploration into evolution and the vagaries of the evolutionary process.
A story of evolution so rapid that in a single lifetime humans will evolve into totally different forms and species. And the titular story, On The Origin of Species, in which far future robots in a university discuss the mad notion that organic life can even exist. The planet is in an ice age caused by a massive black cloud that blankets the Earth, smoke from the factories that recycle old robots into new robots. The final story follows this theme with a 'What might have been' exploration of not only organic life being discovered and grown in the lab, but human life forms. This is a conflict ridden piece as the main character recognises that building these 'unnatural' beings threatens the world of robots. It's a reversal of Asimov's I Robot story.
A collection of short stories on post humanism, and what might happen if the far future is populated by robots who don't remember the existence of humans. I thought the stories to have a weird edge but as I got further into them they started to form a more cohesive theme. The writing style and thought processes probably highlight a Korean manner that I found difficult to engage with until about half way into the book.
Firstly there is a short dissertation on the nature of breasts. It's something of a metaphor for 'some people write SF and some don't.'
There's a story about a person in a role playing game, trying to figure out if he's really human. A story about the nature of time passing, and the incongruity of thinking of time travel. The author asserts that there will never be time travel into the past simply because there has never been anyone from the future who has come back to warn us about anything. And then the stories form an exploration into evolution and the vagaries of the evolutionary process.
A story of evolution so rapid that in a single lifetime humans will evolve into totally different forms and species. And the titular story, On The Origin of Species, in which far future robots in a university discuss the mad notion that organic life can even exist. The planet is in an ice age caused by a massive black cloud that blankets the Earth, smoke from the factories that recycle old robots into new robots. The final story follows this theme with a 'What might have been' exploration of not only organic life being discovered and grown in the lab, but human life forms. This is a conflict ridden piece as the main character recognises that building these 'unnatural' beings threatens the world of robots. It's a reversal of Asimov's I Robot story.