Difference between revisions of "Nano Comes to Clifford Falls: And Other Stories"
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Clifford Falls is the small town in this collection’s title tale whose inhabitants are unceremoniously initiated into the brave new world of tiny machines that make work unnecessary. The devil’s workshop runs full blast with so many idle hands while the wise and genetically industrious shun nanotechnology as a way of life. Older people may fret over programming their cell phones while young people grow up cyber savvy, but is anyone prepared for a technological revolution that will challenge a million years of our evolutionary history? To one character, nano is “Satan’s work,” and to another it is “a gift from god,” but for the level-headed narrator, “it was kind of like everyone won the lottery at the same time” (18). (Morrissey p. 27) [* * *] | Clifford Falls is the small town in this collection’s title tale whose inhabitants are unceremoniously initiated into the brave new world of tiny machines that make work unnecessary. The devil’s workshop runs full blast with so many idle hands while the wise and genetically industrious shun nanotechnology as a way of life. Older people may fret over programming their cell phones while young people grow up cyber savvy, but is anyone prepared for a technological revolution that will challenge a million years of our evolutionary history? To one character, nano is “Satan’s work,” and to another it is “a gift from god,” but for the level-headed narrator, “it was kind of like everyone won the lottery at the same time” (18). (Morrissey p. 27) [* * *] | ||
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| − | '''“My Mother, Dancing”''' | + | '''“My Mother, Dancing”''' |
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| + | is a brilliant first-person narration whose teller remains the same person despite multiple body changes. Told in the voice of a biologist charged with genetically modifying colony species for maximal adaptability who also happens to be one of five clone sisters, the story focuses on [...] why and how did one of the clones blow up an entire sentient-inhabited star system? Another of the sisters is a cosmologist, which affords Kress the chance to have someone explain [...] how the galaxywide QUENTIAM AI operates and how its operation suggests cosmic theories at the heart of speculative physics at the start of the twenty-first century. The complex science, the interactions among the clones and with QUENTIAM, and the artful first-person narration combine to give this tale a mass and power that strains but does not break the boundaries of the short story form. (Morrissey p. 28) | ||
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Latest revision as of 22:20, 13 January 2021
Kress, Nancy. Nano Comes to Clifford Falls: And Other Stories. Foreword by Mike Resnick. Urbana, IL: Golden Gryphon Press, 2008.
Stories listed and briefly commented on by Joe Sherry (2 June 2008) on "Adventures in Reading" blog site.[1]
"Nano Comes to Clifford Falls" "takes a small town and shows what happens with the introduction of a device which can replicate nearly anything by using nanotechnology."
"Computer Virus": "What happens when a rogue AI hides in a computer protected house and takes the family inside hostage?"
"Savior": "covers a couple of hundred years of non-communication with an alien artifact which landed on Earth. Kress shows the changing of society and technology and what an alien craft might be waiting for."
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Reviewed by Thomas J. Morrissey, SFRA Review #285 (Spring 2008): pp. 27-28,[2] who describes this book as "a short story collection featuring thirteen hard SF tales, all of which have appeared in English-language periodicals or anthologies since 2000. Asimov’s Science Fiction published six of them. Every story — whether near or far future — is about human adaptation to science and technology, even though some of the humans are genemods whose relationship to us is best seen at the molecular level" (p. 27).
On "Nano Comes to Clifford Falls"[3]
Clifford Falls is the small town in this collection’s title tale whose inhabitants are unceremoniously initiated into the brave new world of tiny machines that make work unnecessary. The devil’s workshop runs full blast with so many idle hands while the wise and genetically industrious shun nanotechnology as a way of life. Older people may fret over programming their cell phones while young people grow up cyber savvy, but is anyone prepared for a technological revolution that will challenge a million years of our evolutionary history? To one character, nano is “Satan’s work,” and to another it is “a gift from god,” but for the level-headed narrator, “it was kind of like everyone won the lottery at the same time” (18). (Morrissey p. 27) [* * *]
“My Mother, Dancing”
is a brilliant first-person narration whose teller remains the same person despite multiple body changes. Told in the voice of a biologist charged with genetically modifying colony species for maximal adaptability who also happens to be one of five clone sisters, the story focuses on [...] why and how did one of the clones blow up an entire sentient-inhabited star system? Another of the sisters is a cosmologist, which affords Kress the chance to have someone explain [...] how the galaxywide QUENTIAM AI operates and how its operation suggests cosmic theories at the heart of speculative physics at the start of the twenty-first century. The complex science, the interactions among the clones and with QUENTIAM, and the artful first-person narration combine to give this tale a mass and power that strains but does not break the boundaries of the short story form. (Morrissey p. 28)
RDE, finishing, 13Jan21
