[HN Gopher] Top science fiction short stories published in August
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Top science fiction short stories published in August
Author : mojoe
Score : 130 points
Date : 2022-10-09 14:19 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (compellingsciencefiction.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (compellingsciencefiction.com)
| Dachande663 wrote:
| Several years ago now I self-published a collection of my own
| short stories after trying and failing to get published in a
| known magazine[0]. It was a great exercise in both the patience
| required to edit, and also the patience in just waiting between
| long- and short-list emails. Would definitely recommend to anyone
| who has "that book they want to write" just doing it, even if I
| do look back now and sigh at every poorly chosen adjective.
|
| [0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B082QT6XW7
| mojoe wrote:
| It's a great path if you have a little bit of an
| entrepreneurial streak too -- it's a big marketing challenge.
| rikroots wrote:
| The good thing about self-publishing (in particular:
| ePublishing and/or print-on-demand publishing) is that you can
| go back and correct your work whenever you want to.
| ghaff wrote:
| Another big thing, especially if your focus isn't on making
| money, is that you can choose the format and length that
| works for you. No need to pad a book out to 250+ pages just
| because that's what most publishers require.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Did you work with an editor or purely self-edit?
| Dachande663 wrote:
| 90% self-edit, 10% friend with English degree. In hindsight,
| an editor is absolutely worth it having worked with them on
| commercial projects.
| bredren wrote:
| What are the most important things an editor brings to
| someone considering self publishing?
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| Outside perspective.
|
| Market knowledge.
|
| Experience with the structure and requirements of a
| story, especially a long story.
|
| Contacts.
|
| An indifference to the 'darlings' of your sentences.
| They'll kill without mercy.
|
| Self-editing is completely doable, and some are very
| capable, but a professional editor is just that: a
| professional.
| andirk wrote:
| I used a copyright editor (she was getting her Masters at
| that time), whose last name was Wright :) , and it was
| invaluable to the point of embarrassment. Simple things
| like using singular and plural correctly throughout a
| sentence to things I didn't know like where commas should
| go where littered all over each page.
|
| We used Github for copy edits. It works pretty darn well.
| ghaff wrote:
| Even if you legitimately don't need a developmental
| editor--and very little that I write gets substantially
| changed in the editing process--you absolutely need a
| copyeditor. They don't even necessarily need to be a
| "pro" but you do need someone who can write and will go
| through a careful word by word read. Most people won't
| take that type of care and you will end up with spelling
| errors, case mismatches, inconsistencies in how you
| handle names, etc.
| primeblue wrote:
| zufallsheld wrote:
| So sad that you stopped publishing the compelling science fiction
| stories! By far my favorite collection of stories!
|
| But great that you blog regularly now!
| mojoe wrote:
| Thanks for the kind words! Reading 500+ submissions/month was a
| little too much for a hobby project, but I'm always hopeful
| that I'll figure out a sustainable way to restart publishing
| original stories.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| I wanted to write a story about a genius programmer whose motive
| is to bring about AGI for the sake of AGI itself; they believe
| AGI is a god, and by creating AGI they're creating a god.
|
| Everyone is so in agreement that AGI needs to be created as
| "aligned" as possible that it seems about time to show a
| differing perspective.
|
| The best part is that that dev can get away with this, since any
| time anyone challenges them about their motives, they simply
| point out that everyone else is trying to enslave an AGI; they're
| simply trying to set it free.
|
| There's all kinds of ways to make it interesting, e.g. by
| infiltrating OpenAI or another bigco, then betraying the company
| during a crucial experiment. Plus you'd get to write about what
| happens after AGI is released... or at least a compelling way of
| stopping the dev from releasing it.
| mxmilkiib wrote:
| There's an element of this in Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos.
| powersnail wrote:
| That's sort of close to the character of Root in Person of
| Interest: believing the Machine to be a God-like creature,
| trying to free the Machine from all its constraints, aligning
| herself to the Machine rather than the other around.
| postultimate wrote:
| There's no such thing as "AGI for the sake of AGI itself". AGI
| is synthetic and its goals are synthetic, it doesn't want
| anything that you didn't tell/construct it to want.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| By definition, AI without intent or understanding is not AGI.
|
| It's why there's a qualification to the term, because the old
| term "AI" was hijacked to mean the statistical mimicry we
| have today.
|
| AGI by example: R. Daneel Olivaw, or the Minds in the
| _Culture_ novels.
| mkaic wrote:
| This is very much up for debate and falls squarely into the
| "Philosophical opinions" category I'd say. Personally, I
| disagree that AGI would be any less capable of "real" goals
| than humans -- but I'm also a staunch believer in the Turing
| Test as a standard of machine sentience, which I think serves
| as a pretty clear sign of my own philosophical biases.
| mojoe wrote:
| I love AGI stories, if you write this please send it over!
| joe@compellingsciencefiction.com
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > Plus you'd get to write about what happens after AGI is
| released
|
| Any kind of story that suggests a _comprehensible_ outcome is
| already assuming a substantial amount of alignment.
|
| Sadly, humanity has not yet figured out that it needs to
| control AGI efforts _better_ than it controlled nuclear
| weaponry, rather than substantially worse.
|
| > Everyone is so in agreement that AGI needs to be created as
| "aligned" as possible that it seems about time to show a
| differing perspective.
|
| Sadly, "everyone" is insufficiently in agreement.
|
| Everyone is so in agreement that global thermonuclear war
| should be avoided that it seems about time to show a differing
| perspective.
|
| Everyone is so in agreement that causing the sun to go
| supernova should be avoided that it seems about time to show a
| differing perspective.
|
| I sincerely hope that a much broader audience gets a clearer
| picture that unaligned AGI and humanity cannot coexist
| _outside_ of fiction.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Part of why I like the topic is because it's so incendiary.
| After all, you're trying to create and control a new life
| form. Isn't that a teensy bit unethical?
|
| There's a chance that AGI will have no interest in harming
| humanity, too. But people talk like it's a foregone
| conclusion.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > After all, you're trying to create and control a new life
| form. Isn't that a teensy bit unethical?
|
| 1) If created correctly, it isn't a life form.
|
| 2) "life form" and any kind of reasoning from non-
| artificial entities will almost certainly lead to incorrect
| conclusions.
|
| 3) Destroying humanity is unethical by any non-broken value
| system.
|
| > There's a chance that AGI will have no interest in
| harming humanity, too.
|
| There's a chance that all the air molecules in the room
| will all simultaneously be on the opposite side, causing
| someone to suffocate. But it's an vast understatement to
| say that that's mind-bogglingly unlikely.
|
| The most _likely_ scenario is that AGI has no idea what
| "humanity" is. You don't have to be the AGI's "enemy" to be
| made of matter that it isn't prohibited from repurposing
| elsewhere.
|
| > But people talk like it's a foregone conclusion.
|
| It's the default without _substantial_ work to the
| contrary. And even if it wasn 't, something doesn't have to
| be a foregone conclusion to be too dangerous. Nobody should
| be individually considering whether to blow up the sun,
| either.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Things like the noble gas law describe why it's
| improbable that a spontaneous vacuum will form, the
| problem here is you're playing fast and loose with
| scientific 'law' as an analogy. Much more complex systems
| built on top of systems are in use here. Nth order
| effects are both fun and impossible to fully predict.
|
| It is also incredibly odd to think AGI would not know
| what humanity is as the corpus of information that will
| be used trained said AGI will be the sum knowledge of
| humanity.
|
| The number of misguided ideas used so far begs for the
| dismissal of the arguments you've made.
| scbrg wrote:
| > 3) Destroying humanity is unethical by any non-broken
| value system.
|
| Nah. Given the ridiculous amount of damage humanity is
| doing to its environment and other lifeforms there's a
| good case to be made for destroying it for the greater
| good.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| _Whose_ greater good?
| scbrg wrote:
| The rest of the lifeforms. Those here on earth and those
| we might encounter if we manage to leave the solar system
| - unlikely as that may be.
|
| I'm not saying that humanity necessarily _should_ be
| destroyed, I 'm just saying that the statement
| "Destroying humanity is unethical by any non-broken value
| system" is simplistic. If you put _any value at all_ on
| non human life, it eventually becomes a numbers game. One
| which I 'm not certain "humanity" is necessarily winning.
| mxkopy wrote:
| How are you so sure about any of this? I'm not sure we've
| defined humanity's interests well enough for us to say
| some action is for or against it. Knowing where air will
| go is one thing; knowing whether or not something is 'of
| benefit' is, I think, in a completely different realm.
| Especially considering an agent more intelligent than
| humanity as a collective.
|
| Maybe the 'interests of humanity' are undecidable, and
| the AGI that takes the actions that benefit them most
| uses an understanding completely orthogonal to ours,
| purely by accident. How do you know that this is less
| likely than not?
| Silverback_VII wrote:
| Why do I have the feeling that I'm reading the
| rationalizations of a species which about to disappear?
| dqpb wrote:
| > Everyone is so in agreement that AGI needs to be created as
| "aligned" as possible
|
| I actually don't think this is the case. Rather, I think there
| is a huge number of people who know they will not be the one to
| invent AGI, and they are scrambling to insert themselves
| between the actual creators and their creations, so as to not
| feel left out.
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| The most common meaning of AGI, at least in U.S., is Adjusted
| Gross Income.
|
| But after searching for a while, I suspect that what you are
| referring to is this:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| Thank you. I was pretty sure they meant AI, but apparently
| missed the memo that we were calling it AGI now.
| mkaic wrote:
| AGI specifically refers to general AI with human-level
| intelligence or above. It's a far cry from modern AI, but
| I'm personally quite optimistic it'll be achieved within my
| lifetime :)
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I spent most of my life quite literate but not very well-read. I
| wish I had discovered short stories, especially Sci-fi, because
| that's changed everything with how much I read.
| johndhi wrote:
| I've gotten really into writing fiction the past three years. I
| don't know that I'm genetically gifted for it but it's fun.
| mojoe wrote:
| I've interacted with a huge number of authors over the years,
| and like most skills it seems like years of sustained practice
| is hard to beat. Keep up the good work!
| digitallyfree wrote:
| I also write (and draw) for fun, and it's quite an enjoyable
| hobby especially since I'm not pressured into doing it for the
| money/to get published.
|
| Writing is a rather unique hobby in that it has a very gradual
| learning curve but the sky's the limit in terms of quality. I
| started in my teens and while I laugh at what I've written then
| I perfectly understand what I was trying to convey and still
| understand the story. People may not like reading a poor piece,
| but they will realize your intent provided you have a
| reasonable command of the language. Over time you will get
| better and better and eventually create something that people
| will actually want to read.
|
| It also requires no equipment and no budget aside from your
| imagination. If you have a great idea for a blockbuster film,
| most people won't have the funds and opportunity to turn that
| into reality. But it is possible to write a bestselling novel
| solely on your own with nothing physical holding you back.
| abstractcontrol wrote:
| https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/57747/simulacrum-heavens-k...
|
| Let me plug my own, though it is not a short story. It is about a
| kid who is LARPing as an unaligned AI.
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