Antibodies

by Charles Stross, Jared Doreck (Narrator), Shandra Marie (Narrator)

Everone remebers where they were and what they were doing when a member of the great and the good is assassinated. You can kill a politician but their ideas usually live on. They have a life of their own. How much more dangerous, then, the ideas of mathematicians?

Genres: Science Fiction, Audiobook, Fiction

1 pages, Audio CD

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Charles David George "Charlie" Stross is a writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. His works range from science fiction and Lovecraftian horror to fantasy.

Stross is sometimes regarded as being part of a new generation of British science fiction writers who specialise in hard science fiction and space opera. His contemporaries include Alastair Reynolds, Ken MacLeod, Liz Williams and Richard Morgan.

SF Encyclopedia: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/...

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_...

Tor: http://us.macmillan.com/author/charle...

Reviews

[Bookmeister420]

A fine short story, well worth the 30 minutes and 0 dollars I paid for it. (Note: from me, this is high praise, because I value my time highly.) I will now discuss its ending:

The conversational logic of the punchline of this story fails. The regular logic is sound: the heros, who are fighting AIs that attempt to consume the multiverse in part by taking over humans, turn out to be working for an AI attempting to consume the universe. It's great! But the conversation that leads to this reveal implies that the heros have "antibodies" because their immune system has been exposed to an AI before. But, in this metaphor, their home AI would be their entire immune system, not something they were exposed to but successfully fought off.

As I say, this story was good. But, it also fails to achieve what the author's note claims it set out to achieve: "It started with an idea: is it possible to write a hard SF story—one where relentless extrapolation from a technological or scientific assumption forms the backbone of the plot—based on algorithmics, the core of computer science, rather than on physics or biology? And one that has cosmological implications, rather than merely being a story about the birth of a better spreadsheet?". Actually, the P=NP concept is only used (in a vaguely handwavey causal way) to introduce the concept of AI, which is the real crux of the story. This doesn't actually detract from the entertainment value of the story, but it's interesting.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Classic Stross AI paranoia-piece. Short story, first published 2000, text available online:
http://www.baen.com/Chapters/97816257...

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

What happens when a math theorem breaks cryptography? Didn't expect this...

[Alex]

False

[Paul Bard · Rating 3 out of 5]

I re-read this a decade later and it’s a lot more prescient