Joseph Street Digest Volume 1: Seth Underwood Short Stories- Space Miners Quarantined, Android Love and an Android contracting a Disease

by Seth Underwood, Frank A De Puy

Joseph Street Digest Volume 1 continues the periodical's dedication to showcasing the work of single authors across wide-ranging genres. This volume presents two works of science fiction from Seth Underwood.

Underwood's works tend to be hard and speculative science fiction, and with this Volume he explores with two short stories events with his future android model known as A-4s. In The Pallas Quarantine we see the presentation of a love relationship between a human female and an A-4 android, and in The A-4 known as Helen we learn how his future androids can actually contract diseases.

Seth Underwood's creative mind explores the complex realities of a possible human future through a series of small story slices.

63 pages, Paperback

Published August 10, 2017

About the author

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Seth Underwood writes a hard science fiction with some fantasy elements and a political dystopian science fiction.

His future world is a complex, blending the theoretical multidimensional nature of reality according to some physics, genuine science, real political agendas, dystopian realities, and what science considers arcane and fantasy (except maybe quantum physics, where everything seems probable).

He’s an autistic that lives and is retired in Washington, DC area. He writes on Medium for Invisible Illness on primarily autism issues.

His future political dystopian U.S. world features decades of despot presidents, a flooded world, and new para-military force known as the Ranger Marshals. See www.rosellatolfree.com

He has freemium stories at www.sethunderwoodstories.com.

He has articles on Medium at https://sethunderwood56.medium.com/

Reviews

[Shaun · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an unusual volume, collecting two medium-length short stories and a collection of shorts under the umbrella title of “Future Human Follies” from author Seth Underwood. The heart of the collection is a pair of android-centered stories, The Pallas Quarantine and The A-4 Known As Helen that explore aspects of the human-android relationship in ways I’d never stopped to consider. They also share a theme of sickness or weakness cropping up in unexpected places. The Follies are very short, and seem like seeds for longer stories.

I liked the ideas more than the execution. This wasn’t the smoothest read: Helen and the four at the end felt like works in progress out of the author's notebooks. There were some rough patches (run-on sentences, a non-sequitur introduction in Helen) which could have been sanded down by a good editor without losing the narrative texture. I don’t think that’s on Underwood, though, unless he’s his own (and only) editor. Worth the time to discover a new voice with an interesting perspective and some challenging ideas.

5/10 (2.5 stars, rounded to 3)

[Anna E. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seth's future world is interesting. The idea of andriods giving birth to human clones is interesting.