Silently and Very Fast in The Alternative Worlds

Oct 06, 2012 mark monday rated it it was amazing

Shelves: scifi-modern, alpha-team, legendarium

hello gorgeous! i am amazed. such a tender story of an AI trying to grow up, such luminous prose, glowing pearls of prose, layers of myth and fable and parable and dreams and dreaming and dreamscapes and science like magic. a tale retold in so many ways, characters like archetypes but real, so real! a child trying to grow up. parents who are brothers and sisters and lovers and children. such yearning! such emotion! such simple emotions, and such complexity. such brilliant clarity. an author perf ...more

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Apr 23, 2012 Sarah rated it it was amazing

Shelves: sf, fairy-tale-myth-fable

Oh! This is beautiful. This is the kind of beautiful that makes me shake my fist and despair that I may never write anything as good. It feels abstract and a little bit removed at first, but gradually reveals its inner workings. The structure is complex, but the questions at the core are delicate and beautifully handled. It has science-fictiony parts and fantasyish parts and fairytailish parts and love stores and artificial intelligence and gods and machine dreams. I haven't read all of the Nebu ...more

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Mar 15, 2012 Nicky rated it really liked it

Shelves: speculative-fiction, short-stories-novellas

Silently and Very Fast is a new genre for Catherynne M. Valente in one way -- it's sci-fi, essentially, about the creation of an artificial intelligence which has (or seems to have?) feelings and desires. In another way, it's not new at all: as with most of her other work, she draws on myth and fairytale to enrich her story.

I enjoyed it a lot: the slow unspooling of the background of the story, the way Elefsis grows and changes, and of course Valente's skill with words. It took me an hour to rea ...more

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Jul 16, 2012 Michelle rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi, award_winner, worldview, short-stories, fairy-tales

once upon a time, my family all went to go see a traveling exhibit of smithsonian museum artifacts. the hugeness of the convention center was carved into smaller, more intimate rooms full of treasures, a maze to lose yourself in the detritus of human culture. walking into one of these rooms, the far end was dominated by a larger-than-life headless bronze, Rodin's "walking man". i was utterly thunderstruck by it; something about the incredible sense of movement and a persevering struggle against ...more

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Jul 11, 2012 Daniel Roy rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: sf, taw-bookclub, novella

That was a very well written novella, but I'm afraid it left me a bit cold.

This story is about an AI who lives inside a person's dream world, and it's filled with beautiful language and intricate, surreal images. It's very inventive, and it feels like a work of art. But somehow the story failed to establish an emotional connection with me, and it felt like a bit of a chore to finish. I kept getting the human characters mixed up, which, given I'm seeing their entire world from the perspective of ...more

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May 31, 2012 Suz rated it it was amazing

Shelves: kindle, award-winner, book-club, science-fiction, short-stories

First, here - it's free: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/valen...

I'm very tempted to throw this on my "favorites" shelf.

I cannot tell you, exactly, what I adore about this novella. Certainly, this work was a gimme for me to love. I adore Cat Valente's prose. I love mentally chewing on, and savoring the flavors she creates with her flowing, meandering tones, and her beautiful word choices. Fairy tales/folk tales/mythology are among my very favorite subjects, and re-told tales are like crack for m ...more

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