Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories

by Hugh Howey

My altimeter died at 62,000 feet, even though the manufacturer sold these with a guarantee of 100,000. Such guarantees were bullshit gestures with no real-world testing.

Being second was death to me, so I lifted a boot, gears squealing, toes numb, and remembered with sadness the lies I had spoken to my family. There was nothing about this that was safe. If I loved them as much as I loved myself, I would’ve turned around long before Hanson had.

With “The Walk up Nameless Ridge,” I wanted to write about the possibility that our true explorers will never be known. Maybe we should give less credit to those we think broke new ground. And maybe we should look harder and appreciate more those who came before us.

Going to sleep at night is a more useful and less costly way to not exist for some short while.

It’s difficult to remember that every conflict has two sides. The other side feels just as secure in their position as we do in ours. There’s something to be gained by taking the opposing side as our own, really trying to empathize, imagine the bad guys are the good guys.

Deep

Born small, I stayed that way. Doctor said it was a problem with one of my glands. My dad thought it was gender-related. My theory? Self-preservation. My body had figured out early on that it was a target and best to make itself hard to hit. Stupid theory, I know, but it helps to think it.

Instead of worshipping a past that never happened, we should look to a future that we might avoid.

Every generation thinks it will be the last. There is some sickness in man, some paranoid delusion, some grandiose morbidity that runs right through to distant ancestors. Or maybe it is the fear in lonely hearts that they might die without company.

Tracy had thought that preserving a life would absolve all other sins, but the sin of not consulting with that life first was perhaps the only exception. She recalled an ancient argument she’d had with her mother when she was a teenager, remembered yelling at her mom and saying she wished she’d never been born. And she’d meant it. What right did someone else have to make that decision for her? Her mom had always expected her to be grateful simply for having been brought into the world. Now Tracy had made the same mistake.

As writers, we should trust more in our power to create riveting characters, worlds, and story lines. That means being able to let go of past creations. It means not telling the same stories over and over again (even if themes are repeated throughout our works). Letting go is hard. But it’s the only way to reach out and grab what’s next.

you can’t be hated without learning to hate back. The system fed on itself.

we should expect moral perfection, or that we can know all objective moral truths, only that our smugness should be kept in check and our judgment of past generations should be tempered by recognition of their progress and our own failings. Too often we seem to think that barbarians are in the past and that we’ve reached some pinnacle. I think the climbing never ends.

It was all about getting through each moment, getting through the day to enjoy the nights, faking his real life so he could live his fake one.