Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories

by Hugh Howey

It was all about killing a man you didn’t know. That made it easier, keeping them strangers. Knowing them makes the killing hard.

still find it strange how a man can lose at a war and then enlist in another with his enemy. But there are no real sides in this life except the barrel of a gun and the butt of a gun, and I know where I prefer to stand.

We who hailed from the east, who came from that rising sun too bright to see, who came first with scouts across the pitch-black, standing tall and ignorant and proud atop some deadly ridge.

4* Really like the ending with the understanding the guy now had of what man had done already.

This got me thinking of how Europeans arrived from the east, and kept arriving from the east, conquering, stealing land, spreading disease.

Europeans were the alien invasion.

As we push west, there’s a different threat coming. And you can only see it if...

“Just wait, I tell them, but it makes you hurry all the more.”

5* Interesting. I take this as a comparisson of chasing life and death.

It’s the feeling of seeing an old photograph and a flood of memories of that entire day, an entire period of your life, rushing back into consciousness. Where were these memories before? How did a single key unlock so much? Would those memories have been lost forever without that small reminder? The illusion of permanence and memory are too convincing.

Perhaps it’s better not knowing. If we’re going to lose these parts of ourselves, the only salvation is to lose the memory of having had them. Or is it?

Words everywhere, until they can’t be trusted.

4* Fun, like the play on the scam emails

Are we not gods to many with the cruel power to ignore?

It was a corporate meeting on intolerance carried out by the finest minds in the city. A brainstorming session on hate and ignorance that sounded no more informed than the crowds outside the courthouse.

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

“It’s coming,” Melanie repeated. “And if they didn’t hear it today, they need to check their hearing aids.”

4* Interesting.

Really, this time.

3.5* Good story, just didnt hold me

Daniel considered, briefly, doing the same.

5* Oh boy, that tie in from the first story. Tugged thr heart strings i have to say

“Algorithms of Love and Hate” was the first of several of my works to explore the ever-changing idea of equality. Too often we make progress in one area only to find ourselves pushing against the next. Or we find ourselves progressive in one area and stodgy elsewhere.

In my novel Half Way Home, I point this out explicitly: that our current modern selves will be seen as backwards to future generations.

We expand our circle of empathy again, only to find yet another deficiency.

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 felt like room service for the body and soul.

“And all is gray ash,” he concluded.

3.5* Good, some captivating parts, but some that seemed to drag on. I did enjoy the ending though, the twist of it all.

What I liked about this game is that you could do whatever you wanted. Except play as a woman, of course.

“Not a joke, ma’am,” the man says. “Listen to me carefully. Your country needs you.”

5* Love this! Such a different change on the typical shoot em up game.

But as an adult, I now dream of a world where nonviolent solutions are applauded.

Maybe it all changed for me on 9/11 and our response to that attack. Or at least, that’s where my conversion began.

That senseless stagger of a drunk, of a man lost, of a man without that light sparrow on his arm, guiding him through the world.

In Paris, the Pont de l’Archevêché across the Seine gets so overburdened with padlocks—locks looped upon locks—that the entire rail is chopped away and replaced every few months. Rail and locks go to a scrapyard. The permanence is illusory.

A quiet eternity. And then what went together with a gentle click pops with a metallic bang, and the unbreakable shatters.

And bolt cutters slip into an otherwise empty bag.

4* Good story, byt not necessarily super ceptivating.

So when I imagined a couple traveling around the world leaving locks on bridges, my mind immediately inverted this to a single man on a mission to cut free all the locks he and his ex had fastened together. It is a rejection of the supposed permanence of love and the things we leave behind.

For the Billy Pilgrims of the world—those who have seen things they cannot discuss. And for the Montana Wildhacks—those with the wisdom in their breasts to know what they cannot change.

We devolve into animals when we creep near to death.

Everything happens twice in your life. Often, it’s quite more than that. This is a thing Tralfamadorians know and humans ignore.

It’s rarely enough to suffer a thing once, the Tralfamadorians like to say. Not when you can suffer it again and again.

Like Montana Wildhack, Scott dances for a living. But it’s called ballet and wardrobe is involved, so somehow it’s more respectable.

The bullshit truth we place on our reality, in our culture.

Montana had forgotten what it meant to own her body. She had lived a life on display, first because it felt nice, later to survive, and then to profit.

The whole system was broken.

The machinery of it all was set up unfair from the start. Living in three dimensions meant you learned what you needed to know too late in life.

My brain is misfiring with all the possibilities but the real one.

This is when the surety of my last breath seizes me.

The wind picks up on our faces, but all else is silence.

The world seems a precarious place.

She thinks of what Stained told her of the universe ending, how a pilot presses a button and all that ever was or ever is goes kaput. It’s hard to believe such an end might be possible. Even harder to summon some fear of this, some longing or regret.

There is destruction and creation taking place all at once, connected by a single thread.

“But this is where we’re different. You see the future and refuse to change it. Where I come from, we can see the past, but we keep repeating it. That’s where we’re different. The same but different.”

Montana wants to scream, but the thing she is angry at is in the past. The past can’t hear her. This is the thing, her great discovery. She smiles at the future. Happiness is a choice.

I take solace in the wisdom of Montana Wildhack—who knows that nothing in the past can keep her from being free.

5* Fascinating, beautiful, terrifying

Slaughterhouse-Five allowed Vonnegut to write about the bombing of Dresden, which he survived, by approaching it askance. I like to imagine that writing the novel was both difficult and cathartic for him. Because “Peace in Amber” was both for me. It was the first time I tried to write a detailed account of my experiences on September 11, 2001.

I’d been avoiding so much for so long. Not just the imagery, but the helplessness. And the agony I felt thinking my best friend was gone, and then seeing him again, and then the survivor’s guilt, the something close to elation soured by death’s specter.