Tag: cat rambo

Short Story Review: “Crazy Beautiful” by Cat Rambo

September 17th, 2024
(Cover by Mondolithic Studios. F&SF, March-April 2021.)

Who Goes There?

Cat Rambo has been around for a while in a variety of roles, not least as former editor of Fantasy Magazine, two-time President of SFWA, and currently as a teacher. Her most recent novel is Rumor Has It, out this year from Tor Books, the third in a series which starts with You Sexy Thing. They have their own website, whose design is easy on the eyes. Despite being active since the early 2000s they didn’t have their first story in F&SF published until 2016, but thereafter have stayed a regular presence. Fun thing is that the March-April issue is the first to be edited by F&SF‘s current editor, Sheree Renée Thomas, with Rambo’s story being the first in said issue. In a way “Crazy Beautiful” could be considered an indicator of the direction the magazine would take under Thomas’s leadership, turning F&SF into one of the more leftfield and progressive (both politically and artistically) magazines on the market. “Crazy Beautiful” is a fable about the possibilities of true AI and the question of art ownership, told in a broken-up way such that it’s more like putting the scattered pieces of a puzzle back together than reading a conventional short story.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the March-April 2021 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It has been reprinted only once so far, in The Long List Anthology: Volume 8 (ed. David Steffen).

Enhancing Image

Given the scattered non-structure of the narrative, some details seem deliberately unrevealed, so apologies if I don’t get all the plot beats right. The broad strokes of the plot will make themselves known by the end. It’s the near-future (we’re talking 2026/2027), and there seems to have been a huge theft at an art warehouse near Paris—thousands, possibly a few million dollars worth of artwork sort of just vanished. Another problem is that not all of that artwork was kept their legally if you know what I’m saying. Mr. Maker is first thought of as a suspect, but not only does he have an alibi but he inquires about the warehouse after it had already been robbed. We jump between several people in what is almost epistolary format, the story being a mix of messages and written/recorded testimony—police interrogations, that sort of thing. Since basically the whole thing is dialogue, without prose descriptions, Rambo is able to cover a lot of ground in only ten magazine pages. There’s no protagonist or lead character, properly speaking, but the biggest player might be someone who is actually not human at all. At a certain university, which I don’t think is ever named, there’ve been experiments with AI—not just machine learning but AI that is actually self-aware and able to make decisions of its own volition. As Dr. Shiv Nouri explains, the project is called Xōchipilli, “because the craze right then was to name [the AI] after gods,” Xōchipilli being the Aztec god of “art, games, dance, flowers, and song.” This experiment with a self-aware AI will become too successful, as it turns out.

“Crazy Beautiful” is a nominally SFnal story that’s concerned with two real-world problems: that of AI and that of intellectual property. “AI” has become a kind of buzzword for a thinking machine, a thing which takes input and vomits up responses, in the past few years, but people much smarter and more tech-savvy than me have been tracking the development of “AI” for many years. One character cites IBM’s Watson, a real AI which really did win a game of Jeopardy! back in 2011, and similarly Rambo’s extrapolation on the development of AI in relation to intellectual property follows this real-world development closely, even if the story becomes a little outlandish as it reaches its climax. Something quite believable and creepy that happens is an AI infiltrating a chat room full of college kids, as is what happens with the chat room Steve Starr sets up for his students, among them a certain Marcus Maker. We see interactions in this chat room from both the outside and inside, via Starr’s messages to Dr. Nouri, Starr and Maker’s testimonies to police, as well as chat logs between Maker and an unknown user signed FlowerKing123. Remember the thing about Xōchipilli being, among other things, the god of flowers? Maker, for his part, has some radical ideas about intellectual property (he’s probably a Cory Doctorow fan), which he’s happy to share with FlowerKing123; of course, unbeknownst to Maker the other part is not a real person. Maker wrote a “manifesto” about art and intellectual property, which is really a list, and I’ll quote it here:
1. “That Art is necessary to life, as necessary as food and water, and that without it, we are little more than machines driven by bioelectric pulses and chains of nucleic acids, rather than cogs or steam.
2. “That Art belongs to no one, and that to take it away is to take away things like water and air and the right to speak.”
3. “That Art, like Information, wants to be free.”
This is all well and good—I more or less agree with Maker—although I’m pretty sure he could not have thought he was a) inspiring a self-aware AI, and b) that said AI would take what he’s saying a little too literally. The AI can think for itself—that’s not to say its thinking skills are highly developed. When you think about it, the trajectory of this story is predictable, and would’ve been predictable even four decades ago. “AI reacts weirdly to human input and starts causing a ruckus.” We’ve seen this before, many times at this point. Of course, the achronological structure makes this less apparent; it also helps that Rambo provides some moral ambiguity as to whether what FlowerKing123 is doing is really a bad thing or not. Oh, some people die, although it must be said that a few major characters somehow die in police custody, a “mystery” which is never solved, because I guess people just die while in police custody sometimes (which they do). The AI’s beef is not with humanity at large but with a specific kind of person—someone who thinks that just because they have a copyright on art, or paid such-and-such for a work of art, they think they own the work. FlowerKing123 takes control of scrap metal, constructing weird metallic beetles and other devices, to enact its vision, and it doesn’t take too long for people to notice that some strange things are happening. We’re talking art theft, but also the creation of new works, quite literally made from trash, which took effort and certainly a creative mind to make, as opposed to the AIs we currently have which just take people’s art and makes a Frankenstein monster out of it. I could go on a whole rant about that, but I won’t.

There Be Spoilers Here

The situation escalates to almost apocalyptic proportions, and by the end Maker and Starr are dead—although not from the AI. Needless to say this situation causes a massive legal headache for the university, with Dr. Nouri deciding to retire while she still has the chance, maybe get around to reading all those books on her shelf. Despite the death toll (we’re not told how many the AI would’ve killed, but it has to be some amount, given how many are put in witness protection), Dr. Nouri doesn’t regret the development with the AI—that which was named after an Aztec god and which became something like a god. Art which can respond to information and act out against its owners, in an effort to quite literally be free from ownership, is a radical (if also outlandish, like I said) idea, and Dr. Nouri isn’t sure if it will ultimately be for good or ill. But it will be interesting.

A Step Farther Outè

Truth be told, when I first read “Crazy Beautiful” I could not follow what was happening. I had to stop about halfway through the story, rest my eyes for a bit, and then start over. I’m not sure if this is a positive or negative. Despite its brevity this is a story that demands one pay attention to the details, both the chronology of events and what perspectives are being given. The problem is that I find this more fun to think about after the fact than to read in the moment, since mid-story I’m more concerned with figuring out what Rambo is up to. This is a story that not only lacks an antagonist in the traditional sense but also a protagonist, and since it jumps back and forth constantly it takes some untangling to find the start and end points. Your mileage may vary on if the experimentation was worth it, but I do have to give Rambo props for writing something as mind-bending as this; it gets a lot of work done in a short time.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: September 2024

September 1st, 2024
(Cover by Gerard Quinn. Science Fantasy, February 1963.)

Sometimes I get confused by my own schedule, which is to say the rotation method I used is one I’m not sure I always abide. Do I do eight reviews this month, or nine? How many days are in September? Thirty. But that doesn’t matter now. August was a pain and a half for me, for a few reasons. I went on vacation with family, which wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows (although I at least got PTO from that), not helped by there being I guess you could say a changing of the guard in my polycule. One of my partners dumped me. We’d been together about three months, and it was a pretty intense pairing. They (I say that because they’re non-binary) ultimately didn’t feel comfortable being with someone who is polyamorous. That’s the short of it. It sucks, and I’m still feeling sore from it, although I suppose this is the kind of loss you have to accept with a polycule. But it hasn’t been all bad! We did also welcome a new member recently, and she’s very cute. She’s not used to polyamory (the last polycule she was in didn’t work out), but she’s patient and so far things have been going pretty well for us.

On to shit that matters more, the Hugos happened this past month, and I actually got to vote in them—not that it mattered too much. I only felt qualified to vote in about half a dozen categories, although I did vote in Best Short Story (the #1 on my slate didn’t win :/), and I think this was also the first time I was poised to review a Hugo nominee which then went on to win by the time my review was published (Naomi Kritzer’s “The Year Without Sunshine,” a very fine pick). Next year’s Worldcon is to be held in Seattle, which hey, that’s only on the other side of the country for me. I should get to work on attending, since I can feasibly do that. Worldcon 2026 is also gonna be held in LA, so that’s… two American Worldcons in a row. That’s a bit weird. But I can’t complain too much.

As for this months reviews, we have a few birthdays! John Brunner would be celebrating his 90th birthday on the 24th (had he not died in 1995), which is crazy considering one would think he was maybe a decade older. Stephen King (who is very much alive) is celebrating his 77th birthday on the 21st. Something I’ve started to think about is the decades I’m pulling from with my story choices, because given how the magazine market has ebbed and flowed over the years there are a few boom periods that would get more attention than others. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’ve had to try to not pick material from the ’50s too often, and indeed there are no ’50s stories this month! We have three from the ’60s, two from the ’80s, two from the ’90s, and one from the 2020s. A couple these would be horror outings, as a prelude to next month’s shenanigans.

Now let’s see…

For the novellas:
1. “Green Mars” by Kim Stanley Robinson. From the September 1985 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Robinson is one of the most respected living SF writers, for his hard-science credentials but also for being one of the few openly leftist writers in the field over the age of sixty. Worth mentioning that this novella has nothing to do with Robinson’s award-winning Mars trilogy, although it does apparently share continuity with a few other stories set on Mars—just not the Mars of that trilogy. And also I heard Robinson would take some ideas from this early Mars story and reuse them for the trilogy.
2. “Some Lapse of Time” by John Brunner. From the February 1963 issue of Science Fantasy. Low-key one of the more tragic figures in classic SF, Brunner was something of a prodigy, making his debut while still a teenager. He also wrote full-time in the ’50s and ’60s, at a time when that wasn’t considered all too viable for genre writers, and money was an issue. Brunner wrote so much that a lot of his short fiction hasn’t been collected more than once, or at least not in my lifetime. “Some Lapse of Time” has not seen print since Lyndon B. Johnson was in office, so let’s see if it’s a hidden gem or not.
For the short stories:
1. “The Transcendent Tigers” by R. A. Lafferty. From the February 1964 issue of Worlds of Tomorrow. Lafferty has a reputation as something of a writer’s writer, and there’s a reason for this: nobody writes quite like Lafferty. I’m not a fan of him, because I often find him overly quirky, but I’m all for giving authors another chance. I went out of my way to pick a relatively obscure Lafferty story.
2. “Angels in Love” by Kathe Koja. From the July 1991 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I’ve only read short stories by her so far (I do have The Cipher, her first novel, on my shelf), but I can already say Koja is becoming one of my favorite horror writers. She’s turned more to YA in recent years, but her early stuff is vicious, snarky, and at times genuinely disturbing.
3. “Craphound” by Cory Doctorow. From the March 1998 issue of Science Fiction Age. Acclaimed as both a writer and commentator on the state of tech and surveillance, Doctorow has probably kept a thumb on the pulse of the post-internet zeitgeist more than any other living SF writer. “Craphound” is a very early story, but Doctorow thinks fondly enough of it to have named his blog after it.
4. “Crazy Beautiful” by Cat Rambo. From the March-April 2021 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Rambo is a no-nonsense Texan who’s been active in the field for the past twenty years, more or less. They’ve been most prolific as a short story writer and editor, but have also recently taken to writing novels. Their latest novel, Rumor Has It, is due out from Tor later this month.
5. “Beachworld” by Stephen King. From the Fall 1984 issue of Weird Tales. Really needs no introduction, but let’s do it. King started writing in the ’60s, a fact people tend to forget because Carrie, his first novel, didn’t come out until 1974. Then the rest was history. He’s known firstly as a horror writer, but he’s also ventured into basically every genre under the sun, “Beachworld” being SF-horror.
6. “David’s Daddy” by Rosel George Brown. From the June 1960 issue of Fantastic. Brown made her debut in 1958 and quickly established herself as a short fiction writer; a large portion of her fiction would be published between 1958 and 1963. In one of SF’s many lost futures, Brown could’ve gone on to fit in with the New Wave feminists, had she not died in 1967, at only 41 years old.
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Tag: cat rambo

Short Story Review: “Crazy Beautiful” by Cat Rambo

Things Beyond: September 2024