/lit/ - Literature

>>20784958
Instantiation - Greg Egan (2020)

The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine (2017)
A social science fiction story set in the present day about the causes and effects of economic precarity as told through the everyday life of an average Australian family.
Enjoyable

Zero For Conduct (2013)
A story about chemistry and physics set in the present day. An Afghani girl whose parents were murdered lives with a relative in Iran. She's an industrious genius determined to make the most of her life. It would've been better if weren't essentially all set-up.
Ok

Uncanny Valley (2017)
The protagonist is a sideload, an embodied sentient AI that's a very fuzzy simulacrum of a specific human, hence the title. On top of that the original can choose not to transfer certain memories and traits, which causes selective amnesia in the sideload. Most of the story is the protagonist trying to determine which memories weren't transferred and why, so it reads as a SF mystery. The problems are that it continually undercuts its own findings and never quite finds the right tone that would resonate with the reader.
Meh

Seventh Sight (2014)
A twelve old boy with artificial retinas uses an app to reconfigure his trichromat eyes to allow him to become a heptachromat. The story explores what differences this could bring as it follows him through a couple decades of life. It also has a lot of metaphors.
Ok

The Nearest (2018)
This started as a police investigation and became a psychological horror story. It's the kind of story where I tried to view it as the protagonist did, but I failed. It was just too obvious to me what was going on, and I think that was intended. It made for an interesting case study, though I have a lot of doubts about it, but nothing more than that.
Ok

Shadow Flock (2014)
The protagonist is coerced by a shadowy organization to use her drone expertise to help with a heist of physical cryptowallets.
Meh