"Valuable Humans in Transit" by Qntm - short story anthology summary and review

Having read all commercially published works by this relatively new author, of hard sci-fi on stilts, I felt I can to snaffle up this collection of short stories too. Bite size, even for me, so I read and summarised one per day, between dinners. Keeping the old noggin active.

They are all revisions of existing short stories he previous posted for free on his website, which are linked here, as well as purchase options. 

► Lena - Cautionary tale of the first human brain upload being duplicated, incidentally tortured (for compliance) hundreds of millions of times in increasingly numerous parallel simulations, to use him as a cheap information processing commodity.

Qntm preciously threw this into Fine Structure Constant, in passing. It's a sobering thought for extropians like myself, intent on digital reincarnation with indefinite lifespan. But, I feel like ChatGPT and other generative AI are already making redundant this idea of simulating brain Uploads for such utilitarian purposes. It's gonna be many orders of magnitude less efficient and probably less reliable.

"Ra" by qntm - Book Review

I enjoyed this book. It had immediate personal relevance, kicking off in my old-university city of Nottingham! In the 90s, a little while before the time I was there studying physics. With its central female protagonist called Laura (weirdly also the name of a girlfriend I had there), its brief summary of her mundanely relatable romance spoke truth to me, too. Anyway... 

"Ra" initially presents as a kind of alternate history, where magic exists as a new kind of science. Only recently taught to undergraduates, in either applied or theoretical courses. Described as esoteric and remote, for the majority of the population. Much like quantum physics in the real world. In both cases, they've been quietly revolutionary for civilisation. 

Our protagonist makes the exception to this, with ostentatious, hyper-competent implementation of its possibilities. Magic is cast by speaking a kind of programmer pseudo-code, with an ancient Samarian (or some such) flavour. While simultaneously holding complex concepts in mind.

It's no coincidence there's an echo of "The Laundry Files" mathematical demonology, here; qntm has clearly been strongly influenced by several of my favourite sci-fi authors, including Charles Stross, who's tweet put me onto them in the first place.