williamshaw.bsky.social
Ludicrous Care Bear.
Bylines at Strange Horizons, The Georgia Review, Daily Science Fiction, and others.
Blog: https://williamshawwriter.wordpress.com/
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(Here is that essay, if you're curious: strangehorizons.com/wordpress/no... )
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I wrote a bit about this in the AI Girlfriends essay; there the whole fantasy is about having a romantic partner whose emotional and social needs you don't actually need to engage with.
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We won't know if it's possible until we make WALK EVEN HARDER.
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Thank you for reading! And yes, it's definitely not about arguing primacy (nothing new under the sun etc) but I did find it an interesting exercise to make the comparison.
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I wrote about this book! I think you're right that it's not doing much that hasn't been done before, though I found it useful to consider alongside some earlier examples of its tradition:
strangehorizons.com/wordpress/no...
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I just published an essay about exactly this: strangehorizons.com/wordpress/no...
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Excited to see where this column goes!
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Thanks for sharing! Whenever I come across some common or overexposed trope in science fiction or fantasy, it feels like a safe bet that Rachel Swirsky has a much more interesting take on it somewhere.
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Thank you very much! I'll confess Star Trek is a bit of a blind spot for me, but yes, the idea of "humanity" as the ultimate destination is a dull limit, philosophically, and at this point probably also just played out.
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Yeah, I wasn't quite sure what to make of that. I think it's maybe of a piece with the broader feelings/anxieties about gender identity that these stories tend to throw up (again there's a link to "Helen O'Loy"), but I struggled to connect it to a lot of what Annie Bot was doing otherwise.
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Here is the essay, if you're curious: strangehorizons.com/wordpress/no...
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Then of course there's the not-quite-achieved utopian ending, which I talked about in the essay. I definitely want to read the books that people are going to write off the back of Annie Bot, if that makes sense.
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Like the scene where Annie is offered the chance to have her consciousness installed in a 'male' robot body. Feels like there are more stories to tell there.
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I agree that it feels like Annie Bot it leaving stuff on the table. One thing I didn't get into the essay (because it was already running long) is its handful of very awkward nods to trans/nonbinary identities.
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I'd be interested to hear your take on Annie Bot; I think it works better as a commentary/response to the tradition of the robot woman story (the ending has an interesting parallel to "Helen O'Loy") than on the 'AI girlfriends' popping up IRL.
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Link found via @williamshaw.bsky.social's very interesting essay in @strangehorizons.bsky.social. Support the SH fund drive! strangehorizons.com/wordpress/no...
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Ah, thank you for sharing! I'm very proud of that essay, and I'm glad it led you to more interesting writing about this topic. It's such a sprawling, thorny thing to think about, I want to read like a hundred takes on it.
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This was one of the better articles I read for my own essay on Annie Bot (et al); bracing and clear-eyed, and helped me think about the book in relation to the literary tradition of the robot girlfriend rather than theoretically real ones.
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I do worry about the vulnerability of crowdfunding to platforms being shit. Like, I had Patreon straightforwardly tell me I couldn't keep going with the billing model I had. That's to say nothing of the perverse incentives it can create if you're trying to e.g. run a magazine through it.
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These days, if you say you're Superman, you get arrested and thrown in jail.
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I think the prominence of anti-feminist backlash is fuelling a lot of the Annie Bot/Hey Zoey/Companion type texts about specifically "female" robots.
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This is even better than the guy who read Macbeth and said it was a parable about the dangers of promoting people too quickly.
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Ah, but reading is "woke," you see
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I've never lived there on a permanent basis, but my family is from there and I've spent a fair bit of time there. The flag example was clarifying; like in the US I think it's a sign of insecurity, on some level, and is bound up in a history of terrorism.
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It was funny, coming back from America for a brief stay in Northern Ireland, I saw a lot of union flags about, far more than I ever saw in England, and I couldn't help thinking they were doing a similar job.
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Thank you very much!
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It was a pleasure to work on this essay with you!
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I don't think I'm eligible to submit, but I'd certainly be interested in reviewing this when the time comes.
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Yikes!
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There is a much more successful William Shaw out there who is also a writer, sometimes I get tagged in social media posts meant for him.
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I like the opening of this horror story.
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Borad Nation Rise Up
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"I know it's not as good as it used to be but I'm still terribly interested!"
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It's a very rare skill in this game.
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Need to write a haunted house story about the TARDIS, got it.
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Alien Bodies is a very good Dr Who book, as is Dead Romance; that's all the Miles stuff I've actually read, personally.
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Maybe it IS time to get into Faction Paradox
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Ah, my grad school diaries.