Reviews and Comments

This book is well crafted, to the point I had to remind myself several times that its first person accounts weren't real. Labatut turns these historical figures into believable and distinct characters with individual voices.

I learned several things about John von Neumann that I didn't know, and became interested enough to probably read more deeply in the future.

Apart from a few short quotes we don't hear from von Neumann himself in the book, and that choice really helps underscore how impossibly unique he was. Not to mention how strongly others would react to him.

Given some of the marketing around this book, I was a little disappointed to realise that (as far I know) the fiction doesn't venture far beyond historical fact. Based on how it was presented I was expecting the final act to be somehow speculative, based on more of von Neumann's ideas coming to fruition, but that's not what it actually is.

I didn't quite get the Prologue chapters about Go and AI. These are written in a more journalistic style and I couldn't connect them that strongly to the main book. A good piece on its own, but I don't quite understand why it got included here instead of becoming a longform magazine feature or something.

Still, a good read that provides much personal illumination of "the alien" while also reminding us how much of the twentieth century he contributed to.

I picked this collection up as I'm a fan of editor Zen Cho's other writing, but the premise also hooked me in. The Cyberpunk genre has borrowed superficially from East Asian imagery and stereotype, so I was keen to see what Malaysian writers would do with it.

Although all the stories are in English, they're (as you'd expect) largely written for a Malaysian readership. For the rest of us to keep up then we need to understand a little basic Malay and/or have a willingness to look up words at times. I think there were some more subtle geographical/cultural references that flew straight past me as well, as I've not spent much time in Malaysia.

There are interesting takes in these stories, but I didn't feel anything really stretched the boundaries of the genre. I did notice, but maybe shouldn't have been surprised, how many variations of techno-authoritarianism (both hard-line religious and hard-line secular) crop up over and over.

My favourite story, Kakak, was quite soulful and sad: an account of a fugitive android waiting to be smuggled to relative freedom in Indonesia. That one also had some great world-building glimpses of a pan-Southeast-Asian near future. Migrant worker themes like this pop up in a few stories, with the workers in question variously imagined as artificially intelligent robots or traditionally intelligent humans.

Its tonal opposite, Attack of the Spambots by Terence Toh is a hilarious story that I reckon would make a fantastic animated short.

This collection is almost a decade old now, and I want to go and see who is writing this kind of stuff in Malaysia these days. It'd be interesting to see how the themes and tropes might be different - for example there's a lot of gadget-based direct technological control in these stories, and I wonder if those anxieties might have morphed into extrapolations of more traditional surveillance and disinformation in the intervening years.

A recommended read, if any of this sounds interesting.