When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis

December 29, 2018 12:15 PM

A new short science fiction story from Annalee Newitz in Slate. Each month in 2018, Future Tense Fiction—a series of short stories from Future Tense and ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination about how technology and science will change our lives—will publish a story on a theme. The theme for October–December 2018: Work.

It's a short story, but very affecting. The digression into crow language and society is fascinating, but also relevant to the story in interesting ways.

posted by Homo neanderthalensis (13 comments total)

That was incredible, thank you!
posted by Slinga at 1:03 PM on December 29, 2018 [3 favorites]

That was great! Thanks.

I recently moved to Portland and the crows here are big and sassy and omnipresent. Apparently they gather in huge flocks downtown in the evening and the city has been using laser-guided hawks to scare them into gathering elsewhere.
posted by gamera at 1:49 PM on December 29, 2018 [2 favorites]

Longtime Portlander here, and for the past several years, I live in a crow-dominated environment (all previous ones infested by pigeons or seagulls).

Apart from pooping on my car, the crows are far superior to all other avian neighbors I have ever had, and sometimes they chase away the goddamn squirrels.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 3:46 PM on December 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

I think my favorite detail of this piece was how the crows don’t think humans are sentient because of how we don’t eat the same food the crows eat I.e. our trash- because we leave that food untouched, to the crow we must be stupid animals. It was a nice philosophical touch.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 4:02 PM on December 29, 2018 [6 favorites]

An AI programmer's response.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:09 PM on December 29, 2018

Holy....I'm gasping at the brilliance of this. Thank you so much!!!
posted by notsnot at 7:21 PM on December 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

This is a fun and clever story. I am also a fool.
posted by glonous keming at 11:11 PM on December 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

That was wonderful. I wonder if there is a name for the narrative technique, which is pretty common in SF, for describing a truly horrific situation from the point of view of a different conceptual framework? There's something about this distancing technique that makes the themes of the story much more impactful. Robot is just doing its job and neutrally analysing and describing what is around it, but in doing so it reveals a human society that's falling apart.
posted by Happy Dave at 4:17 AM on December 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

This seems a pretty good example of the hopepunk genre / aesthetic / movement, and the first I've come across after being aware of it.
posted by condour75 at 7:57 AM on December 30, 2018 [3 favorites]

(look for the helpers, be they human, robot, or corvid)
posted by condour75 at 7:58 AM on December 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

This seems a pretty good example of the hopepunk genre / aesthetic / movement, and the first I've come across after being aware of it.

Annalee Newitz is the master of that type of science fiction story. She wrote the book Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans will Survive a Mass Extinction, which is non-fiction on the subject, along with her short stories.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 12:20 PM on December 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

Am I really the only one who thought this was going to be about Mystery Science 3000?
posted by feersum endjinn at 2:54 PM on December 31, 2018 [3 favorites]

You're not, I almost didn't read it because I haven't ever seen MST3K (no cable) and figured I'd miss all the jokes.
posted by jenfullmoon at 4:36 PM on December 31, 2018 [2 favorites]