Archives for 17 May 2007
EP106: The House Beyond Your Sky
Published on 17 May 2007 at 3:31 pm.
24 Comments.
Filed under Hugo Awards, Podcasts, Rated R.
Read ‘EP106: The House Beyond Your Sky’
-->2007 Hugo Nominee!
By Benjamin Rosenbaum.
Read by Paul Tevis (of Have Games Will Travel).
First appeared in Strange Horizons, September 2006.
The simulations, while good, are not impenetrable even to their own inhabitants. Scientists teaching baboons to sort blocks may notice that all other baboons become instantly better at block-sorting, revealing a high-level caching mechanism. Or engineers building their own virtual worlds may find they cannot use certain tricks of optimization and compression‚Äîfor Matthias has already used them. Only when the jig is up does Matthias reveal himself, asking each simulated soul: what now? Most accept Matthias’s offer to graduate beyond the confines of their simulation, and join the general society of Matthias’s house.
You may regard them as bright parakeets, living in wicker cages with open doors. The cages are hung from the ceiling of the priest’s clay hut. The parakeets flutter about the ceiling, visit each other, steal bread from the table, and comment on Matthias’s doings.
Rated R. Contains some profanity and child abuse. It’s probably too complex for young children as well.
Referenced Sites:
Diversity in SF Markets (blog post by Tobias S. Buckell)
Finis: A Book of Endings
Nina Kimberly the Merciless
SciFi Smackdown
