HUGO AWARD-WINNING SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY MAGAZINE
Immersion
Winner: 2012 Nebula Award for Best Short Story, Winner: 2013 Locus Award for Best Short Story, 2012 BSFA Award Nominee for Best Short Story, 2013 Hugo Award Nominee for Best Short Story, 2013 Finalist: Theodore Sturgeon Award
Our first piece of audio fiction for June is "Immersion" written by Aliette de Bodard and read by Kate Baker.
Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 69 - Immersion by Aliette de Bodard [40:57m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (20486)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Aliette de Bodard is a software engineer who was born in the United States, but grew up in France, where she still lives. Only a few years into her career, her short fiction has appeared widely throughout the genre, and she has won the British SF Association Award for her story "The Shipmaker." Her novels include Servant of the Underworld, Harbinger of the Storm, and Master of the House of Darts, all recently reissued in a novel omnibus, Obsidian and Blood. Her most recent book is a chapbook novella, On a Red Station, Drifting.
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ISSN 1937-7843 Clarkesworld Magazine © 2006-2014 Wyrm Publishing. Robot illustration by Serj Iulian.
TwistedSciFi wrote on June 6th, 2012 at 9:40 pm:
Very interesting timing with the release of this story! As a society, we're on the cusp of the adoption of augmented reality glasses, and we commonly use avatars to represent ourselves in social media. For iPhone owners, Siri tells us where to go and what to do, so Aliette de Bodard just makes a natural extension of these technological crutches with the creation of the concept of an 'immerser' in her story.
So what are the consequences of being able to present whatever physical representation of ourselves that we want? What does that do to our self-image?
What about our dependence on technology? How long can we go without access to our tablet, our smartphone, Facebook and Twitter? Is our addiction to technology and gadgets unhealthy and if so, what are the consequences?
This short story takes us down a very interesting path that leads to asking these and many other questions-I loved it!
Of course, another great job by Kate with the narration. Thanks again!
Aliette de Bodard wrote on June 8th, 2012 at 6:12 am:
Aw, thank you! I'm glad it comes across OK on the narration, I was a bit worried that it wasn't going to be easy to follow.
Self-image and addiction to some forms of technologies were definitely some huge issues I tried to tackle with the story (the immersers started as masks before I decided to be a little more SFnal!), along with cultural domination and cultural imperialism.
Suzanne Conboy-Hill wrote on June 10th, 2012 at 10:06 am:
TwistedSciFi - very interesting points. I made a comment about avatars on the text version of this page before I saw yours. This whole area is in expansion and hence the business of dependency v addiction is under scrutiny because they're rather different. When our clinical service went over to computerised records, calendars, and communication, the fact that we were paralysed if the system went down was not due to addiction, but because we now had nothing else, so we were dependent. In this story though, the avatar has integrated itself deeply into the wearer's neural and psychological processes that you could almost say she is more cyborg than human. So - is a prosthesis a thing of addiction or a dependency? I'm not sure here - and good for you Aliette, for not trying to make this a clinical dissertation! - but the upshot is that 'Agnes' is now so close to the backbone of the Galactics that she can mediate the destruction of the immersers by knowing the thinking that created them. Very clever.