As I’ve always said, short stories are where the newest science-fiction ideas first appear and it’s been too long since I last read a decent collection of them. qntm is the pen name of Sam Hughes who seems to be a self-published author and makes many of his stories free to read on his personal website. I haven’t read those stories before but I do know that he is a contributor to the SCP Foundation website and I have read many of the stories there. This is a very short book and the individual stories are not so much stories as scenarios. That’s fine by me as I’m here for the ideas, not the dramatic arcs.

The stories in here can generally be divided into two categories: those that deal with computers and those that do not, including two that are about nanotechnology. I have to say that I didn’t really like the stories in the latter category. One does make the insightful observation that the familiar grey goo scenario is not possible unless the nanobots are driven by an intelligence smart enough to design specific nanobots for different environments. These are all set rather far in the future and feel too generic to be truly interesting. The stories that are about computers or Internet culture on the other hand are great, being original and well thought out. I was instantly smitten by the very first story, Lena, which is not a story at all but an article about the world’s first human brain upload that is executable on a computer, written decades after the event. Its focus isn’t on the specifics on how the technology works but on how to get the most work out of the upload and the associated legal issues. It’s grim and ugly but it’s exactly what I expect would happen when an enthusiastic graduate student volunteers to participate in such a project in the name of research and loses the legal rights over the upload.

A few other stories share the same mix of straightforward practicality and dark humor, including Driver, which is sort of a follow-up to the first one. One outlier in this volume is If You Are Reading This, which reads much more like a traditional story than anything else in here, about a man who goes to meet an astronomer and science writer who was his childhood idol. The science-fiction in it is rather light but it’s a great piece of writing and I like to think that it’s more about the insularity of subcultures than anything else. Then there are oddballs like cripes does anybody remember Google People which is written as a series of social media posts. I won’t spoil it here but it’s delicious how it skirts the edge of something that could be real. Another one that shouldn’t be spoiled is The Difference so I’ll just mention how perfectly suited it is for our post-ChatGPT era.

There’s not much else that I can say about a volume of stories this small. I’ll just add that the stories that I like are based around a kernel of an idea that is sound and set in a reasonable near future, so we can see how we go from our present to that scenario. It’s also clear that Hughes real background as a programmer helps him write more authoritatively and convincingly on these subjects. Anyway this was a great read and exactly what I want to see in science-fiction. You don’t even need to buy the book since almost all of the stories are available for free on the author’s own website. But I am very glad I did as a show of support.