Soh Kam Yung reviewed Uncanny Valley by Greg Egan
On an android which is not quite the same as the original human.
3 stars
A story that drops you straight in with little warning about a future where memories can be uploaded to real-life androids, raising questions as to how human the android can be, especially when some memories are deliberately left out.
As the story progresses, Greg Egan starts to fill in the background of the android, who contains the memories of a famous screenwriter. But when he bumps into another person whom he should know from the memories but does not, it triggers off a search for the missing memories; a search that may reveal a dark secret about a grudge the writer had with another person who may have stolen his idea and caused the death of a loved one.
The title of the story probably refers to the idea that robots and artificial creations start to appear creepy as they become close to, but not quite, human. But in this …
A story that drops you straight in with little warning about a future where memories can be uploaded to real-life androids, raising questions as to how human the android can be, especially when some memories are deliberately left out.
As the story progresses, Greg Egan starts to fill in the background of the android, who contains the memories of a famous screenwriter. But when he bumps into another person whom he should know from the memories but does not, it triggers off a search for the missing memories; a search that may reveal a dark secret about a grudge the writer had with another person who may have stolen his idea and caused the death of a loved one.
The title of the story probably refers to the idea that robots and artificial creations start to appear creepy as they become close to, but not quite, human. But in this case, it may refer to the idea that memories make up a person, so how 'creepy' can it get when an android only have almost all the memories of a person?
A thoughtful story that, in contrast to Egan's other recent works, has little esoteric hard SF but instead features a character that is feeling his way through memories, trying to fill in parts that have been deliberately left out.
