Soft Zombies and Other Stories

Has Artificial Intelligence conquered the world? Is it a machine already on the verge of decrepitude? Or is it simply another invention to which we must accommodate ourselves? With cars came miraculous mobility, highways, pollution and collateral death. Yet we have adapted to automobiles, invest heavily in their maintenance and attend the funerals of those killed by them without a single thought of banning the internal combustion engine. Is a similar integration of human mind and machine in the offing? We have, for the most part, learned to balance everyday life with unanticipated consequences. A surge in technical semi-domination might be met with the same querulous indifference that confronted the plague that killed 21 million of our fellow earthly inhabitants.
Soft Zombies, the title story of this collection, portrays a world where humans, plague and AI take equal shares in collective mismanagement. Neighborhood Watch follows the same theme. MOUT takes place 5,000 years in the future, where a tyrannical AI has run its course and is in the process of rusting away. Metaphysics is lampooned in Metaphysical Mall and Mr. and Mrs. Doppelganger. The Rehab and Hospice Center for Supervillains confronts the idiocy of the Marvel Universe, while Nine Billion Names takes on the possibility that Arthur C. Clarke was not only a master of sci-fi tech, but of supernatural woe.
The other titles in this eleven-story collection deal with self-delusion, Armageddon and evolution…with a personally nostalgic and cautionary addendum.