Author Archives: nullimmortalis

Maleficia Falling by Alexander Zelenyj

This story’s reading became a miracle for me. Today of all days, preternaturally when I have been first enabled to read it, i.e. when our current world leaders in real-time have been meeting for the last few days (19 – 21 May) in a certain country and in a certain notable city in that country, a place specifically mentioned in this story, and when thinking of these leaders’  decisions  there  that could well lead to the sort of event that once happened to this city …. a sort of war for all of us that, by rights, would have been unheard of in the time and place of this compelling story, a story that holds the power of trinity and prophecy to which I have grown accustomed in Zelenyj.

The story must surely have been written long before the agenda for today’s meeting in real-time was set, let alone any planning for the meeting itself!

 The story is about ancient Rome and the Emperor Hadrian, and he is in conversation about  three sculptures supposedly sculpted in his honour, Lovecraftian to my inner eye but  with deeper configurations that play with edges of the reading mind,  and this  conversation tells  of their sculpting and what may lie within them…. Unmissable. And hugely ironic. More than just coincidence. Look at the author’s surname! A great story, even without these very possibly unintentional considerations!!

Published in Helion Science Fiction Magazine, Print Edition, Issue 3-4, May 2023. Editor:: Cornel Secu

The issue is being launched officially at the European Science Fiction Convention in Uppsala, Sweden in June 2023.

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The above review is part of my ‘Dessemination’ project here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/01/24/39772/

My previous reviews of Alexander Zelenyj: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/alexander-zelenyj/

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The AIdom in Leena Krohn

Possibly my last and grandest and certainly largest set of AI visual experiments triggered into a shifting collage by my gestalt reviews of any author, shown as a whole here regarding the work of LEENA KROHN: all 98 images shown here: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/2023/05/19/leena-krohn/

‘BEFORE THE SINGULARITY’ (published 2010)
H’s wife takes him to her study group with Artilects – a form of Artificial Intelligence, and the loops and paradoxes of humanity in interface with AI is demonstrated strikingly by H’s cynical approach to them. A form of inverse tontine. Or a form of envisaged post-Singularity symbolised by Sibelius’ Silence of Järvenpää.
— From my review of LK’s collected fiction here in 2016: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2016/03/26/pereat-mundus-a-novel-of-sorts

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INTO THE GREEN: A.C. WISE

a story in LOOMING LOW TWO

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 This is unashamedly a crowded horror story, indeed over-crowded with many horror tropes and spooky situations as well as the  story’s ‘the green crowds closer’.  Cousins visiting a secluded island as half-trespassers, and its ghostly backstory of a cult, a compound and a demolished house, against the backdrop and devastating backstory of one of these cousins. And a mural they find that makes me think of the occluded and piecemeal AI images that are the backstory of us all, with bits of people there one minute, gone the next, or bits missing from the gestalt that is still there —

“The [mural] image wavers as the light passes over it, and the figures stretch though they’re already tall. Featureless, pale as the birch trees around them. […] —subtly wrong. […] At any moment, one of those faceless painted figures will turn and shush her. They’re intruding on something sacred.”

Seminal stuff! But the triggered images today,  for this review, seem instead to concentrate on the crowding  green…

My previous reviews of this author here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/a-c-wise/and her AI collage can be found here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/2023/04/21/a-c-wise/