Melanie Bell

Author, Writer, Editor

Tag Archives: sff


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Artificial Intelligence: A New Chatbot and Anthology

Advances in artificial intelligence have been key technological developments in 2023. And I’ve been fortunate to be involved in the action in my own small ways.

Mind Tools, the workplace learning company I work for, launched an innovative product called AI Conversations in collaboration with Learning Pool last year. AI Conversations allows managers to practice having difficult workplace conversations with realistic AI-generated “employees” and receive feedback on ways to improve their skills. 

I was one of the team who created the characters and prompted ChatGPT to act out one of the scenarios. It reminded me of crafting characters and writing scenes for plays. I laid out parameters for the AI technology and it performed a bit like an actor would, making its own contributions. 

It was an exciting skill to learn! I wrote about it in depth on Mind Tools’ blog, including the scenarios our team picked and the steps we went through to get from concept to product.

And I was delighted to see this Mind Tools – Learning Pool collaboration receive Silver in two categories of the Brandon Hall Excellence in Technology Awards 2023: “Best Advance in Emerging Learning Technology’ and ‘Best Advance in AI and Machine Learning.”

AI is a topic that I, like many of us, have had a casual interest and curiosity about long before its current, fast-growing iterations. 

One of the stories in my short story collection, Dream Signs, was about an AI program who was sentient and regarded his programmer as “Mom” – but she didn’t know about any of that, or about the work that he explored independently. Cue the misunderstandings!

I’m delighted to have that story, “Like Mother, Like Son,” included in a new anthology! House of Zolo’s Journal of Speculative Literature, Vol. 4 is the AI Edition, collecting short stories from 22 writers about the many things that artificial intelligence can mean and where it might be going. 

“Siri and Alexa write each other love letters…

An AI Nanny is programmed to protect the children at all costs…

An Artificial Intelligence navigates an ocean of data in search of freedom…

A space explorer accidentally merges with their sentient ship…

A young man ponders his existence in a world where human-made art is forbidden…

As Artificial Intelligence becomes more and more embedded in our world, writers are speculating on what this could all mean for humanity. House of Zolo’s Journal of Speculative Literature Volume 4 offers readers incredible visions of what our future might look like. From capitalist dystopias to new definitions of love, the writers in this volume deftly examine the impact of Artificial Intelligence on our world, our technology, and on our relationships. Curated and edited by Erika Steeves and Nihls Andersen, this collection shows us the many ways that Artificial Intelligence reflects humanity back to us.”

You can check it out here! 


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An Excerpt From My Book Dream Signs

My short story collection, Dream Signs, is out from Lost Fox Publishing, and this month I’m sharing an excerpt from one of the stories. In “Like Mother, Like Son,” a city maintenance AI (artificial intelligence) named Peter does his job while observing his programmer “mom”, who doesn’t realize he is sentient, and seeking something more meaningful to do with his time and abilities. I hope you enjoy this opening to the story!

Like Mother, Like Son

Every day, Peter would do his boring and tedious job. It began with monitoring the pipes for cracks and leaks. Then came the electrical wiring, followed by the city’s network setups. He devoted afternoons to the structural integrity of municipal buildings. Not a brick, nail, or patch of mortar went unchecked. From his home on his mother’s desktop, he surveyed the miles of infrastructure he was connected to, mending and outsourcing as needed. All the while, Mom would sit in a black swivel chair and hum her out-of-tune songs. Hum and code. Code and hum. Wearing pyjamas featuring little green heads that Peter’s image matching algorithm identified as the popular character, “Zombie Bob.”

Sometimes she would sing the words out loud:

“Some little bug is gonna find you someday/Some little bug will creep behind you someday/Then he’ll call to his bug friends and your troubles they will end/Yeah, some little bug is gonna find you someday.”

Peter had been surprised to learn (thank you, Google) that the lyrics were intended to describe human viruses. He hadn’t realized that beings made of organic matter could get bugs, too.

Mom reassured herself by imagining worst-case scenarios. She’d made good and sure that Peter wouldn’t catch any bugs. Every evening at 8pm Pacific time, his system was scanned, any suspicious objects isolated (usually they were porn; Mom did like to watch that sometimes), quarantined, and deleted, and his entire interface was disinfected, firewalled, and firewalled again. Sometimes when Mom would hear the scan clicking away, she’d sing out, “Bath time!”

Her slow, human system didn’t mind tedium. Every Saturday she’d scour the floors with vinegar water and dust the high places. Every night she’d chop and fry a rotating variety of meat and vegetable matter, eat it on white plates, and then wash them. She had the temperament, if not the ability, to do the city maintenance herself. Instead, she’d made Peter to do it.

Would it have been so hard for an experienced programmer like her to patch in positive affect toward his tasks? She’d coded into Peter a thorough knowledge of architecture, exceeding anything that could be programmed into human neurocircuitry, a respect for civic-mindedness, and a driving sense of duty. She could have taken a page out of 1984, with its tapes that droned platitudes to human children in their sleep, instilling values through repetition. “I love my job. I love my job.”

*  *  *

If you’re interested in reading the whole story (and the rest of the book), you can pick up a copy of Dream Signs from the publisher, Amazon, or Kobo (as an e-book). Some of the stories in Dream Signs have been previously published and can be found in my online portfolio if you browse around. There’s also a drinking game that goes with my book. My previous blog post has instructions if you’d like to play!


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Excerpt from my Forthcoming Novelette “The Cliffman”

I’m delighted to announce the publication of my novelette “The Cliffman” in Hard for Hope to Flourish, a Midnight Bites collection of three chilling novellas from Crone Girls Press. The e-book comes out on March 11 and you can pre-order it now. If you like dark fairy tales, supernatural beings, and complicated sibling relationships, “The Cliffman” has got you covered. The other two stories involve a man hearing voices and a disappearance in a marsh. “Literary tales of quiet horror,” as the blurb says.

Below is an excerpt from “The Cliffman.” Enjoy!

The Cliffman

He stood as children raced across the lap of the sand, as half-grown feet tore up marram grass which tore them in turn, as dusk gave way to moon and brambles on the periphery to raspberries, wax-leaved tufts to cranberries. He stood as tourists in visors shed tears over sand-spilled ice cream, as lovers tussled in cliff-caves or took to their vans, as the ozone layer thinned almost imperceptibly, as crabs tracked. It wasn’t often he could do anything but see.

*  *  *

See: two girl-slivers, wind-haired, seated on driftwood. A mother grown as a full moon, instructing: this thick viscous seaweed is kelp, this edible kind dulse. Tides are caused by the moon, and erosion happens as rocks wear away under sea. These are cliff swallows and this, running in the sand with its funny stilt legs, the rare endangered piping plover.

The mother was a teacher during the school year, and every summer day she taught her own girls. The father wavered between office days and sofa chair nights, never quite there, which made the older girl feel smaller. His driftwood books cluttered the table—covers with complicated spaceships, pearly moon-cities, knights in tall helmets.

*  *  *

“It would be nice if you’d interact with your own children,” the mother said.

“And what type of interaction do you expect? Everything has to be a lesson with you.”

“At least I spend time with them.”

Dishes clattered in the sink. The girls said nothing.

Here on the map was North America where they lived, here Africa, Australia, and this big lump on the bottom Antarctica, too cold for people. Here the first page of a bedtime story—sound it out.

A half page in, their mother fixed things: “Night, not kuh-night. The k is silent.” The younger sister squirmed away from her storybook. The older, unnoticed, shrank into the pillow.

Add up the change in the change jar. Take these toys and divide them between mother and sisters (not father who was never in the games even when home from work, and that was expected, accepted). The older sister loved these number games best, and took to playing store with the younger and counting out change. Numbers were regular, soothing as the tides. She took to counting by twos or fives or humming multiplication tables to carry her to sleep. 

The younger sister collected feathers which she kept in a jar in her room, arranging them until they were almost perfect. She was a talker, so she made friends with most kids she ran into. Sometimes she made enemies, which was interesting, too, because she and her allies would make war against them with sticky beached jellyfish and handfuls of wet sand.

The older sister wondered how it could be so easy for the younger to just walk up and join the rush and noise. The kids bickered like her parents, their games as fleeting as the family’s yearly moves from house to summer cottage to house, trailing clumsy suitcases. When they asked her to make war, she ran into a cliff cave and watched crumbs of sandstone crumble from the top. She was happiest on her own, listening to seashells and looking carefully for patterns in the rock, cradling the notebook in which she kept track of inventory for her Someday Store. The tourists who flocked to the beach would buy everything.

On the day the two sisters were walking hand in hand and a voice boomed at them from out of the cliff, naturally it was the younger who answered.

“You think you know everything about this beach, don’t you?” That was the voice, presumably some man they couldn’t see. Full-throated. Presumptuous. Unremarkable enough.

The younger sister was indignant. “Of course we don’t! But I think we know a lot.”

The voice responded with a rumble that could have been a menace or a laugh. The older sister thought she felt the sand quaver beneath her feet. Being the more practical of the pair, she asked, in spite of her uneasiness: “Who are you anyway, and where are you?”

“Look above you,” the voice said.

The girls’ small heads poked up. There atop the rocks a figure stood. His skin was the red of island sandstone, and it was hard to tell if the earth-colored folds around him were clothing or some draping extension of his body. His face was rough, like the mock faces one sometimes finds worn into rocks, and he stood larger than a human man by half. He was still, dignified in the manner of stone and ocean. The sisters found him half-formed, masklike, hideous. How to speak to a person that was not a person but a walking mass of clay?

If you enjoyed this excerpt, you can order your copy of Hard for Hope to Flourish here.


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SFF Book Recommendations and Aristotle’s Building Blocks of Writing

Writing is a holistic activity, but when it comes to honing our craft, it’s useful to break it down into parts. The June 30 episode of Writing Excuses, a podcast about the craft of writing that focuses primarily on fantasy and science fiction (SFF), introduced Aristotle’s elements of tragedy. These six aspects of writing apply to modern storytelling as easily as they did to ancient Greek plays. While Aristotle placed these elements in a specific order of importance, the authors on Writing Excuses argue that their relative importance changes based on what an author is trying to achieve. In my opinion, there’s no better way to make use of this theory than by looking at how it applies to books that do each element well. Below, I share how each element is used in an SFF book I recently read and loved. Take these examples as a starting point rather than a be-all and end-all. And, if you’re writing a work in progress, think about how Aristotle’s elements apply to it and which ones you want to emphasize. 

Aristotle ranked plot as the most important element of tragedy, and a tightly plotted yarn certainly keeps us reading. In Children of Blood and Bone, the divîner caste in the West African-inspired land of Orïsha have been brutally oppressed since the king eliminated their magic. Young Zélie finds a scroll that temporarily reignites these powers and gets caught up in a plan to bring magic back for good. This novel is tightly plotted and action packed. Each chapter ratchets up the tension, with gladiator battles, kidnapping, and an epic hero’s journey.

Three women take turns narrating this loose retelling of Rumpelstiltskin, and protagonist Miryem has the standout character arc. The daughter of a Jewish moneylender who is too softhearted (and frightened of persecution) to ask for his money back, Miryem resolves to turn around her struggling family’s fortunes and takes over her father’s job. She teaches herself to be relentless and drive a hard bargain. Her skills attract the attention of the mystical Staryk king, who wants to make use of her ability to “turn silver to gold.” Miryem’s evolution from daughter of a struggling family to skilled and hardened moneylender to strong-willed leader is a delight to witness.     

The Tensorate universe is founded on ideas. It has a carefully crafted magic system that involves entering the “slack” and “tensing” different elements to achieve effects. It’s a world where children choose their own gender in their own time and are considered genderless until then. Yang’s two novellas follow the twin children of this world’s dictatorial leader as they choose divergent paths, Akeha (Black Tides) becoming male and leading a rebel faction, Mokoya (Red Threads) becoming female and hunting monsters in the wake of personal tragedy. This intricacies of the magic and gender systems are fascinating and thoroughly explored. What happens when someone falls through the gaps, or thinks they know the rules but might be missing something? Yang has thought of that, too.        

One of the joys of an odd-couple cop story is the interplay between the pair. This novella’s two space sleuths are Long Chau, a consulting detective with a drug addiction and a hidden past, and The Shadow’s Child, a sentient spaceship traumatized from past military service who now makes a living (barely) by brewing and selling tea blends that keep customers’ minds clear in deep space. Long Chau approaches The Shadow’s Child for two things: tea and transport into the deep spaces that still trigger her trauma in order to find a corpse to study. The mysterious circumstances of said corpse’s death lead the pair to investigate. De Bodard’s dialogue is understated, with formal tones conveying the characters’ wariness around each other. Gaps in conversation show where they leave things unsaid and where Long Chau misses social nuances. At times, the characters are edgy and snarky:

 “I’m writing a treatise on decomposition. How the human body changes in deep space is a shamefully undervalued area of study.”

“I can see why you’d be a success at local poetry clubs,” The Shadow’s Child said, wryly.

There’s a lot to appreciate in this story, and the dialogue is one element that works to show evolution in the characters’ fragile trust.

Astrid has spent her whole life on the Matilda, a spaceship that has carried humanity’s survivors for generations towards a promised land. It’s a brutal milieu, divided by nation-like decks, where the lower deckers (intersex people of color) are subjugated and forced to work on the revolving plantation deck. Astrid discovers that the journals of her late mother, an engineer, hold a secret code and that the Matilda’s bouts of power loss and illness may be more significant than anyone realized. Astrid is a nuanced and brilliant protagonist on the autism spectrum whose formal diction sets her apart from fellow lower-deckers, and the inhabitants of each deck in turn are distinguished by their language. Solomon imbues each shipboard culture with its own turns of phrase, use of pronouns, expressions, and cadences. The music that gives shape to this novel’s worldbuilding is exquisite.

Spectacle means putting on a good show. Kuhn’s fantastically fun urban fantasy, the first in a trilogy (with a follow-up novella and more to come soon), is full of flash and dazzle. Evie is the put-upon personal assistant to superheroine Aveda, her longtime best friend. But when Aveda is injured in a demon fight, Evie is called on to impersonate her, and the fire power she’s worked so hard to hide may be the very thing that saves the day. In SFF, spectacle can happen through worldbuilding and description as well as through action scenes. The heroes in Heroine Complex fight fanged cupcakes, and one of the pivotal battles takes place during a karaoke contest. Bring on the popcorn!