Waiting for the Machines to Fall Asleep by Peter Öberg

It’s a bleak story and very futile overall, though the personality of the main character, Vega, and the description of the situation are almost enough to salvage it.

Ingrid Remvall’s “Vegatropolis – City of the Beautiful” follows a couple of young women who crash a party where the beautiful people attend, in a world where there are very advanced AIs who are out to take over by force. Erik Odeldahl uses some familiar tropes, and a revelation that is hardly original so it really just becomes an exercise in style. Like any hardboiled mystery, things are not as straightforward as they seem.

It’s set in a world where “the Event” has changed things, including creating the “Event Sector,” which warps reality in odd ways. “Getting to the End” features a hardboiled detective who is asked by a sexy and mysterious woman to find a book. The story does a good job of drawing you down with him, and had an ending that is both disastrous and hopeful. The narrator shows a change in personality – maybe even madness – from his disease. Taking a page from the Pied Piper, he develops a way to lure the rats out of the city, but the narrator has been infected with a disease that makes him empathize with the creatures, and he eventually takes the matter into his own hand. The story sets up a situation and a mystery and Rasmus works nicely as a character, but the ending is just a downbeat revelation that hangs in the air.īoel Bermann contributes “The Rats,” where the narrator is recruited to help solve Sweden’s rat problem. He eventually discovers the real goal: a wormhole is being used to take people to other worlds, but lately there have been some problems. The book begins with “Melody of the Yellow Bard” by Hans Olsson, the story of Rasmus Ekblad, a scientist who has come up with a thesis about controllable wormholes and who is approached by a mysterious company who offer s him a mysterious job. None of the authors’ names are familiar, of course, but the exploration is a good part of the journey. So I jumped at the chance to read Waiting for the Machines to Fall Asleep, an anthology of new science fiction from Sweden. You often find authors reinventing the wheel, of course, but you can also find writers whose conception of the genre is more than the usual stuff. I always like the opportunity to read science fiction from places outside the US.

Waiting for the Machines to Fall Asleep by Peter Öberg