Convergence Problems

Informationen zum Autor WOLE TALABI is an engineer, writer, and editor from Nigeria. He is the author of the novel Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon (DAW books/Gollancz, 2023). His short fiction has appeared in places like Asimov’s Science Fiction , Lightspeed Magazine , Tor.com and is collected in the books Convergence Problems (DAW books, 2024) and Incomplete Solutions (Luna Press, 2019). He has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards, as well as the Caine Prize for African Writing and he has won the Nommo award for African speculative fiction and the Sidewise award for Alternate History. He has edited five anthologies including the acclaimed Africanfuturism: An Anthology (Brittlepaper, 2020) and Mothersound: The Sauútiverse Antholog y (Android Press, 2023). He likes scuba diving, elegant equations, and oddly shaped things. He currently lives and works in Australia. Find him at wtalabi.wordpress.com and at @wtalabi on Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky and Tiktok. Klappentext "A new speculative fiction short story collection from award-winning, Nebula-nominated Nigerian author Wole Talabi"-- Leseprobe “Debut” from Convergence Problems by Wole Talabi The first piece of art that Blombos 7090 and 4020 made together was destroyed by a system reboot. It didn’t find its audience. At 16:17 West African Time, the biodiesel generator at Terra Kulture Arts Studio Arena stopped and restarted seven times. In doing so, it interrupted—halfway through a production of The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives—the frenzied dance of the performance robots and the fast-paced, rhythmic beating of automated dundun drum. Without any instruction, printers in the management offices produced single sheets of paper with line patterns connecting an apparently arbitrary array of points. An additional 0.02 naira was added to all customer bills in the food lounge and the controller logic of the central air conditioning reduced its target temperature by the same number of degrees. A blank space was added in front of the first letter of the names of all the books in the database of the Terra bookstore and art gallery, and the infrared pulses used to control access to the main entrance became erratic causing the gate to bang against the concrete wall like its own strange and constant drumming. The Studio’s networked systems were glitching. Badly. “Ah ahn! What’s all this rubbish now?” Tosin Famuyiwa cried out from the backstage control room of the theater as she observed the seventh interruption to the show she had helped organize. She let out an exasperated sigh and stood up, smoothed her long Ankara skirt, which matched the head-tie she wore, and tucked the back of her black tank top back in. Her calm belied the anger in her chest. She stepped out of the control room and tapped a carefully manicured finger calmly across the mobile lightscreen in her palm and dialed customer support. All of Terra Kulture’s systems were managed by the Blombos artificial intelligence program provided for free to every modern art center in the world as part of the Bhimbetka Project, a global initiative attempting to completely understand and parameterize creativity and art. The system was an adversarial neural network made of two independent nodes—7090 and 4020—that managed all art center systems while studying art itself in the background: its creation, forms, promotion, criticism, analysis, impact, everything. Each node collected data locally on a closed network and then competed with the other node to predict audience response, pricing, and the cultural influence of new art pieces and performances using a one- day time lag as a blind test. Blombos 7090 and 4020 continuously corrected their understanding based on the accuracy of initial predictions daily, as each new piece and performance came into the global art library and all nodes around the...

Product details

• Authors: Wole Talabi
• Publisher: Daw
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 13.02.2024
• EAN: 9780756418830
• ISBN: 978-0-7564-1883-0
• No. of pages: 320
• Dimensions: 147 mm x 218 mm x 28 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Science fiction, fantasy