Science Fiction for Engineers
Noting the high percentage of science fiction fans in the engineering community your steadfast Twin Cities ExComm has put forward the idea of a science fiction book club within our section and tasked me with nominating a quality title that appeals to geeks. This is my selection.
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| Cover courtesy of Amazon.com |
| Title: | Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories |
| Author: | qntm/Sam Hughes |
| Publication date: | October 31, 2022 |
| Page count: | 101 (MMP) |
To the SF-loving engineer this anthology is a breath of fresh air. The author is a programmer and the absurdities of the software engineering profession inform his plotlines. Like Ted Chiang, he sports original ideas in a genre that has grown sadly repetititve over the last century. Likewise his output is so sparse that he has hung on to his day job, rather than publish drivel. I will focus on my 3 favorite (out of 10) stories.
3rd place: Lena
- “Lena” is a dry future history of the first successful download of a human brain that could be simulated on conventional computer hardware, written in the style of an article in the IEEE Transactions (or Wikipedia), carefully equipped with unelucidated acronyms, statistical data, and industry jargon. Although the subject is referred to as “he”, the focus is on how to manipulate the simulation into performing advanced AI tasks, while keeping a careful emotional distance from the concept of human rights. It is a mirthful jab at the tech industry and only true geeks will intuit where the title came from.
- You can sample “Lena” on the author’s web site.
2nd place: The Difference
- Nerds of a certain age will recognize the format of the bulletin boards that surged to the fore in the Internet of the early 90s replete with typing errors and references to popular video games. The forum is inhabited by a lost soul who claims to be locked in a prison with no memory of how he got there and no outside contact beyond the bulletin board. Passers-by briefly log in, interact with him, and log back out, in the style of a Kafkaesque nightmare, impelling the reader ultimately to a surprise ending.
1st place: The Frame-by-Frame
- The reader witnesses a ‘conversation’ among electronic control units of a motor vehicle moving at high speed along a highway, trying to identify and react to images picked up by its cameras. The CAN bus traffic has been translated to vernacular English but the messages between the ECUs are quite realistic.
- Published in 2022, “The Frame-by-Frame” was meant to be a warning about the risks of self-driving vehicles; but the scenario it describes actually happened in 2018.
Weighing in at only 101 pages, Valuable Humans in Transit‘s most serious liability is that it appears to be out of print. The Hennepin County library system has only 2 copies, but you can buy it (new or used) from Amazon.
N.B.: I have taken pains to avoid spoilers in this review. The same cannot be said for many on-line critics and I recommend you avoid them if you decide to read the book.
© 2025, Gary Lynch. All rights reserved.