By the life of me, I will never understand how these are collected.
The book contains some delightful short stories plus a slightly longer one (Profession), mostly all of them revolving around the rise of Multivac, the first supercomputer built by humanity which in turn takes charge of humanity for humanity’s own sake. And there are glorious pieces of fiction connected to that: “Franchise” is the story of the single man called to vote in the Presidential Election, from whose vote Multivac will calculate the probable vote of everybody else without them needing to bother voting; “All the troubles of the World” takes place in a scenario where Multivac predics the probability of crime and the government acts to try and prevent criminal activities; “Jokester” features a man who’s trying to use Multivac to figure out where jokes come from.
And then you have… poetry? Two satirical pieces on what it means to be an author. Fantasy? A story on a fantasy writer being visited by an elf (“Kid Stuff”) and a story about angels and the devil and the end of the world (“The Last Trump”). Then you have stories with robots, one of which already features in another collection (“Satisfaction Guaranteed”).
The titular tale “Living Space” is a marvel, and I liked the attempt at a mystery in “The Dying Night,” though we’re far from the splendid stories of Daneel and Baley.

Clarice Lispector’s Room you never designed for yourself
The premise of The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector’s mystical novel from 1964 is almost nothing: a sculptor, known to us only by her initials, decides to clean out the maid’s room after the maid has left her employment. That’s the entire plot. She




No Comments