Spoilers neatly quarantined in their own section.

Evie, Mas and Don. What a trio.

The free short story “Skinner Box” is complex, holding more emotional resonance and depth than some novels. It shows the nature of human relationships when in isolation (apt timing during COVID-19) and such layered levels of deception that the reader must pay keen attention, unravel the different meanings, and contemplate the implications.

In short, it’s damn good. I read it twice to appreciate the nuances and the agendas of the characters, all thinking they know the true mission they have been sent on in this interplanetary trip through the solar system.

This story is filled with trauma, of the abuses, physical and emotional, we visit upon our closest loved ones. The abuse is essential to the story. It’s not just senseless violence (this story is rated M), and it plays out in ways critical to understanding what the crew is attempting. The aha moment at the end forces the reader to view the violence in an entirely new light.

Everything ties neatly with the technology experiments taking place on board the ship (the reward and punishment in the skinner box trials, conditioning the nanites) and the desires of the people on board. It’s nothing short of brilliant how the story can be read completely differently the second time. It’s dark sci-fi at its best and Carole Johnstone is one of my new must-read authors. This tale would also fit nicely in an animated short-story anthology like Netflix’s LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS.

What perhaps is the story’s crowning achievement in my mind is the acceptance each character has of his or her fate and embraces it despite the risks, understanding that freedom is just an illusion.

SPOILERS:

Don’t do it, don’t read the excerpt that follows. It gives it all away. Come back after you read the story.

>>>>>
>>>>
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>

I am an unsupervised machine learning model with a continuously learning AI program.
I am bio-evolution.
I am one-shot learning.
I am the singularity.
“I’m transhuman.”

This was an extraordinary reveal. It was all about Evie. She was the test subject, she was the potential answer to solve space travel for one evil corporation. I don’t know what the literary mechanic is called when a character’s whole reality comes undone, but I could feel Evie’s anxiety as the understanding of her existence dawned on her.

So the mission was to figure out how to make interplanetary travel possible with long periods of isolation. Human-to-human didn’t work and robot-to-human didn’t work. What would? Perhaps an AI that thinks it’s human AND can resist the stimuli (whether it’s abuse, or other harsh conditions) and maintain its ‘programming’. Evie thinks that the ‘other man’ – Boris the cyborg on a previous mission, or her human lover Mas on this mission – is the test subject. She’s trying to see if they’ll do her bidding in killing her husband for her. Why? Don is beating and raping her, but thinking it out logically, doesn’t that make the abuse a part of the test conditions to make the cyborg sympathetic and the lover angry? It’s one giant twisted and perverse scientific experiment to make long-haul space travel a reality.

But Evie is really the one being tested. First with the cyborg Boris, who agrees to murder, but then self-terminates as his programming dictated; then with a man she develops feelings for and wants to protect by committing the murder herself (so Mas doesn’t have to).

It’s an unsettling look into the human soul and how we can deceive one another. Not to mention our ambitions at playing God. In the end, it’s not just the nanites in a skinner box, but the crew as well in their dysfunctional ship.

5 of 5 stars.

– Josh

A Quick Tech Guide to Getting Your Free Ebook Loans

The National Emergency Library (NEL), made available by the Internet Archive, is providing a worldwide service during the COVID-19 pandemic (yes, anyone on the planet can sign up). Libraries across the nation have shuttered, but now through June you have at your fingertips a massive free digital library. There are over 1.3 million book selections. Good luck picking your ten. In addition to a wide selection of books, there are no waitlists for a digital copy. That’s the big selling point.

The NEL isn’t without controversy. Publishers and some authors say it’s piracy since the books aren’t licensed. Yet they don’t acknowledge that NEL places limits on book checkouts (10 at a time for 14 days per book) and the digital files are locked down completely, to the point downloads are only possible through Adobe’s Digital Editions app (a double-edged sword, which I’ll get to).

 

 

Publishers simply want their money. Are they wrong? Maybe not, but they don’t have much of an argument from where I stand. Two big reasons: First, people who do choose to buy ebooks don’t actually own them, but rather only have limited licenses to ebooks. That fact is buried in Terms of Service agreements and makes me even less inclined to buy ebooks.

Second, I can get most of the books I want at my library, so this is a legitimate alternative to help me and my kids (if they can get off Netflix) read during this period. Before the pandemic, I was three books shy of figuring out if the Baudelaire orphans could really defeat Count Olaf in the 13-book series, “A Series of Unfortunate Events.” Now I can tear through these books in short order. I’m not paying $30 when I could normally get them at my library.

But this article is not about all the money grubbing and finger pointing. It’s about the technical part of getting your free ebook loans, which is a bit frustrating. I’m fairly tech savvy, and it still took me four days of sporadic testing to figure this thing out. So now, in short order, here’s how I navigated this arcane process to book bliss.

Reading in the Web Browser (a.k.a. The path of least resistance):

• Go to https://archive.org/ and sign up for a free account. Click on the book icon. Search for a book. Read in your web browser. Done.
• If you don’t want to carry around your laptop to read, you can read on a mobile web browser, but you’ll strain your eye-sight squinting at the baby-sized font. (The book pages are scanned images, not actual text, so they don’t resize well.)
• Brush up on your search query skills when book hunting. There are a ton of results. Get specific. For example, if you’re looking for a book in a series, put in the exact title of the entry to find it rather than the series’ name.
• Good luck getting your kids to read in the web browser. They might laugh at you.

Reading an ebook offline:

• Download the Adobe Digital Editions app to your device. Unfortunately, you have no other choice.
• Connect to your Adobe account or create one.
• Look in the book description for download links to the ePub and PDF files.
• Download the ePub version (HIGHLY recommended).
• Open in Adobe Digital Editions. You’ll be prompted to login to your Adobe account if you aren’t already in order to authenticate the device you’re reading on.

DESKTOP:

• If you’re reading on a laptop (really?) using Adobe Digital Editions, either file type will work. But sometimes two thumbnails of the book appear randomly. The interface is bare bones too. I didn’t do much here because I’m not reading on my laptop…

 

MOBILE DOWNLOAD:

• The only way you’re going to even have a remotely painless ebook experience on mobile – from download to reading – is the following route.
• On a mobile browser, login to your Internet Archive account, borrow your book and download the ePub file. (The PDF of the “scanned book” will cause you to pull your hair out. I warn you – the file is big, pages bleed off-screen, it doesn’t work half the time if downloading on desktop and syncing to mobile, and it won’t work at all if trying to download directly on mobile.)
• On my iPhone, the download prompt asked me which app I wanted to open the file in. Open in Adobe Digital Editions, which I can now officially say is the most jarringly bad ebook app experience on mobile (an indie developer could do better). The download with start automatically.
• If the device isn’t already authenticated with Adobe credentials, you can do that in the settings.
• Don’t let your mobile screen go to sleep during download, and don’t check your texts or other apps. The download will stop every time if you navigate away from the screen.
• Downloads on LTE sometimes took a minute, sometimes upwards of 20 minutes. These are small ePub files so it’s a problem I would suspect with the software.
• There’s a standard disclaimer that the ePub files have errors, so I first went with the PDF, which turned out to be a far inferior and more frustrating file to even download and get working. I swapped back to the ePub with ‘errors’ after wrestling endlessly with the PDF.

MOBILE READING EXPERIENCE:

• It’s passable, but not pretty.
• The ePub book text is pulled from scanned pages, so there are lots of weird characters (a.k.a. ‘errors’) that are obvious, but not deal breakers.
• If you choose to do the PDF “scanned book”, the font is an eye-strainer, and when trying to download on mobile to read, I couldn’t. I had to do it on a laptop first and sync to mobile. So, that’s not an option anymore in my book (pun!)
• You’ll probably want to increase the text size with the touchscreen pinch-and-zoom gesture. If zooming pushes text off the screen, rotate the screen to landscape and rotate back to normal to fix (on iPhone at least).
• The controls are not consistent from ePub to PDF. I recommend only ePub on mobile, but if you have both files, the screen options for the book change depending on the file type. Really poor experience that keeps you guessing.
• Of the basic screen options (you can count them on one hand), highlighting and notes exist, but you can’t download them from the mobile app. So what’s the point?
• Actually trying to highlight often advances the page instead. Or it highlights huge blocks of text you don’t want and modifying the highlight is frustrating. Saying the function is worthless is not too harsh.
• Don’t try to advance the pages while the screen is loading; you’ll jump several pages ahead.

Learning about all these issues was a four-day trial. The NEL is a service that I hope continues, but the technology that it uses for mobile downloads and reading is below even basic standards for mobile ebook readers. The majority of these issues are Adobe’s to solve. If users are forced into Adobe Digital Editions, it needs to simply work. The company’s ebook app is far from intuitive or easy, surprising for a company that pours millions or more into development for its Creative Cloud apps. Consumers also need more obvious prompts that make it clear ePub files are what should be used for small screens.

Without more guidance, readers likely will suffer a lot of heartache through the summer, if they even attempt to struggle through downloading and reading on a mobile screen using Adobe’s app. The Amazon “Buy Now with 1-Click” Button never looked so enticing. But remember, that’s a deception too, since you’re only licensing ebooks.

I hope the NEL can reach its full potential. The books are there (at least until authors request their work be pulled), but the technology is not. As the Baudelaire orphans might say, maybe Abode is the real VFD, Very Fickle Developers. That might make for a good entry in that series. Now back to fighting Count Olaf instead of bad technology.

Happy reading through these hard times!

Josh