Summer Frost By Blake Crouch

A video game developer becomes obsessed with a willful character in her new project, in a mind-bending exploration of what it means to be human by the New York Times bestselling author of Recursion.

Maxine was made to do one thing: die. Except the minor non-player character in the world Riley is building makes her own impossible decision—veering wildly off course and exploring the boundaries of the map. When the curious Riley extracts her code for closer examination, an emotional relationship develops between them. Soon Riley has all new plans for her spontaneous AI, including bringing Max into the real world. But what if Max has real-world plans of her own?

Blake Crouch’s Summer Frost is part of Forward, a collection of six stories of the near and far future from out-of-this-world authors. Each piece can be read or listened to in a single thought-provoking sitting. Summer Frost

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Summer Frost was so good. Probably my second favourite of the Forward collection because Jemisin's Emergency Skin just really did it for me, but they are so different that it's hard to compare them. Jemisin's was shorter and snappier with a very hard-hitting concept. Crouch's was longer, with way more character development and a touch of what seems to be his trademark doomed romance.

Crouch really is quite the romantic, I think. Not in a bad way. It adds a much-needed layer of humanity to his sci-fi novels. This mini-epic spans years as it looks at artificial intelligence, gender binaries, playing God, and the nature of reality and consciousness. You know, light stuff.

Though if it seems like a single story might get bogged down by all those big themes, I don't think it does. I am glad he wrote a longer story than all the others and didn't scrimp on character development because I think that was really important here. Becoming attached to Riley and Max was necessary for the story to have the impact it does.

It's a smart story that is about many things, but all of them seem to come back to the same thing: Technology is amazing, but don't let it take over your life.

Randomize by Andy Weir - ⭑☆☆☆☆
Ark by Veronica Roth - ⭑⭑⭑☆☆
Emergency Skin by N.K. Jemisin - ⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑
You Have Arrived at Your Destination by Amor Towles - ⭑⭑⭑⭑☆
The Last Conversation by Paul Tremblay - ⭑⭑⭑⭑☆ 75 Second favorite in the Forward Collection for me (after Emergency Skin).

Solid speculative fiction with artificial intelligence, totally recommend! 75 Once again – speculative sci-fi has been mastered by Blake Crouch!

5 stars and the best of the Forward series.

This is a perfectly crafted techno-thriller from page one. The concept was unique and the results surprising on almost every page. At times my heart was wrenched. Other times my mind was blown. It is surprising that my body is still in one piece after this experience!

I will say this, if you are a video gamer, you may never look at the non-player characters again after reading this one!

For those who have seen Black Mirror – this story would fit in perfectly with all the wonderfully weird, technology driven tales you find there. In fact, the whole Forward series could easily be the next season of the show.

Crouch was the mastermind behind putting the Forward series together and I hope he does it again. The results were awesome!
75 I’m a Blake Crouch fan; I really enjoyed “Recursion” and “Dark Matter”. When I saw this short story from Audible’s Forward collection, I had to get it!

“Summer Frost” tells a story of Artificial Intelligence gone bad. Maxine is an AI character, built by video game developers. Riley is one of the developers, and she determines to see if she can code more human emotions in Maxine. What could possibly go wrong??

Narrator Rosa Salazar does a fantastic job narrating the creepy voice of Maxine.

I highly recommend this creepy short story!!
75 Rosa Salazar narrates the audio version of Blake Crouch's short story, Summer Frost. Set in the future, Riley, a video game designer, realizes that one of her minor character creations is going off script (code?) and exploring the boundaries of her game worldsetting. No longer is this character getting murdered in the first part of the game but instead she is taking game weeks, exploring boundaries and expanding her knowledge.  As Riley examines Maxine's code and digs deeper into what is allowing Maxine to deviate from her small role in a video game, Riley becomes obsessed with this character. With an almost unlimited amount of funding from one of the richest men in the world, Riley allows Maxine to acquire a physical body, allows her to acquire all the knowledge of mankind, and Maxine even develops the ability to act as if she feels the things a human feels. Riley is losing herself to Maxine, putting Maxine ahead of everything else in her life, until Riley has no family anymore, no interest in anything else.

But there is even more going on with Maxine. Because Riley is much too close to this subject and has developed feelings for this almost super artificial intelligence, she's on the verge of unleashing horrible consequences on mankind, if she doesn't understand what is really going on. This has the makings of a very modern horror story, if Riley can't make the right decisions when it comes to her beloved creation. 

This is a Kindle Unlimited selection

Blake Crouch’s Summer Frost is part of Forward, a collection of six stories of the near and far future from out-of-this-world authors. Each piece can be read or listened to in a single thought-provoking sitting.   75

A strong 4 stars for this SF novella that examines the issues with AI. Full review first posted on FantasyLiterature.com:

A woman steals a Maserati and takes off for a mansion north of San Francisco, on a remote stretch of Highway 1 on the coast of California. Another person, Riley, follows her into the home and up to a bathroom, where a man in the tub is dying of knife wounds. As Riley pursues the woman, the tension is offset somewhat by feeling that something about the scene is off. A smell is described as “almost right.” The woman that Riley is chasing, Maxine or “Max,” speaks in toddler-like language.

Riley, the VP of Non-Player Character (NPC) Development for a video game developer, realizes that Max, a minor video character in a virtual reality game, isn’t accepting the role of murder victim to her occult-obsessed husband within the game. Instead, after being murdered 2,039 times by her husband during the development of the Lost Coast game, Max has decided to resist her fate and is trying to escape the confines of the VR game’s map. Somehow Max has developed self-awareness. The question is, what to do about it?

Summer Frost is an intriguing novella about the development of artificial intelligence by Blake Crouch, author of the WAYWARD PINES trilogy and Recursion. It’s a speedy read, about 75 pages, that kept me glued to my chair as I read it in a single sitting. Riley and the principal of WorldPlay, Brian Brite, agree that Max needs to be digitally contained so as not to escape their control. But within those confines, there’s a lot of room for Max to develop their intelligence and capabilities (Max chooses the singular “they” pronoun, rejecting a gendered identity), and an overarching concern about whether Max’s values will align with humanity’s.

Riley is a sympathetic, workaholic main character who becomes overly attached to the AI Max. It has a realistic effect on Riley and her family: her wife Meredith feels jealous of Max, and Riley and Meredith are growing more distant as Riley pours her heart, time and mind into her work and relationship with Max.

I … turn onto my side with my back to Meredith’s back, three feet of demilitarized space between us in the bed, but our hearts infinitely further apart.

The handling of some of the gender-related issues felt a bit clunky; though it’s a highly timely topic, there’s more discussion of what Max is and is not from a gender point of view than seemed really relevant to the plot and Max’s nature as an AI. On the other hand, there’s a vaguely foreboding feeling to the whole story that did work well: can a human trust an AI that’s rapidly becoming more powerful and knowledgeable? And what can you do to make sure humans are safe if the AI escapes its artificial confines?

These are questions worth examining, and Crouch handles it deftly and in a way that surprised me in the end. I love the evocative title of this novella, and how Crouch also introduces the thought experiment Roko’s basilisk into Summer Frost, which lends itself well to the plot.
Summer Frost is part of the FORWARD collection proposed and curated by Crouch. It’s a set of six stand-alone novellas, each by a different author, that explore the “effects of a pivotal technological moment.” The authors are Crouch, N.K. Jemisin, Veronica Roth, Amor Towles, Paul Tremblay and Andy Weir. The individual novellas are reasonably priced and available in ebook and audio form individually or as a set.

Content notes: a handful of scattered F-bombs. 75 Riley, a video game developer, eventually becomes obsessed with one of the characters in their new video game project (named Max). Max starts doing things with a will of her own. Riley has plans for Max’s future, but it seems, so does Max…

I really enjoyed this short-story. It was very engrossing, strange and different from what I usually read. I was curious to see what was going to happen, and I had a hard time putting the book down. This is my first read by Blake Crouch and I look forward to reading more by this author.
75

“It’s not choosing between reality and fantasy. It’s choosing which reality you want to exist in.”

What do we, humans, want when chasing the dream of creating an advanced artificial intelligence? Is is just a pure desire to create AI because we can, a scientific challenge for a geeky mind? Or it a commercial desire to have intelligent but yet obedient servants, human enough in their reasoning for us to be comfortable interacting with them — but still constrained from taking over despite supreme intelligence — a desire for intelligent but obedient slaves? The fear of AI/robotic uprising has fueled SF for a while, leading to those famous Asimov robotics laws and electric sheep-dreaming Dick’s androids, and even to my favorite rogue Murderbot.

“I think you are building me to be a benevolent super-servant for humanity. I think you are my creator, and as such, you want to see me embodied in your image.”

You certainly would not want an advanced *evil* AI. At the least you would want it to absorb and process the information in the way that allows it to watch out for humanity. An all-knowing benevolent entity — a deity of sorts, perhaps.

“We have to program the AI to act in our best interests. Not what we tell it to do, but what we mean for it to do. What the ideal version of our species should want.”

When Riley, a video game developer, notes that a NPC (non-player character) in one of her virtual reality games appears to defy the rules, Riley and her boss decide to see how far they can develop this AI. And, faced with the results of their experiment, they must consider all the above. But when is it too late?

“Knowledge is just information, which is subjective.”
“But I want to give you a sense of real sensation.”
“There is no such thing as real taste or real smell or even real sight, because there is no true definition of ‘real.’ There is only information, viewed subjectively, which is allowed by consciousness—human or AI. In the end, all we have is math.”

A short novella with nevertheless excellent characterization and a storyline that manages to span years and raise questions about the nature of consciousness, reality, love, loneliness, and danger of playing God, it’s my second favorite in the Forward Collection, close behind Jemisin’s Emergency Skin. It’s my first encounter with Blake Crouch, and now I’m intrigued.

4.5 stars.

We will be so happy.
[…]
And together we will live forever.”

———————
The Forward Collection, in the order read:

‘Emergency Skin’ by N.K. Jemisin: Lovely. 5 stars.
‘Randomize’ by Andy Weir: Meh. 2 stars.
‘The Last Conversation’ by Paul Tremblay: Eerie. 4 stars.
‘You Have Arrived at Your Destination’ by Amor Towles: Perfectly adequate. 3 stars.
‘Summer Frost’ by Blake Crouch: Very intelligent (artificially?). 4.5 stars.
‘Ark’ by Veronica Roth: Underwhelming melancholy. 2.5 stars. 75 4.5 stars

I love AI stories and this one was really well done.

For a short story, it is surprisingly complex and it feels 'complete'. It tackles a lot of subjects, such as being human, consciousness and emotions, gender identity and many more, and I loved how the author approached all of them.

The story itself might not be groundbreaking, it reminded me of Ex-Machina in some ways, but I loved the concept, the writing and the way the story developed until the end. 75 I am not a big science fiction reader, but whatever Crouch cooks up, I will devour! This was such a clever and interesting book. He had me from the beginning scene and didn't lose me even with lots of computer, science fiction, and AI.

I listened to the audio book and really enjoyed it. I enjoyed hearing Blake explain what inspired him to write this Forward collection which include short stories by some of the authors he admires.

The gist is a video game programmer becomes obsessed with her new creation. An obsession which lasts years as she watches Max evolve and begin to go off script if you will. Riley wants to bring Max into the real world, but will Max be keen to do this or does Max have their own plans.

How delightfully interesting with a twist that packed a punch. What a fantastic way to kick off the collection.

Fans of science fiction and/or Blake Crouch will not be disappointed.

You can read more of my reviews at www.openbookposts.com 75