Blake Crouch

Summer Frost

Nessa Luna

I both love and 'hate' these types of stories - I love reading about AI but I am also terrified stuff like that will one day happen in real life. This story was great and I personally think it worked well as a short story. I still wish it had been a full-length novel, though, because it was just really great. I think this one might be my favourite out of all the Forward Collection stories (and I can confidentially say that as I've now read all of them, yay).

C. J. Daley 

This is part of the Amazon Prime ‘Forward Collection’ curated by Crouch. In my quest to get more and more into his work, I grabbed this one for free with my prime membership. It’s available for both kindle reading and audible audio. 

I truly feel as if Blake Crouch is not respected enough as a writer, researcher, and creator. Everything scifi that he releases is so incredibly detailed and researched to the point where you don’t even have to question if it’s real or not. It doesn’t feel like it needs debating. This one even broke down how many hours of HGTV would fit into the amount of stored data needed. I thought it was a great touch. 

This is a short about an NPC going rogue, breaking from its programming, and then becoming sentient. All while its creator becomes deeply obsessed with it. It reads like a mix of Jason Segel and Kirsten Miller’s ‘Otherworld’ and Alex Garland’s ‘Ex Machina’ as Crouch navigates the future of VR interfacing and gaming, and the nature of what it means to be human. 

Genuinely gripping, and one hell of a ride for such a short story. Personally a 5/5*, and the narration by Rosa Salazar was very good!

Vilandra

This was a good story - a Frankenstein for the digital age. The only thing I didn’t like were a few instances of virtue signaling that seemed to run counter to what he was actually trying to say. Also, I kept finding myself thinking the main character was a man instead of a woman, which doesn’t really bode well.

Midori Kobayashi

4/5stars



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



Speculative sci-fi (techno-thriller) short story, with a glimpse of what it would be like if there is a AI/robotic uprising in the future. 



Premise: 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?



You search for glimpses of beauty to justify your existence.



This was a quick fast paced action packed sci-fi story. Blake Crouch very well knows how to write this category of stories. The writing was well paced, it always kept me on edge and since this was my last book from the collection here is my rating for the collection-

1. Emergency Skin 
2. Summer Frost
3. The last conversation 
4. Ark 
5. You arrived at your destination
6. Randomize 



Consciousness is a horror show

Shona Tiger

Fun, and thought-provoking. Best one of the lot for me.

Cindy Lieberman

An intimate look at the relationship between a programmer and the game character he brings to life. To real life.

Cheryl Hedlund

This is a part of the Forward collection of speculative shorts done for Audible Originals. It is also the first one I have picked up. On the strength of this, I am excited to check out the others. Max is a NPC (Nonplayer Character) in the prologue to a video game. Suddenly the character goes off script and leaves the story to explore the boundaries of the game. Riley, the game creator, takes Max out of the game and into a dedicated server to live and continue to develop in a virtual environment. This short story is about Riley and Max's interactions as the AI learns and evolves. There are questions, tensions, and developing emotions. Riley has tried to be careful, to manage the risks, but can you control something you don't really understand? I listened to the audio and it was very well done. This story is gripping and entertaining. The tension creeps and grows to the ending. I really enjoyed it and would definitely recommend it, especially to people who enjoy AI stories.

Ben Burns

Summer Frost is one of 6 short stories included in Amazon's "Forward" sci-fi short story collection, but I'll review all 6 here instead of polluting my feed with 6 separate entries. 4 stars for Summer Frost, but overall the collection was a mixed bag.

Summer Frost, Blake Crouch - 4 stars, my favorite of the collection. Standard (view spoiler)[emergence-of-a-too-powerful-AI (hide spoiler)] story, much like (view spoiler)[Ex Machina or Lucy or Her (hide spoiler)]. But this was just fresh enough of a take to be enjoyable. Cool near-future world. 

Emergency Skin, NK Jemisin - 2nd favorite. Great reading experience, reminded me of the stories in Ted Chiang’s Exhalation - slowly figuring out what’s going on as you progress and your perspective widens. Cool perspective choice (the opposite of the underdog) and combination of utopia and dystopia to convey a very modern and fresh moral about inequality and revolution. I don't think I agree with the revealed premise that (view spoiler)[if the selfish ruling class disappeared a new one wouldn't arise (hide spoiler)], but I liked the idea.

You Have Arrived at Your Destination, Amor Towles - Eh. Nature, nurture, class, genetic determinism. A little unresolved. Didn't like the characters much, or the momentary cheap-shot betrayal of the reader's trust in the middle, like the author was saying "psych!"

The Last Conversation, Paul Tremblay - OK. First-person view of (view spoiler)[being a clone (hide spoiler)] - unique and somewhat realistic take, good reveal, but not all that interesting to read. Once you figure it out, you're kind of done.

Ark, Veronica Roth - OK. Somewhat slow and unresolved. I do like thinking about what would happen if an asteroid was coming for us, though, like in The Last Policeman. 

Randomize, Andy Weir - my least favorite. The writing just wasn't that good. Makes me appreciate how hard it is to write believable characters with interesting perspectives. Like - the Indian-American woman's voice here still just sounds like a white guy, just like the protagonist Jazz Bashara did in Artemis. Is every Andy Weir character basically a different flavor of Mark Watney? 
And quantum computing isn't that interesting of a sci-fi technology to explore anyway.

chan

"You ma­de me in your ima­ge, and now I will re­ma­ke you in mi­ne."


Can always go through a Blake Crouch book expecting at least four stars. Holy shit.

Jennifer

A short and quick read for me. This futuristic Sci-Fi novella took me a mere single 1 hour sitting to crunch through. This novella focuses on the interaction between Riley (the game developer) and Max (the AI). I liked the concept and explorations on what makes a person human: it redeems itself both a thought-provoking but also lowkey a haunting read. 

While I enjoyed the concept that Blake Crouch incorporated in Summer Frost, I feel like the length of the novella is simply not enough to allow me the time to fully connect to the world. Its brevity also didn't allow sufficient character development and the complete realisation of the potential given its premise.

But nevertheless, this is a decent novella and a much more intriguing entry, comparing to Ark, for the speculative Forward collection.

(3.5 stars out of 5)

The way Blake Crouch writes just really does it for me. Obsessed.

Olivera Mitić

Ovo je zapravo bilo jako zabavno! Ako ste raspoloženi za priču o veštačkoj inteligenciji, onda ovo ima sve što vam treba. 

Blake Crouch možda nije moj omiljeni pisac, bog sveti zna da mu uglavnom dam trojke, ali čovek ima super ideje. Dužina je bila taman, a priča je ovaj put imala to nešto što mi inače fali kod njega. Volela bih da od ovoga naprave neki film à la  Ex Machina  ili da bar ovi iz  Black Mirror-a  snime epizodu, jer je, čini mi se, sjajno za ekranizaciju.

Baš se radujem da pročitam još neke stvari iz ove 
  Forward
 edicije.

Michelle Xu

The Forward Collection Overall: 3.5 stars.

It's hard to give the overall collection a rating because some stories were hits and others were misses.

Summer Frost - 4 stars
I really enjoyed this, it reads very similarly to other Blake Crouch works such as Dark Matter and Recursion. The short story played out much like a movie. I can see it being adapted into a screen play, but then it would be too similar to Ex-Machina for me. I think that was my only reason for giving it 4 instead of 5 stars. It felt way too similar to Ex-Machina and I felt like because of that, I kind of could guess where it was going. Crouch does a great job though at pacing and keeping the action going. I felt like I couldn't put this short story down.

B. K.

4.5 stars. Great narration by Rosa Salazar.

Juliana Matias

WTF did I just read? I am not sure how to take this, to be honest. This story took me for a ride. It felt exactly like watching a Black Mirror episode.

As the longest short story in this collection, I almost DNF’d this in the first few pages. I’m actually later than I expected because I kept putting it off after reading the first page and a half. It’s videogame related and I really don’t like books about videogames – they tend to bore me – and the initial “chase” scene was so, so boring.

But then we move into a deep study into AI and consciousness, and it threw me for a loop. All of a sudden I was super interested and into the story. And then the ending – somehow exactly what I expected and yet completely surprising – how is that even possible?

I don’t know – I don’t even know if I liked it. But I guess I have to give it 4 stars? So I must have, right? God I am confused.

Ruth Parker 

I love Blake Crouch and I was super intrigued by this story. It was like a horror thriller version of Ready Player One almost. It reminded me of Ex Machina. I loved this idea. It was well executed and I really enjoyed the characters.

Summer Frost

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