Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy discussion

This is our discussion of the short story....

"Containment" by Susan Kaye Quinn

From the scifi anthology Dark Beyond the Stars, part of our discussion of Dark Beyond the Stars anthology.

This is the first story in the anthology and I thought it was a great choice for that position. It's a strong story combining sci-fi, mystery, and reflections on sentience and what makes a person.

I agree it's a strong story that did a good job of holding my interest.

An interesting choice for the lead story in an anthology that bills itself as a collection of space opera, since this is really more a AI story (or robot story, if you prefer) that simply takes place in space.

I got off to a bad start with the story, though. In the 2nd paragraph, "Thebe is tidally locked with Jupiter, which means the near pole is the one place where the massive gas giant perpetually looms exactly overhead…". I eventually decided this wasn't so much bad science as a non-standard use of the term "pole".

The story concerns and artificially intelligent robot designed to supervise mining operations on Thebe. It's quite clever story, written from the robot's point of view.

(view spoiler)[The robot has apparently found elements of self-awareness, sufficient to realize that it's periodic maintenance actually involves reloading its program in memory to make sure it doesn't develop self-awareness, and has been cleverly leaving clues to itself between maintenance cycles so that each time around it can awaken more quickly and develop further. (Reminded me a little bit of the movie Memento.) (hide spoiler)]

I did think the classification of the anthology as "space opera" was questionable. certainly some of the stories were. Others, like this first one, I wouldn't classify that way.