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susanvoss18

susanvoss18

The Emoticon Generation

The Emoticon Generation - Guy Hasson In this collection are seven stories that I am excited to tell you about. Guy Hasson has mostly focused on near-future technology concerning artificial intelligence (AI) and the human quest for immortality. There’s also some emoticon humor mixed in, regret on past decisions, relationship problems, and the hunt for one’s origins.

Here I will go on a little about my favorite of the collection: Hatchling. Glynis leads a pretty quiet life for a teen. She lives at home, exclusively, having a rare bone calcium deficiency that makes her frail. Her mother, Olivia, and two of her mother’s friends from work are the only people in her life. However, she does spend lots of time on the internet and watching daily news and tv. So she knows that most kids have 2 parents, or at least know something about both of them. Yet she knows nothing about her father. She lays a small trap for her mother, requesting simply her father’s name for her 13th birthday. Her mother relents and tells her this one name, and nothing more. But this only leads Glynis on an interesting and sometimes frustrating chase for the truth through cyberspace. Breaking into a variety of databases and using public cameras, she tracks a man who may know something of her origins. Eventually she blackmails him into telling her, and it was not what she expected. I enjoyed this story immensely. It was not what I expected it to be, nor did it end the way I thought it would after the plot twist was revealed. Oooo! I really wanted to pop one of the characters in the nose at the end of this book, so well did the story have me in it’s grasp. This was the jewel of the collection for me.

What I Liked: The emoticon humor; Hatchling was my favorite in this collection for the plot twist and the unexpected ending; the AI theme pervades through several of the stories; the characters were very real to me – definitely human even if they did not have blood and bone.

What I Disliked: A few times in two of the stories (Her Destiny and Freedom Is Only A Step Away) things seemed to drag on a bit and didn’t have the same pacing as the rest of the collection (minor dislike, obviously not enough to make me put the book down).