Short Take

When HARLIE Was One by David Gerrold (1972)

I picked this one up at a library sale in New York and it took a few months to get to it. Like most authors I follow, I’ve been reading David’s work very much out of order. This is an early work, and one that David refers back to in later works. HARLIE is an artificial intelligence–but referred to absolutely as an artificial human (my emphasis). I ran into David at the 2025 Worldcon and told him I had just finished this book and exclaimed “How did you get so much of it right IN 1972?” He just shrugged.

The book’s not perfect–the subplot with the main scientist getting a girlfriend is fairly by-the-numbers but the relationship is necessary for development of an understanding about HARLIE.

All in all, an amazingly prescient story that is still relevant.

Collisions by Alec Nevala-Lee (2025)

Since I have a passing acquaintance with Alec, I look at his new projects with interest. Collisions is a thorough biography of Luis Alvarez, a physicist who was involved with several interesting discoveries and applications of work. He’s probably best-known as one of the scientists in the Manhattan Project.

The work covers a lot of ground while clocking in around three hundred pages. I read the NY Times review of the book which thought it needed to go into more details about Alvarez’ character and personal actions, but the key thing I realized in reading the acknowledgements is that the first people to be thanked are his children. That kind of access probably comes with a natural inclination to temper the view of the subject (if the children liked/respected their parent). Since I knew nothing of his accomplishments, I found it to be an even retelling of his life and achievements. I especially appreciated the Afterward that served as a summary/commentary of the man and his approach to science.

Illegal Alien by Robert J. Sawyer (1997)

I have been reading Sawyer’s books for a long time on-and-off. This one I acquired recently and got inscribed to me when I met Rob at Balticon this year. I just got to the book this week and finished it in a couple of days.

Like all of Sawyer’s books, it takes an interesting premise and creates an engaging story around it. I will say that while I figured out one minor plot point in advance, I missed a couple of biggies, which makes for wonderful reading!

The only “negative” point I’d have about this story in particular is that some of the details hinge around the O.J. Simpson case from 1995. This is a case of “in 1997” this stuff was fresh with everyone; however, I never watched a moment of the trial and to this day still don’t know a lot about most of those involved. It’s a minor quibble as I remembered enough, but not as much. I had a similar feeling about the WWW trilogy because of the tech involved, some of which I never used, but it was cutting edge when written.

One of these days I’m going to have to print off a list of Sawyer’s novels and figure out which ones I have missed reading. If you didn’t know, Sawyer now controls most (if not all) of his backlist and it’s easy to find his stuff at sfwriter.com