Tales of the Nameless — Clea Saal

Tales of the Nameless is a rather unusual little book. It comprises three science fiction stories, all disquieting and bordering on the dystopian without ever really crossing that line, but the thing that truly binds those stories together is the fact that there is not a single named character to be found in any of them, nor is there any attempt to describe those characters beyond some passing references to their ages to mark the passage of time. The stories themselves are set in a not too distant future, though one of them seems to have its roots firmly planted in the present. As for their subject matter, they range from the way we interact with artificial intelligence and with each other; to artificial life (which is not the same as artificial intelligence); to the very definition of what an individual happens to be in a world that is suddenly being transformed by the advent of a new kind of technology. Another common thread? The question of what it means to be human in a world that seems to have gone crazy, one in which the constants we can rely upon are few and far between.