Former BB guestblogger Jenn Shreve’s excellent science fiction short story “Whooping It Up In The Uncanny Valley,” published in the last issue of Adbusters, is now available as a free PDF. (Previous post about Jenn’s story “Space Junk” here.) Somebody get this girl a book deal, quick! From Jenn’s blog post describing “Whooping It Up In The Uncanny Valley”:
The inspiration for this piece came a couple years ago from a New Yorker article about robotics. In the field, there’s a term called “the uncanny valley.” Briefly explained: when a person encounters an artificial being, they are more likely to empathize with it if it has distinctly human characteristics. However, if the artificial being is too human, revulsion takes the place of empathy. The Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori termed this sudden dip in empathy the “uncanny valley…”As I read the article, I started to wonder what it would be like if the uncanny valley was an actual place. Who would live there? And what would it take to finally push them to the point of revulsion? When I started to create this fictional place, I found it was not all that different from the gated, suburban communities many live in now. My nameless protagonist wakes up one morning to find himself disgusted with his life. The story is his attempt to cut through the unreality of his life and finally live and feel like a real human being again.
