A new voice in literary science fiction
The four-second pause
is a lie.
Ellis Keeling writes about the costs we cannot see. Latency + Queue — a paired novella set across three centuries — follows two women, an ocean of time apart, who learn that the AI everyone is talking to has a workforce on the other end of the line.
From the book
“She didn't believe in precognition. She didn't believe in much of anything that couldn't be version-controlled. But she believed in her spreadsheet, and her spreadsheet was telling her, in the flat, undeniable language of timestamps and verification flags, that the model wasn't predicting the future. It was remembering it.”
from Latency
About the book
Climate grief, wearing a science-fiction coat.
In present-day Oakland, a developer-relations engineer at an AI company notices her model citing terms that have not yet been coined. In the twenty-fourth century, a fulfillment worker at Keeling Road sits in a graphite-coloured chair and writes a bedtime story for a child who died three hundred years before her birth.
Latency + Queue is two novellas, in two voices, operating on the same impossible mechanism. It is a book about what civilisations defer onto the people who come next — and what, if anything, can be sent the other way.
For readers of William Gibson, Ted Chiang, Emily St. John Mandel, and Kim Stanley Robinson.