The Stories of Ibis [Paperback]

The future. A young man is captured by the robots who now control the Earth. Particular interest is taken in him by Ibis, who looks like a beautiful woman on the surface but constantly reminds him that that is not what she is. The young man hates robots, for they have stolen the Earth and brought humanity low, and so gently Ibis wooes him, in a reverse of the Arabian Nights, with tales of Artificial intelligence and its interaction with humanity. What is her ultimate goal? Why is this young man so important?

That's the framework for this book, another sterling entry in HaikaSoru (an imprint of manga publishers Viz). It's an odd admixture of short story collection and novel, containing as it does stories that have little to do with each other in terms of producing a single world, but everything to do with each other thematically. The novel's confession that these short stories are untrue is part of a wonderful metafictional conceit that forces the reader and the narrator to confront the human interaction with fiction and whether that's good or bad and what it ultimately means about people. As such, much is made of what is truth and what fiction means, which gives the narrative depth and provokes thought.

It certainly is more lively than the first couple of short stories which seem slightly... amateurish? Old hat? This may not be fair, as we're dealing with translation so cannot be sure that all the implied meanings of the original text are coming through, but there is something slightly fan fiction-y and too on the nose about the first stories. As the novel continues, though, the writing becomes more assured and complex, and with clever sleight of hand, Yamamoto manages to wind the fictions into the "reality" of the framework narrative as it refers back to the stories.

The stories themselves:

1.) The Universe on my Hands is about role players who run a fiction ring based on a ship that feels very Star Trek-y and how a murder in the real world encroaches on the crew's experiences and how they react.
2.) A romance in Virtual Space deals with a girl who spends a lot of time in the virtual world and how it gives her strength in the real world when she meets someone online.
3.) Mirror Girl is about a toy that becomes a friend and how the current obsession with the inanimate could have unforeseen repercussions.
4.) Black Hole Diver is about the possibility of using a Black Hole as a gateway to another universe and mankind's need for challenge.
5.) A world where justice is just is about a special girl who starts getting emails from a doomed world. It doesn't take long to guess the twist but it is the way the story is resolved that's so interesting.
6.) The day Shion came is about the creation of an artificial caregiver and how her uncompromising apprehension of the world in terms of logic comes to have an effect on other caregivers and the residents of the care home they work at.
7.) The final story is Ibis' own story and tells how the world of the novel came to be, while pulling on strands from all the other stories here.

There is a good amount of emotion, optimism and intelligence in the writing here. It does, at times, feel a little unoriginal, particularly in the early stories, but as the short stories become longer, almost novella length, Yamamoto is more able to paint a picture of the world and what the people in it experience and it becomes more satisfying. The author's background in videogames certainly comes through as all the stories play in the hinterland of consumerism and mankind's relationship with product and particularly electronics. He doesn't shy away from the more negative aspects of current behavioural trends, though it's obvious where his sympathies lie. And most intriguingly all the stories except the framework narrative are told from the female perspective (more or less).

I'd be interested to read more of Yamamoto's fiction, particularly his more longform work as that seems to be where his strengths lie.

The Stories of Ibis is one in a series of books by Japanese SF authors translated into English and published by Haikasoru. One of the nice things about them is their originality. Japanese SF author have a clearly different take on SF compared to Western authors. Also somewhat surprisingly, technology and science play a less important role than the psychology and the social interactions of the main characters.

In The Stories of Ibis the human population has dwindled to a mere 25 million people, and humans are living a much more simple life than we do nowadays. They blame the androids for that. Ibis is an android who has beaten a human nicknamed Storyteller in a fight, and has "captured" him to treat his injuries. In the book it is Ibis who does the story telling. Her stories are about the interaction between humans and androids. Although most of them are fiction, they tell the androids' point of view on humanity's fall.

The book is really about blaming others for one's situation, rationalizing this, and how this can lead one to do to terrible things. This sounds quite negative, but the book is actually quite optimistic. Even though it presents the androids as the superior species, there is nothing for humans to feel bad about. The difference is, in terms of the book, simply because androids and humans have different "specs".

I was quite impressed by the book, and would have given it five stars, except that I found the quality of the stories a bit uneven. Still, it is well worth reading.