The Stories of Ibis

The Stories of Ibis
by: Hiroshi Yamamoto
Published by: Viz Media [Haikasoru imprint]
from the publisher: In a world where humans are a minority and androids have created their own civilization, a wandering storyteller meets the beautiful android Ibis. She tells him seven stories of human/android interaction in order to reveal the secret behind humanity’s fall. The stories that Ibis speaks of are the “seven novels” about the events surrounding the announcements of the development of artificial intelligence (AI) in the 20th and 21st centuries. At a glance, these stories do not appear to have any sort of connection, but what is the true meaning behind them? What are Ibis’s real intentions?
my ramblings: I finally finished reading The Stories of Ibis this morning (yay for 4am urges to read). The book is a series of short stories all pulled together by their teller, the android Ibis. Ibis is telling these made-up stories to a human in order to change his anti-robot views. I love the interconnectedness of the stories; even though I had to get used to a whole new set of characters each time a new story started, it was awesome to see how Ibis connected them all together in the end.

There were a few of the stories that I preferred over the others, but only really one that I had issues with. The very last story (which is actually Ibis’s history) is full of “i” as a way of showing how much the AI’s felt an emotion. For example, one time Ibis is talking about loving someone and she says “love 4+10i”, which would denote the highest form of love for an AI. There were other times when you would have no idea what was going on because the AI use metaphors (and beyond that secondary and tertiary metaphors!) to explain things and it just seems like nonsense when you’re reading it. You aren’t supposed to understand (Ibis says that humans don’t understand AI language), but it’s still jarring and I’m not sure I liked that part.

I just adore the cover art and design! However, I definitely have to agree with sylphalchemist in that the colors are all wrong; Ibis is said to be like a flame in the book, while the cover makes me think more of water.

There was one editing issue that I found that was a little more confusing than most. The line went something like “textbooks after the second half of the 21st century were banned” which didn’t make sense in context, I’m almost positive it was supposed to be “textbooks BEFORE the second half of the 21st century were banned” to show that older, more correct info was banned and not the new, incorrect info. I read the sentence multiple times to make sure I wasn’t imagining it, but I’m pretty sure I’m not just confused.

On the whole, I highly suggest The Stories of Ibis! Despite a few minor flaws in the very end of the book, it was a great read and the short story format makes it easy to read just a little bit at a time.