‘For me, I AM AI was less about the nefarious creep of technology and potential negative impacts of generative artificial intelligence than it was about a very realized, widespread hardship that is already well-proliferated today: the near-inescapable compulsion to sacrifice our innate desires and personal ambitions in the name of financial prosperity or security.’

‘Like a growing number of popular horror novels, it’s not enough to just be traditionally scary, to conjure ghouls and monsters that crawl out from the dark places and threaten mortal lives. No, now it seems that what readers fear most must be rooted in reality, as evil as any esoteric demon or creepy clown, but also a tangible, crudely familiar terror that many experience at some point in their lives–poverty, discrimination, so on. Quite simply, with each passing generation, we in the Western world fear the evils of the unknown less and less, instead turning weary eyes to the darkness which spills forth from the cracks in our own society, a corruption which has always been there but from which we are collectively, in unbroken legacy with those who came before us, seeking some exit.’

‘Jiang has done something truly masterful here in that she leaves just enough blank space on the pages, and just enough secrets in the novella, for the curious reader to seek layers of meaning which may have not been intended or expected. This is a line only the best authors can walk, and it imbues their fiction with a timelessness and sense of resonance that many readers will find affecting, and the right reader might just call perfect.’