![]() ![]() ![]() The stories are the main draw of the book, and although sometimes kludgy in presentation (especially the first, shorter five), each raises questions or doubts about where the line between virtual and real should be drawn, or even if it should be drawn at all. The seventh is her story, and-while clearly fiction to us, the reader-is the true story of the downfall of man. She presents six of the stories as fiction, but acknowledges all the while that fiction is a truth, cleverly disguised. ![]() An itinerant storyteller, after a brief scuffle, ends up in a machine-run hospital room with Ibis, who coyly tempts him with the seven stories she tells which, according to her, reveal the reason behind the fall of man and the rise of machines. The framing story presents a future where machines have taken over the Earth, leaving small pockets of humanity scrabbling for existence. It places itself between the real and the virtual, and ignores the arbitrary delineation between both. It lurks somewhere in the interstices between the framing story of an android telling stories a la Scheherazade to a storyteller and the stories she tells. Part short story collection, part novel, Hiroshi Yamamoto‘s The Stories of Ibis is largely a story about stories. ![]()
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