Review of Charles Hand, “The Pond Who Sang”, Analog Science Fiction and Fact March/April (2021): 132–135 (Kindle) – Purchase Here. Reviewed by John Atom.
Due to a plane crash, a scientist’s revolutionary neural network device falls into a pond where it interacts with the local flora and fauna to become sentient. A perplexed musicologist who lives nearby attempts to understand the sounds that are coming from it.
“The Pond Who Sang” has a poetic quality about it that I enjoyed very much, even though I don’t think the artificial neural networks described in the story are accurate at all. Otherwise there’s little that stands out about this piece. It’s a nice little tale about nature, AI, and the fateful convolution of the two.
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