Notes

Part four of Cory Doctorow's reading of Human Readable, originally published in the anthology Future Washington, and recommended in Locus Magazine's list of the best novelllas of 2005. Human Readable is the tale of a world that's been upended by hyper-efficient planning algorithms based on ant-colony optimizations, so that Los Angeles has the best traffic in the world. However, when these networks crash, they really crash -- cars, surfboards, and many other common conveyances end up catastrophically failing, with concomitant loss of life. This story will be reprinted in 2006 in the Science Fiction Book Club's Best Short Novels anthology.