Bewildering Stories welcomes...

Dean Giles

Dean is from London and currently lives in Surrey with his family. He works in a fibre-optics production company that he owns jointly with his father. Dean is adept in several martial arts and has won championships in kickboxing. Aside from business and athletics, Dean enjoys writing science fiction and horror. His short stories have appeared in print and in the U.K.

“DAVE” portrays an Artificial Intelligence designed to operate an interstellar colony ship. The name is ironic, of course; it’s the name of the human character in 2001: a Space Odyssey who disables the murderously deranged computer, HAL.

The “DAVE” in Dean’s story is HAL’s counterpart, and Simon is the man who must outwit the machine. While HAL goes crazy because science-fictional computers tend almost axiomatically to have a Frankenstein complex, DAVE has a plausible reason: he’ll go crazy if he doesn’t.

DAVEs are complex enough to develop personalities of their own as a kind of curious emergent property. But after all, DAVE is not human, and it thinks like a computer. There seems to be little point in getting mad at it; Simon might take pity on the lonely machine.

Dean Giles’s bio sketch can be found here.

Welcome to Bewildering Stories, Dean. We hope to hear from you again soon and often!