By Jesse Graham
The Mail’s own resident film critic has made his second foray into the world of published fiction, releasing a short story collection on Tuesday, 28 February.
Healesville resident and freelance writer, Seth Lukas Hynes released his self-published book, Transsentient – a collection of 13 short stories focusing on Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics and a future where “the line between human and machine is blurred”.
He said the idea for the book came after an essay for his honours degree and an interest in the cyberpunk genre.
“It’s a collection of cyberpunk short stories, set in the mid-to-late 21st century, and the stories form an over-arching narrative that explores the ethics of trans-humanism – expanding the human condition via technology,” Mr Hynes said.
“I would say it’s all about robots and artificial intelligences, computers thinking for themselves and what rights they deserve – whether they will receive human rights, or their own kind of rights or a completely different kind of right altogether.”
Asimov’s laws are that a robot may not injure a human being or allow a human being to come to harm, must obey orders given by humans and must protect its own existence, so long as no action under the second or third law break any other.
Mr Hynes said he started work on the book in December 2015, after releasing a free book full of stories based on Dr Who, and details right down to the page numbers were done manually.
He said that, though he typds out his weekly film reviews for the Mail, he wrote his fiction with pen and paper – this, he said, helped with reviewing when his words make it onto a screen.
“If you read what you’ve typed out later, if something sounds stupid when you say it, you know you’ve made a typo,” he said.
Anyone interested in a copy can contact Mr Hynes at sethhyneswriter@australiaonline.net.au or twitter.com/sethhynes.
eBook or tablet versions of the book cost $10, while the printed copy costs $20.
