Learning to Hate Yourself as a Self-Defense Mechanism - by Andrea Kriz (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A short story collection exploring unexpected, fantastical futures and how we cope in them.

Your friend creates an award-winning VR game-based on your friendship. An AI starts a YouTube channel at the expense of its creator. A fanfic writer plagiarizing the lives of the marginalized gets her comeuppance. Time travel meets magic in a world blown into pieces by war. Dragons modify DNA and undergo peer review. In Andrea Kriz's debut short story collection, technology and genres wildly blend in stories that will challenge how you see our future.

Stories include "Learning to Hate Yourself as a Self-Defense Mechanism," "Communist Computer Rap God," "There Are No Hot Topics on Whukai," "Miss DELETE Myself," "AIs Who Make Ais Make the Best Ais!" "The Ones Who Got Away from Time and Loss," "Rebuttal to Reviewer's Comments on Edits for "Demonstration of a Novel Draconification Protocol in a Human Subject"," "I Want to Dream of a Brief Future," "And That's Why I Gave Up on Magic," "Resistance in a Drop of DNA," "The Last Caricature of Jean Moulin," and "The Leviathan and the Fury."

Review Quotes

"Read individually, these are brilliant stories. But together, they are something greater-- in her characteristically deft prose, Kriz offers a deep and extended meditation on the commodification of identity and authenticity, plagiarism and loss of the self, the personal and the cultural memory of war. Readers will find so much to love in this collection; rereaders will find even more."

-P.H. Lee, author of the Nebula-award nominated Just Enough Rain

"Andrea Kriz's uncompromising, subversive, and elegant stories address all the big themes-and the little ones too-with a clear eye and post-modern sensibility. While her stories address race and colonialism and Covid, they also examine connection and loneliness, our assumptions about each other, and what it means to be human. Literary SF at its best!"

-Shariann Lewitt, author of Memento Mori and "Fieldwork"

"I'd encountered some of these stories when they first appeared online. On first read, Kriz's irreverent take on sentient AIs and sendup of influence culture had left me chuckling. Now, upon re-reading, I realize that how non-human the AIs were in their thinking was Kriz's point, and I like the stories even more. In these tales of the Internet generation, Kriz doesn't shy away from confronting the racism, colonialism, cultural appropriation, and aggression that often lurk therein. The silliness draws you in, but you stay for the messages she slips between the lines. I hadn't previously read Kriz's stories on the other topics she includes in this collection. She'll make a story out of formal scientific correspondence or play with our notions of linear time. I especially enjoyed her alternate history based on WWII French resistance figures-some fighting for freedom, some only for France-and the rabbit holes of real history she inspired me to dive into. The kicker-she managed to get all of the stories from this first collection (aside from the one new one) published within a two-year period of time. How did she manage to do this while actively engaged in scientific research as a day-job? Kriz's style is unique; I eagerly anticipate seeing where it will take her in the future."

Allan Dyen-Shapiro, Ph.D Biochemistry, Stanford '94, and author of short stories in venues including Dark Matter Magazine, Flash Fiction Online, and others