Learning to Hate Yourself as a Defence Mechanism is a collection of speculative-fiction short stories that test our attitudes on AI, tech and how far we may go in the interested of innovation. Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC I received in exchange for an honest review.

Andrea Kriz stories manage to be both light-hearted and belly laugh funny in parts, while addressing some of the more sinister applications of technology and human relationships elsewhere. There are stories here that seems to have come from similar ideas or worlds and I want more! The different timelines we spent saving Jean Moulin?? Yes please! I would take the astronauts stories in Delete Myself in a heartbeat.

I can't say I loved and entirely understood every story, but they all certainly got me thinking and discussing things with my partner we may not have otherwise. Classed as a win for me!

I should start by saying that this book of short stories was really not my cup of tea - it’s the sort of sci-fi that I just don’t really connect with - the concepts went over my head.

That said, there were some moments of delight - I enjoyed the writing style but just overall, not for me.

I really enjoyed the opening story - learning to hate yourself as a self defence mechanism- I felt so outraged and sad for the unnamed narrator who is villainised so unfairly.

Thoughts:
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily. This is a great collection of well thought out short stories of varying lengths. The AI moral conflict stories were interesting as it’s not something I’ve thought about too much before. Most of them seemed to follow a similar world such as the Kami being in more than one story. The ones nearer the end that had a WW2 twist were awesome, blending together the history I’m more familiar with the sci-fi twist.

Favourite Quote:
"Art inspires change. That’s why I write."

Learning to Hate Yourself as a Self-Defense Mechanism is a fascinating speculative short story collection that explores things like AI, internet culture, colonialism, time travel, and even things like apartheid and war-related trauma, all through the lens of science fiction and fantasy.

I got really taken in by how tangible these stories felt due to the subject matter and also the personal/emotional throughlines in each story. “There Are No Hot Topics on Whukai” and “Miss DELETE Myself” feel like they’ve been cut from the very fabric of internet Discourse and streaming culture. And even the more lighthearted “AIs Who Make AIs Make the Best AIs!” portrays both the baffled “what even is this” human point of view of the rapid development of technological sentience, while also delivering a rather poignant ending note on the importance of creativity and the making of meaning.

On the more serious side of the stories here, I was also pleasantly surprised by “I Want to Dream of a Brief Future”. It was already engaging when it presented itself as a time loop story, delving into the horrors of war/xenophobia/internment camps, but it also turned out to be a challenge to the heavily protagonist oriented narrative tendencies of time loop stories—of many stories in general. The ending hits hard with the reminder that sometimes a protagonist’s idea of heroism can actually just be rooted in their self-centeredness. (And also that the other character(s) are often given a limited/lesser amount of personhood as a result of the nature/structure of a time loop story.)

Even with the wide range of topics and emotional tones in this story collection, Andrea Kriz’s writing voice is crystal clear all throughout. It was a delight to read, thank you to Interstellar Flight Press and NetGalley for giving me the chance to read this book early!

This anthology is just as edgy, self-deprecating, and humorous as the title. Filled with a balanced mix of tech-mech dystopia and a few fantastical elements involving magic, you can easily find a few favorites depending on your preferences. I particularly love "Rebuttal to Reviewers' Comments on Edits for 'Demonstration of a Novel Draconification Protocol in a Human Subject," "The Ones Who Got Away From Time and Loss," and "Resistance in a Drop of DNA."

The sets of stories do come in a bundle of themes that seamlessly connect with the next story, exploring futuristic as well current issues permeating society today, such as the use of AI, colonialism, the terminally online culture that's all too familiar in this day and age. However, I find that not all of them pack as much of a punch, leaving a few of them slightly hollow and almost an inferior version of the previous/next story.

Andrea Kriz however has a clear talent and fresh perspective in the sci-fi realm, and more unconventional stories such as "Rebuttal Rebuttal to Reviewers' Comment on Edits for 'Demonstration of a Novel Draconification Protocol in a Human Subject," are the most engaging to read.

Thank you Interstellar Flight Press and NetGalley for the advance copy. All opinions are my own.

I’m going to be honest and say that I dnf this book.
I was initialy very excited to pick it up as the cover and title were so original and eye-catching. However, once I started reading the stories I quickly realized this was far from what I expected, as I don't read much in this genre. Maybe I shouldn’t have picked a book solely for the cover.
Despite not having finished I’m giving a review because I do believe this will be someone’s cup of tea. It is well-written and I can see how the concepts are interesting. If you have a predilection for science fiction, this stories will definitely grab you from the start!

This is a collection of SFFH stories originally published in genre magazines. While a lot of them work well together, others--like the time-travel/slipstream pieces involving France--don't mesh terribly well as a collection. The stories are all fine and address current topics well, like artificial sentience, identity, and colonization, but none really grabbed me. They reminded me a lot of the kind of prompts and stories for kids in the 1980s, just with a little tech tweaking, and so they were very familiar even if the details had changed. I'm sure plenty of readers will love this, but it didn't impress or engage me very well.

Learning to Hate Yourself as a Self-Defense Mechanism is a collection of short stories set in a futuristic time. These stories cover many topics to include racism, self-destruction, colonialism, cultural appropriation, and so much more. With sci-fi being the main focus, we are carried through short story after short story pushing the boundaries of current events and the near future.

This collection was tremendously entertaining. The stories were hard hitting and truly made me stop and think at times. I loved how they pushed the boundaries of current events using futuristic settings. Some of these stories will stick with me long after I’ve completed them. The last three stories appear to be linked but I think I missed the link between them all. With that, I am giving this collection 4/5 stars. It was quite the adventure and I hope to see more from Kriz as they continue with their work.

This book sold me on the title and the cover first, despite my wariness of short story collections. Previously I have found with collections that some stories are weaker than others and lack cohesion with the rest, but that is not the case here at all, and I am suitably sold on collections going forward. Kriz has converted me.

There was a wonderful mix of humour and heartfelt here, just enough to balance each other while deepdiving into the relentless innovation and development of technology so advanced it is scarcely different from magic. Cloning, transformation, time travel, alternate timelines, nothing it outside of the reach of these stories, but the core of them is the human experience, the griefs of war and its aftermath, hopes and failures, loss and its manifestations. This is what the best of sci fi does, and what Kriz is already showing a deft hand for, fascinating speculative futures and pasts showing all the scope of humanity. Even the incident with the dragon is so wonderfully set up, I'd say it was one of my favourites if I couldn't easily say that about all of them.

I initially faltered, but in the end I have to say 5 stars. There was nothing I didn't like and my only regret was that these stories didn't continue, expand and become their own universes, which is what the best short stories do, give you a glimpse of a place that leaves you wanting more.

*Thank you to the publisher and to Netgalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.*

Andrea Kriz is without a doubt a speculative author to keep an eye on. The first short story of hers I read was THERE ARE THE ART-MAKERS, DREAMERS OF DREAMS, AND THERE ARE AIS in Clarkesworld Magazine (https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kriz_04_23/) and I found her growth as a writer very impressive. I liked a lot some of the stories in this collection while others left me aloof (the same thing, I suppose, could be applied to any short story collection I have ever read). I appreciate the attention of Kriz for themes too often removed from speculative fiction such as visual arts and video games (and fan fiction, woah, I really loved THERE ARE NO HOT TOPICS ON WHUKAI).

I found some of the stories more hazy than others but given that English is not my first language, it could be mainly my fault. In any case, I look forward to reading others from this author (maybe a novella set on Whukai?).

The first half of this collection is comprised of near-future SF stories, told in a crisp prose, lyrical but unsentimental. They're very timely, filled as they are with online novels, livestreams, AI. But I love how strange Kriz makes those topics and how she finds a personal, emotional angle on them: the colonial dynamics and precarity of "There Are No Hot Topics on Whukai", the fraught friendship and playing with perspective in the titular story, the melancholy and traces of magical realism in "Miss DELETE Myself". I even enjoyed "Communist Computer Rap God", which is a true testament to Kriz's skill and perspective because I've seen a few stories about sentient communist robots/AI and I tend to hate them for a variety of reasons – but this slice of life story about an AI that becomes an unsuccessful youtuber really managed to endear me. How can I not love a story containing senteces like "Maybe being a bad communist and making bad rap, in spite of a lot of effort, was the most human it could be"?

There are three other groups of stories in the second half of the collection and even though they are very different from each other, the stories are arranged in such a way that the shifts are not jarring. A story about a disgraced professor trying to create an AI building other AIs serves as a segue into humorous riffs on academia. These are fine stories, although they feel the slightest in the whole collection.

Subsequently the collection shifts to more serious fantasy, dealing with apartheid, prejudice and xenophobia. "I Want to Dream of a Brief Future" plays strongly with Holocaust imagery in a fantasy setting and follows the main characters as they're stuck in a time loop, attempting to escape from a transport to a camp. And then the story shifts suddenly in the final scenes to being about something else entirely, but there's so little time to explore this new – central – idea that the intended takeaway has to be spelled out by one of the characters in dialogue. It's a puzzling story, and not entirely successful one I think. "And That's Why I Gave Up on Magic" deals with similar topics and feels more coherent: it's a melancholy tale of a friendship torn apart by prejudice. But I think it suffers from how generic the fantasy settings feel and ultimately left me feeling pretty cold.

The three final stories focus on anti-fascist resistance in occupied France and here the topics introduced earlier find a much better realisation. Once again there's science, friendships forged in blood and destroyed by war, time travel and alternative timelines. This setting feels much more detailed and particular, like the near future in the first part, and I think it gives heft to those stories. Of these "The Last Caricature of Jean Moulin" is by far my favourite; an affecting meditation on the power of art to resist and outlast murderous regimes.

Overall, I found this collection to be a pleasure. It's a breeze to get through: two of the twelve stories hit 5000 words, and the rest is significantly shorter than that. At its worst it can be a little overly didactic, slight, and generic. At its best it's sharp and lyrical, containing emotional and thematical complexity in few words. It floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee.

I will admit I judged a book by its cover when requesting to read this one. I haven't previously read any works by Andrea Kriz, so I wasn't sure what to expect from a book filled with short stories by this author. "Learning to Hate Yourself as a Self-Defence Mechanism" had me hooked from the title, and the stories contained within were diverse and felt a little like a more detailed Black Mirror series.

While the stories were perhaps a little darker than I initially expected, there were a number of lighter moments. I have a bit of a soft spot for "AIs Who Make AIs Make the Best AIs" and have returned to reread this story a couple of times. But, the majority of the stories had me hooked and made me think, especially the titular story and "Miss DELETE Myself," mainly because it was possible to envision a world where these scenarios could happen to an extent.

Overall, I enjoyed this book. It's well-written, and most of the stories instantly had me hooked and thinking. I would absolutely recommend this novel and look forward to seeing more work by this author in the future.

Learning to Hate Yourself as a Self-Defense Mechanism is a mix of stories that slowly coalesces into a heart aching depiction of the human experience and everything that makes science fiction a desirable genre.

Andrea Kriz’s voice is clever throughout her collection. The satirical exaggeration of common issues in today’s world displayed in the first few stories keeps you turning pages just to hear how the characters’ absurd stories end. And the straight forward depiction of emotional reactions to unrealistic situations in the final half keeps you turning pages in resignation of your own human experience.

Kriz’s humor shines in “Communist Computer Rap God” which lays out the absurd way we think about online status in a way that feels hyperbolic and underrated at the same time. That humor again pops up in “Rebuttal to Reviewers’ Comments on Edits for ‘Demonstration of a Novel Draconification Protocol in a Human Subject’”, whose title alone tells you you’re in for a treat as Kriz plays with form and conveyance of world building.

While I enjoyed the humor of the first few stories, I do think they are the weakest of the collection. I found the mentions of “Covid-times” in multiple stories distracting (though this could, admittedly, be because it was my first time seeing Covid directly mentioned in a book I was reading). The blatant inclusion of real world, named issues felt off putting next to the strange new worlds Kriz was building within each story.

Kriz also sometimes slips into a more stream of consciousness style, which I don’t hate but could be jarring when it hit after I’d finally gotten into the groove of a new setting. This was most prominent in “Miss DELETE Myself” whose worlds and characters I had difficulty fully visualizing, even though I enjoyed the setting Kriz was trying to convey.
Despite any road bumps, you are eventually lulled into a more concrete and emotional narrative that interconnects through the final few stories. This narrative had me immediately turning back to the first page to start the book all over again so that I could imagine each title in a different light.

My favorite of the stories is “The Last Caricature of Jean Moulin”, though it is difficult for me to choose between the final five stories, which are more poignant than their predecessors. The more fantastical look at science fiction, especially shown in “And That’s Why I Gave Up on Magic” and “I Want to Dream of a Brief Future” left me wanting entirely fleshed out worlds, though I am still incredibly satisfied with them existing in their tiny universes.

The only reason I hesitate to give the collection a full five stars is the dichotomy between the first and last half. Other than the difference in strength of narrative, there is a shift in the way the stories connect after “The Ones Who Got Away from Time and Loss” that I wish encompassed the entire collection.

Kriz does a wonderful job of weaving her stories together into a larger narrative that will linger with me. She understands how to dig into the emotion that sits at the center of science fiction and speculative fiction–the reason that we as readers and humans yearn to live in those imagined worlds.

LEARNING TO HATE YOURSELF AS A SELF DEFENSE MECHANISM is a rare one-author short story anthology that isn’t uneven. That is to say, most of the time when an author collects a bunch of their short stories it tends to contain a few great stories and a bunch of whatever. But reading this made for a very strong collection, only getting better as I kept reading.

There’s a few themes in these stories that keep returning—cultural appropriation and exploitation, being (ab)used by others, modern and refreshing takes on social media and how they’ve changed the way we interact, AI, time travel and time loops. What I loved about these stories the most is that they never overstay their welcome. Most of them are flash fiction or slightly longer than that. Too many short story writers don’t know when to stop, but Kriz does.
I think I’d read maybe one story by her before in Clarkesworld or something like that, so this was a pleasant introduction to the author. Feels like something AK Press might’ve published.

Thanks to the Interstellar Flight Press for another strong ARC.

This collection of short stories is a must-read for anyone interested in speculative fiction, especially near-future fiction that focuses on the impact of the increasing integration of technology with our daily lives. This collection addresses a huge range of topics in a variety of settings; just as I thought I got the theme of the collection, the next story showed a major shift in tone, topic, genre, setting, etc. Although I found some stories stronger and others weaker, I really enjoyed this collection on the whole and wanted to read the next story as soon as I finished the previous one.

Thank you to NetGalley and Interstellar Flight Press for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review,

Learning to Hate Yourself as a Self-Defense Mechanism is a collection of speculative fiction. It delves into the intricacies and the implications and dangers of technology, while also touching on the impact that COVID-19 had on society.

I definitely enjoyed certain stories over the rest, with the ones that stuck out to me being the first story which I believe was called "Learning to Hate Yourself as a Self-Defense Mechanism", as well as the story called "Miss Delete Myself" and "I Want to Dream of a Brief Future."

Other stories unfortunately did not have the same lasting effect on me and quite frankly I don't quite remember them well.

I would recommend this to fans of Sci-Fi and short stories, and also to those who enjoyed the Netflix Series "Black Mirror".

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an electronic copy to read in exchange for an honest review.

This collection threw me way outside my comfort zone. I'm glad I took time to read the stories over the course of a few days. They needed time to settle in my brain. I'll admit that some still don't make sense to me (maybe I'm too old? Not sci-fi enough?) Regardless l, they are an interesting and thought provoking collections.

To be honest, I haven't read a lot of speculative fiction, so I thought trying out some short stories would be a good way to ease into the genre. Regardless, I actually loved them all! These stories felt so fresh and inventive, and often I found myself just sitting and reflecting on the themes from each story.

There are a lot of interwoven thoughts on technology (as envisaged in the far future) but without losing the representation of humanity, which was wonderful.

The only stories I didn't like as much were the ones set in the past (or rather, with time travel capabilities that took the main character to the past). It's just not a personal preference. However, I did love the elements of biomedicine that worked their way into some stories (particularly in Resistance in a Drop of DNA) - I think the combination of tech and biology is such an interesting facet of speculative fiction!

I also loved Miss DELETE Myself, it was such an insightful commentary on the growing horror of entertainment consumerism and how that could be extrapolated to a future scenario.

I could actually probably write about every single short story in this collection, so I'll stop here. But I really enjoyed this anthology and I'll definitely be putting the author down on my to-watch list!

3.5 stars rounded up to 4.

A collection of short stories of speculative fiction. Most of these were intriguing and caught my attention right away, or pulled me in near the end.
It’s such a nice experience to finish one story and be able to sit with it and reflect on what you read, what was intended, and what you got from it.

A few of the stories near the end lost me a bit, probably because of some sci-fi elements my mind couldn’t wrap around quite well. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed how this was written and the author’s narrative voice(s) are a pleasant read.

Thank you NetGalley for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review!

Learning to Hate Yourself as a Self-Defense Mechanism is a fantastical collection of speculative short fiction. Without a doubt, this anthology took me back to watching Black Mirror and Love, Death & Robots for the very first time. Each story has that same cinematic quality that makes it so easy to picture the scenes and characters on a screen.

The collection is an immersive deep dive into the pertinent and complex issues raised by the advancement of technology. In some ways, it's a forecast of what the world could look like in the distant or maybe even near future. In other ways, it’s a reimagining of histories and worlds that combines exciting components of science fiction with various genres and powerful themes that explore the human condition.

I love how balanced and unified it is. Despite the dark underlying themes in some stories, others are laden with so much life and humour that feels both absurd and completely natural. The Communist Computer Rap God is the perfect example of this. It is so funny, from the premise itself to the dry tone of dialogue and everything in between. I found it so impressive that while bizarre and futuristic, it was still completely imaginable, which just made it funnier. I honestly think it’s one of the funniest short stories I’ve ever read, and it’s one of my favourites in this collection. (Other favourites include There Are No Hot Topics on Whukai, Miss DELETE Myself, and I Want To Dream of a Bright Future. But even though I liked these the most, the others are also so so good.)

Overall, a really well-written anthology with interesting plots and worlds that make you want to sit and reflect for days and days after reading. I definitely enjoyed the writing style and the pacing of most stories, but I do think that the characters could have been developed with a little more individuality and depth. Of course, some stories are stronger and weaker than others, but for the most part, I really enjoyed this and I’m eager to read more of the author’s work.