Author Hugh Howey is a favorite with many of the Boing Boing staff. We first fell in love with his Wool series of stories, which won Kindle Book Review's 2012 Indie Book of the Year Award and is being developed as a movie by Ridley Scott. Today, Amazon is selling Howey's collection of stories in a volume called Machine Learning for just $2 in the Kindle edition. Even better, if you have Kindle Unlimited, you can read it for free.

I got completely lost in this book as hurricane Irma roared around my house in Miami. No really, it is that good. From start to finish the work is thought provoking, completely engrossing and yet fun and easy to read. The groupings of the stories into six sections (Aliens and Alien Worlds, Artificial Intelligences, Silo Stories, Fantasy, Algorithms of Love and Hate, Virtual Worlds, and Lost and Found) gives you an indication that this book covers and incredibly wide range of topics. So much of this is new ground and when Howey delves into trope themes (like alien invasions) the stories are completely fresh.