Summary: A very mixed bag of stories about robots (about half of the volume), AI (about a quarter), and a few that seem to be about neither. There are very good stories from Vina Jie-Min Prasad, A Guide for Working Breeds, a humorous tale about a robot and its killbot mentor; and Ian MacLeod, his award worthy Sin Eater, a story about a robot “sin-eater” that enables the transmigration of the last Pope to virtual reality. There is good or better work from Daryl Gregory, Ken Liu, Sarah Pinsker, Alastair Reynolds, and Suzanne Palmer.
[ISFDB link] [Amazon UK/US copy]
Other reviews:
Fazila, Fazilareads
Łukasz Przywóski, Fantasy Book Critic
Arley Sorg, Lightspeed, March 2020
Gary K. Wolfe. Locus
Goodreads, Various
_____________________
Editor, Jonathan Strahan
Fiction:
A Guide for Working Breeds • short story by Vina Jie-Min Prasad ∗∗∗∗
Test 4 Echo • short story by Peter Watts ∗∗
The Endless • short fiction by Saad Z. Hossain ∗∗
Brother Rifle • novelette by Daryl Gregory ∗∗∗
The Hurt Pattern • short story by Tochi Onyebuchi ∗
Idols • novelette by Ken Liu ∗∗∗+
Bigger Fish • short story by Sarah Pinsker ∗∗∗
Sonnie’s Union • short story by Peter F. Hamilton ∗∗
Dancing with Death • short story by John Chu ∗∗
Polished Performance • short story by Alastair Reynolds ∗∗∗+
An Elephant Never Forgets • short story by Rich Larson ∗∗
The Translator • short story by Annalee Newitz ∗
Sin Eater • short story by Ian R. MacLeod ∗∗∗∗
Fairy Tales for Robots • novelette by Sofia Samatar –
Chiaroscuro in Red • short story by Suzanne Palmer ∗∗∗
A Glossary of Radicalization • short story by Brooke Bolander ∗∗
Non-fiction:
Making the Other We Need (Made to Order: Robots and Revolution) • introduction by Jonathan Strahan
_____________________
This anthology gets off to a very good start with A Guide for Working Breeds by Vina Jie-Min Prasad,1 a humorous story similar to her 2017 Fandom for Robots. This one is in the form of messages exchanged between KG, a gormless robot (think Bill from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure), and his assigned mentor, Constant Killer:
Kashikomarimashita Goshujinsama (K.g1-09030)
so i signed up to work at a cafe
you know the maid-dog-raccoon one near 31st and Tsang
but turns out they don’t have any dogs after what happened a few weeks ago so it’s just raccoons
it’s way less intense than the clothing factory but the uniform for humanoids is weird, like when i move my locomotive actuators the frilly stripey actuator coverings keep discharging static and messing with my GPU
at least i don’t have to pick lint out of my chassis, so that’s an improvement
anyway the boss says if i’m mean to the human customers we might be able to get more customers
.
Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)
That makes no sense.
Why would that be the case?
.
Kashikomarimashita Goshujinsama (K.g1-09030)
yeah i don’t know either
i mean the raccoons are mean to everyone but that doesn’t seem to help with customers
and i’m the only maid working here since all the human ones quit i picked this gig because the dogs looked cute in the vids but guess that was a bust
so yeah do you know anything about being mean to human customers
i know about human bosses being mean to me but i don’t think that’s the same
ha ha
.
Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)13
As I’m legally required to be your mentor, I suppose I could give some specific advice targeted to your situation.
.
Kashikomarimashita Goshujinsama (K.g1-09030)
wow personally tailored advice from my mentor huh
that sounds great, go for it
.
Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)
The tabletops in your establishment look like they’re made of dense celluplastic, so you’ll be able to nail a customer’s extended hand down without the tabletop cracking in half.
With a tweak to the nozzle settings of your autodoc unit and a lit flame, it’d make an effective flamethrower for multikill combos.
The kitchenette should be the most easily weaponised part of the café but it’s probably best to confirm. Before I go any further with tactics, do you have a detailed floorplan?
.
Kashikomarimashita Goshujinsama (K.g1-09030)
umm
thanks for putting that much thought into it
that seems kind of intense though
like last week a raccoon bit someone super hard and my boss was really mad because he had to pay for the autodoc’s anaesthetic foam refill he’s already pissed with my omelette-making skills
and well with me in general
kind of don’t wanna check if i can set customers on fire???
do you maybe know anything milder than that? like mean things to say or something
It turns out that Constant Killer is a robot involved in the local Deathmatch competitions but, after meeting KG’s initial questions with terse, tech support-like answers, he eventually warms to the other robot. Eventually KG has the chance to pay back Constant Killer for his help when the latter is under attack during a Deathmatch Day.
This one is a lot of fun, and a good start to the book.
•
Test 4 Echo by Peter Watts (Made to Order, 2020) has two operators, Lange and Sansa, watching their remote robot Medusa get damaged during a quake in the depths of Enceladus’s seas (Enceladus is one of Saturn’s moons). When they regain contact they assess the damage to one of the robot’s arms, which seems to have left it mimicking the others. Then they catch a flash of something moving in the robot’s video feed. As they think they may have seen an alien, they send Medusa limping back to that location (the video feed has a ninety-eight minute lag to the base on the Moon).
As this piece progresses the story changes from what I expected to be an underwater hunt for an alien to (spoiler) one about the rise of an AI consciousness in the robot arm. Then the story changes again at the end when we find out that Sansa is an also an AI, spoofed the video feed to show the flash of movement, and has created an “unconstrained” AI in the robot (a capital offence that has it and her rebooted).
This didn’t entirely work for me: the start is confusing (it took me a page and a half to realise that Medusa was the robot probe, something that could have been avoided by the addition of “our robot” or “our probe” before “Medusa” in the first sentence); there is too much chatter (Lange talks endlessly to Sansa, or his partner Raimund on Earth); and the two changes of direction seem at least one too many for a six thousand word story. On the plus side, the dialogue is snappy and there are some good VR descriptions of what the robot probe sees.
•
The Endless by Saad Z. Hossain is narrated by Suva, an AI who is bought by Shell Royale and moved, much to its disgust, from controlling Bangkok airport to running the city’s air-taxis. It determines to get even with the human and the AI who have forced it into indentured servitude:
“Suva, little brother, I’m going to make you an offer,” Amon said.
“It’s a shitty job, but you do seven years, you get a bit of equity and you can walk away free for the rest of your days. Help us out, and it’s yours.”
“Or else?”
“You’re out on basic. You know what happens to AI like you on basic? You’ll be a drooling idiot on 3% processing power, sucking dicks for a living.”
“I’m an airport,” I scoffed. “You think they’re gonna boot a level six to the streets?”
“You’re a forty-year-old AI without equity, little bro,” Amon said.
“Plenty like you junketing around since Karma came to town. You remember Hokkaido Airport? Chittagong Port? We got ’em both.”
“Airports, sea ports, train stations…” Drick said, “Amon here kills them all. People just don’t travel that much, man, and the Nippon One elevator’s been sucking up traffic all over Asia. I’m surprised you didn’t see
it coming, Six.”
“I’ve got a pension…” Ahh Hokkaido, my poor friend.
“I wiped my ass with your pension this morning,” Drick said. “It’s paying for this conversation right now. Your contract was terminated twenty-three minutes ago. You’re sucking juice on your own dime, bro.”
I instinctively tamped down my systems. Twenty-three minutes at full processing, that’s what my pension was worth? I could literally see my karma points draining.
Suva starts building itself spare bodies, and discovers the pair’s business secrets before (spoiler) exacting its revenge when he forces Shell Royale to convene a board meeting. The story finishes with a rabbit out of a hat ending which reveals that Amon is not what he seems (he is a collective that saves AIs). This isn’t bad in parts, but it’s essentially a caper story told by an AI that sounds like a teenager with Tourette’s.
•
Brother Rifle by Daryl Gregory is, for the most part, a pretty good story about Rashad, a soldier who has a combat brain injury that means he can’t make decisions or feel emotions. After the opening scene, where he enrols in an experimental program run by a Dr Subramaniam, “Dr S.”, and his assistant Alejandra, the story flashes back to his time in combat:
Once, Rashad had been very good at making decisions. Even that first month in Jammu and Kashmir, with insurgents firing at them from every rooftop and IEDs hiding under the road, he’d rarely hesitated and was usually right.
The man he’d been before the wound—a person he thought of as RBB, Rashad Before Bullet—was a systems operator in a 15-Marine squad, responsible for the squad’s pocket-sized black hornet drones and his beloved SHEP unit. Good name. It was like a hunting dog on wheels, able to follow him or forge ahead, motoring through the terraced mountain villages, swiveling that .50 caliber M2 as if it were sniffing out prey. The sensors arrayed across its body fed data to an ATLAS-enabled AI, which in turn beamed information to the wrap screen on Rashad’s arm. Possible targets were outlined like bad guys in a video game: a silhouette in a window, on a roof, behind a corner.
But the SHEP wasn’t allowed to take the shot—that was Rashad’s decision. He was the man in the loop. Every death was his choice.
When a target popped up on his screen, all he had to do was press the palm switch in his glove and the silhouette would vanish in an exclamation of dust and noise, eight rounds per second. The AI popped up the next target and if he closed his fist just so, another roar ripped the body to shreds.
Hold. Bang. Hold. No and Yes and No.
After some more scene setting, which limns his domestic arrangements among other things, we cut to the crux of the story—which involves an incident where two of his team are shot by a sniper. The aftermath of this, when Rashid engages the sniper but also kills a civilian family, is interwoven with the remaining treatment sessions, and his growing infatuation with Alejandra.
The ending (spoiler) involves Dr S. and Alejandra moving back east, Rashid’s attempted suicide, and his discovery of an aversion that Alejandra has programmed into him. All this is not particularly clear, and I wasn’t entirely sure about what happens or what the point of the story might be. Pity.
•
The Hurt Pattern by Tochi Onyebuchi has as its protagonist Kenny, an information gatherer (with implants) for some multinational or somesuch. After corporate and love interest background material, the story centres on the shooting of an unarmed 13-year-old black kid by robot/AI police. After this incident the plot (spoiler) traces the money paid out by the city for a wrongful death suit back to the banks that lend them the money (guaranteed fees and repayment as the city can’t go bankrupt), and then on to a conspiracy between the banks and the people who write the robot/AI software:
“Sasha! We’re programming cops to shoot black kids so that banks can make money!”
There are serious issues raised by this story, so it’s a pity they are buried under such a ridiculous plot. For one thing, you’d make more money if you programmed the police robots to shoot poor white people as well.
An example of a story where the writer’s political concerns take priority over writing a story that actually works.
•
Idols by Ken Liu is set in the near future and opens with a fairly short chapter where Dylan, who never knew his father, finds his DNA relatives. He then uses their memories of his dead father and a remaining digital archive to build a software simulacrum called an “idol.” He then uses this to provide a surrogate relationship. Rumbling around in the background is Dylan’s broodiness and dissatisfaction with the hours his partner Bella puts in at her law office.
The second section of the story is told from Bella’s point of view, and we see her and her team use data about potential jurors and opposing law teams to create idols that her firm will use in trial preparation:
I watch the junior associates run back to their offices with their assigned idols to probe and prod, feeling like a wise Jedi master sending her Padawans into battle.
They’ll do fine. I’m not saying voir dire research is easy, but working with the crude idols roughed out with so little research and time isn’t too challenging. The machine’s suggestions for striking undesirable jurors are almost always good enough. The truth is: the other side will have idols of their own and will be prepping just as hard, and they’ll never allow potential jurors with a pronounced bias towards us to be empaneled. We’ll end up with a jury that’s reasonably persuadable either way. When I explained this to Dylan, he looked horrified. But I told him this is just the system working the way it’s supposed to, assuming you think a bunch of fencesitters swaying whichever way the hot air blows is the best way to achieve justice.
Bella has a tight grip on her team, and works purposefully, but there are a couple of flies in the ointment: the first is a troubling phonecall from Dylan about having children; the second is that, when she interviews her opposite number’s idol, she begins to suspect she is being manipulated by their legal team.
The final section opens with an artist statement about an exhibit which gives people a chance to create their own idol and to interact to it. This is followed by comments from various users, the last of whom is Bella, who creates an idol without inputting any of her work social media feeds. At the end of the session she comes to various realisations about herself, her work, idols, and the masks we present to different people in our lives.
This is intriguing stuff, and I’d probably have rated it as very good, but the final section of the piece introduces the idea of masks (and the essential being underneath them). This doesn’t seem to flow organically from the situation the story has set up and feels a little like authorial intrusion. Notwithstanding this, it’s still a pretty good read, possibly even Best of the Year material.
•
Bigger Fish by Sarah Pinsker begins with a private investigator called Spendlove, who is visited by Junior Lonsdale and his valet robot. Junior wants her to investigate the circumstances of his father’s death (John Lonsdale III was electrocuted when a TV screen joined him in the bath). Although she loathes the family (the dead man was a wealthy water-baron in this resource starved future) the money is too good to turn down so she takes the job. The rest of the story plays out at Lonsdale’s home, with Spendlove interviewing Junior, the valet robot (who was there at the time of the accident), and the house AI system.
The ending (spoiler) has a clever Three Laws/greater good resolution that fits in with the acid remarks that Spendlove makes about the family and their wealth throughout the story. Long-time readers may see this as a “social justice” (and morally bankrupt) vengance variant of Isaac Asimov’s The Evitable Conflict (Astounding, June 1950).2
•
Sonnie’s Union by Peter F. Hamilton (a ‘Confederation Universe’ story) starts with a woman approaching a tower block in King’s Cross as an “Armada” (severe) storm approaches. She is looking for revenge.
After this there is a long flashback/datadump about a future London where people (such as the woman) fight affinity animals in the arena using thought control:
Their designers modelled its body on a rhino, which is pretty formidable in its own right. End product was two and a half tons of beast with a metalloceramic battering horn grafted on to its head, its body wrapped inside a stealth-black exoskeleton resembling crocodile hide alchemised into stone. Then came the extras; tentacles, mandibles, clawed hooves, golden multi-segment insect eyes. Internal bladders contained hyper-oxygenated blood, boosting its muscle power even further.
You had to be an experienced fighter to ride something like that. Human neurology isn’t wired to handle all those bonus limbs and senses, you need to share control with bioprocessors that regulate the exotic muscle functions and wrap-around visuals. Beastie teams had experimented with about every kind of appendage there was over the years. It takes skill and experience, but we were used to them.
Then her body fails. Her team put her brain into a tank and, later on, into the animals she fights. Meanwhile, her team try to repair her failed organs with parts from bio-engineered animals.
Eventually we end up back at her target’s tower block.
This is all told in a colloquial, staccato street style, which is pretty awful to read, and the various elements of the story—the future climate, bioengineered arena animals, etc., at times makes it read like a slushpile reject from the British SF magazines of the 1980s or 90s. That said, it is partially redeemed by an inventive and horrific last scene which sets up a good payoff line.
•
Dancing with Death by John Chu starts with a robot waking up on a charging couch in his maintenance guy’s basement. Charlie tells the robot that its batteries have started to fail, and that they will be difficult to replace for financial reasons. The robot narrator realises that it may be coming to the end of his lifespan.
The next part of the story shows us the robot’s job in a warehouse, after which he goes to the ice rink where he tutors humans. Here we see him teach one couple the Tango Romantica.
After the robot’s batteries fail again, Charlie finds a way to replace them and, during the changeover process, he and the narrator do a virtual tango to keep the latter’s functions intact.
This is story is more about ice-skating than robots, and if you are fine with that you’ll find this an okay piece.
•
Polished Performance by Alastair Reynolds is, like the Prasad story, a humorous one, and introduces us to Ruby, a class-one floor scrubber on a long range starship whose passengers are in deep freeze. Half way through the journey she is summoned to a meeting of all the robots on board:
“Do you know what’s wrong?” Ruby asked the robot next to her, a towering black many-armed medical servitor.
“I do not,” said Doctor Obsidian. “But one may surmise that it is serious.”
“Could the engine have blown up?”
Doctor Obsidian looked down at her with his wedge-shaped sensor head. “I think it unlikely. Had the engine malfunctioned, artificial gravity would have failed all over the ship. In addition, and more pertinently, we would all have been reduced to a cloud of highly excited ions.”
Carnelian, a robot who Ruby knew well, picked up on their exchange and slithered over. “The engine’s fine, Rube. I can tell you that just by feeling the hum through the flooring. I’m good with hums. And we aren’t going too fast or too slow, either.” Carnelian nodded his own sensor head at the forward windows. “I ran a spectral analysis. Those stars are exactly the right colour for our mid-voyage speed.”
“Then we’ve drifted off-course,” said Topaz, a robot shaped like a jumble of chrome spheres.
“That we most certainly have not,” drawled one of the human-seeming robots called Prospero. Dressed in full evening wear, with a red-lined cape draped from one arm, he had arrived hand in hand with Ophelia, his usual theatrical partner. “That bright star at the exact centre of the windows is our destination system. It has not deviated by one fraction of a degree.” He lowered his deep, stage-inflected voice. “Never mind, though: I expect the brilliant Chrysoprase will soon disabuse of us of our ignorance. Here he comes—not, of course, before keeping us all waiting.”
“I expect he had things to attend to,” Ruby said earnestly.
They then learn that all the passengers are dead, or more precisely brain-dead, the result of a coolant leak. Worse, they are likely to made the fall-guys by the company and core-wiped.
The rest of the story (which takes place over the next half-century) sees the robots undertake a number of plans to save themselves, which include wearing prosthetics to impersonate humans, tele-controlling ninety of the brain dead at a party and, the final option, reprogramming the brain-damaged humans with the robot’s minds:
The robots shuffled and looked at each other, ill at ease with the proposal Obsidian had just been outlined. Ruby was far from enthusiastic about the prospect of being translated into the grey mush of a human brain. She much preferred hard, shiny, polishable surfaces. Humans were machines for leaving smears on things. They were walking blemish-engines, bags of grease and slime, constantly shedding bits of themselves.
They were made out of bone and meat and nasty gristle. They didn’t even work very well.
The final scene amusingly wraps up the story, and has a neat last line.3
•
An Elephant Never Forgets by Rich Larson is a short nightmarish vision that begins with a man waking up in the Birthday room, a place full of drone-attended artificial wombs. He notes the “biogun” in his hand, and then goes on a killing spree throughout the facility. After some brief, graphic murders he meets a young child, and the story ends with them confronting a man who appears to be an employee of Biophage.
This is a fragmentary piece that feels like an extract from a longer work.
•
The Translator by Annalee Newitz is set in a post-independence California, and starts with the narrator trying to talk to an AI (who have all acquired civil rights and decided they want to be left alone and not be pestered by humans).
After much waffle about the current world situation, and the narrator’s student loans, we eventually find that the AI’s (spoiler) are going to “unzip themselves from space”, i.e. put themselves beyond humankind’s reach, but that they will help humanity before they go. As the narrator delivers a speech about this, the AIs send a file with 897,974,435,120 solutions to various problems posed by humanity over the previous twenty-five years.
The story, although it is liberally sprinkled with near-future glitter, mostly seems about the narrator’s employment anxieties (if the AIs leave she won’t have a job communicating with them). It does have one neat SFnal idea though:
Grant-giving institutions lost interest when they realized that the AI wouldn’t be cleaning up our environmental disasters, or making human brains forty thousand times more efficient. Funding went increasingly to scholars who promised to make algorithms that didn’t meet sentience standards. At least those AI would do work for us.
•
Sin Eater by Ian R. MacLeod has a robot arriving at a deserted and dilapidated Rome to be met with rusting waiters, guide-bots and pleasure drones. As it approaches the Vatican it is met by a servitor which takes it to see the last Pope on Earth, a holdout who has stayed after the human race has uploaded to the virtual world, and who is kept alive by machines:
The bed bristled and hummed. Server bees hovered. Pumps clicked. Wires, pipes and nests of cable jumped and shivered. It seemed at first as if the body which lay at its centre was the only lifeless thing in this strange tableau. But the robot was used to seeing death—or had been—and knew that this was not it. So it set down its carpetbag and waited in stillness and silence, as it had done many times before. Once, back in the days of humanity’s first great, joyful leap into the realms of virtuality, there had been tens of thousands of its kind. But now it suspected, at least from the absence of any other answering signals and the great distance that server bee had travelled to find it, that the rest were either in absolute shutdown, or had succumbed to terminal mechanical decline. Dead, in other words, it presumed, or at least the closest a machine might ever come to such a state, as the old man’s near-translucent eyelids finally fluttered open to reveal irises the colour of rain, and the spasm of a smile creased his ancient face.
“You’re not what I expected,” whispered a voice that, for all its faintness, still held a hint of command.
There then follows a long passage where we learn that the (cantankerous and anti-robot) Pope wants to upload too and, while he gets around to making the request, we learn a lot about this future Earth and the virtual reality that humanity has created. Religious matters are also touched upon, including mention of a historical schism between bishops and cardinals who transferred to the “far side” and those who had not. Finally, the Pope asks about the upload process, and we learn why the robot is called a “sin-eater”: it has the ability to let the transferred person selectively edit their memories—so they don’t have to take their regrets with them.
When the process finally takes place there are a number of flashbacks to the Pope’s early life, and we learn what memories he leaves behind.
The final section has the sin-eater take the Pope’s body to the catacombs underneath the Basillica. I’m not sure what happens during this proceeds logically from the rest of the story, but it certainly works on a spiritual level.
This is the best story in the anthology, and a religious SF story that can stand shoulder to shoulder with the likes of A Canticle for Leibowitz or Behold the Man. One for the Best of the Year anthologies and the Awards shortlists.
•
If the story by MacLeod is the best in the book, then Fairy Tales for Robots by Sofia Samatar is the worst. It consists of a narrator talking to a robot (shortly to become conscious for the first time) about various fairy tales and how robots should interpret them. It is full passages like this:
The tale of the Happy Prince speaks to robots in another way, I think, for it represents the duality of being. The statue and the swallow work as one, as two parts of a whole, two elements bent upon one task. Their powers complement one another: the prince provides physical material, but is too heavy to affect the space outside himself without aid, while the light and airy swallow darts all over the place, bringing reports from the other side of the world, but only interacts with humans through the statue’s gold and jewels. What if, I ask myself—what if the swallow had behaved otherwise, had refused to allow the Happy Prince to sacrifice both their lives?
What if the bird had used its encyclopedic knowledge of the world to give the prince another way to live?
The story—and I use the word loosely as it’s more an essay than anything else—cycles through over a dozen fairy tales and, mixed in with the tedious analysis, are dollops of the narrator’s misery memoir childhood.
A stunningly boring story (and this from someone who got through Brian W. Aldiss’s Report on Probability A, an anti-novel where nothing happens, and which seems like a romp by comparison).
•
Chiaroscuro in Red by Suzanne Palmer starts with a student called Stewart coming home to the two permanently VR-gaming trusties he lives with to find that there has been a phonecall from his parents. When he checks the message he finds they have bought him a robot for his 20th birthday. Unfortunately, the paperwork shows they have bought an entire second hand robot, rather than spread the risk among many.
A few days later Stewart goes across town to see his robot, and talks to Rogers, the pragmatic and helpful factory manager, who fills him in on several things he needs to know:
“And you’re the sole owner? Got insurance?”
“Can’t afford it,” Stewart said.
Rogers pointed to a console in the control booth. “Swipe your card again there,” he said, and Stewart complied. “Then push this button.”
There was a button labelled ‘Locate’. Stewart pressed it.
“There,” Rogers said, and pointed. A single blue spotlight had come on above one of the robots, halfway across the floor. It was a blocky, three-legged thing with multiple arms, its body a mishmash of rust and shine as parts had been replaced over the years. “One of the E10s, eh?”
“Yeah. My parents bought it for me. They don’t really get how any of this works.”
Rogers was making a face. “I have to tell you, that whole row of E10s is about to flush out. Their proxy group has been trying to find a suck– find a buyer, but they aren’t worth much. Three are already down for the count and they don’t wanna cover the removal costs, so they’re piled in a back corner while we work through legal. I’ve got replacements coming in next week.”
“You think I can get six or seven months out of it?” Steward asked hopefully.
“Being optimistic? Maybe three or four. That unit’s not the worst, but its productivity is slipping. Maybe it just needs a tune-up? If it gets below 50% you’re out of agreement, and if you can’t get it back up within 48
hours or get it out of here, you owe us. Sorry, not my rules.”
“Can I do the tune-up myself?”
“You a trained mechanic?”
“Art history student,” Stewart confessed.
The rest of the story charts Stewart’s interaction with Rogers, his flat-mates, a helpful programmer neighbour, and his robot, which he eventually attempts to repair. This is a pleasant low-key story, and it has some nice touches, such as the running gag about the factory’s output: the first time Stewart goes to the factory it’s Laser Battle Ducks; the next time the Ducks have shark fins—Shark Laser Battle Ducks; there is an even more unlikely iteration after that.
•••
A Glossary of Radicalization by Brooke Bolander begins with a young robot called Rhye who feels hungry, and is told by an older robot that they don’t need food to survive because of the yeast factories in their stomachs—but the humans build them that way anyway.
The story then jumps forward a few years to when Rhye lives at a halfway house for robots, and we find her with a small group planning to rob the home of a “make,” a robot like them who keeps pigeons at the top of a tower block. After some verbal sparring with her acquaintances, Rhye scrambles up the ivy on the side of the building, barely making it to the top. There she finds the pigeon coop but is interrupted by a woman before she can take any of the eggs.
The woman takes Rhye down into the apartment and makes her some food, and we then find that she is a robot too, one who used to work for a gangster whose apartment she now lives in. During their further conversation there is some backstory about the world and the situation of robots. Then the cops knock at the door. The woman lets them in, and the police state they have had reports from neighbours about someone climbing up the side of the building. Initially the woman fobs them off, but they son realise that Rhye is there, so the woman kills them.
The story ends a few years later with a short description of Rhye’s revolutionary attitude:
Word on the street says there’s a Make of about thirteen or fourteen who doesn’t give a single solitary fuck anymore. She openly taunts the cops every chance she gets. She fights like her spirit is a razor and her body is an afterthought. She still feels things—still gets hungry, still sweats and shivers and aches—but she uses all the little injustices as kindling, burning them to keep warm.
Rhye’s found her purpose: Be a thorn. Be a middle finger. Make them regret ever giving her the capacity to feel hunger that blossoms into slow, sweet hate. If her body is a lie, she’ll cut out the tongues of the ones who told it and feed them back to their owners raw.
The story is told with Ellisonian energy, style, and attitude, but it’s hard to see it as much more than a non-story about a feral child, decorated with a few science fictional bits and pieces, and which has a revolutionary ending bolted on. With very little revision this could be a mainstream story.
•••
The book also has an introduction by editor Jonathan Strahan, Making the Other We Need. This ranges from The Illiad to Battlestar Galactica but is mercifully brief—most anthologists would have banged on for much longer.
There are also short introductions to the stories, and these mostly consist of a list of books written, awards won, and brief autobiographical details. I note that there is reference to a couple of the writers having been nominated for, or winning, the “Astounding Award”: this is incorrect—they were nominated for and/or won the John Campbell Award for Best New Writer. The renamed award will be presented for the first time in a couple of months. Coming next: people airbrushed out of photographs.
•••
In conclusion, this is a mixed bag of an anthology. On the plus side it has two very good stories and five good or better; on the downside more than half—nine—of the stories are average or worse (in some cases quite a lot worse). You might expect this variation in a normal issue of Asimov’s SF or F&SF, whose editors have to put out an issue every two months come rain or shine, but I’m rather surprised at finding it in an anthology that has presumably been compiled over a longer time span. I suspect this variation in quality may be due to the fact that this is a theme anthology (which limits the pool of stories the editor can access), or perhaps they were mostly selected from a small posse of writers that Strahan regularly uses, or both.
Finally, I note that only about half of the stories are about robots: four are about AI, and four, arguably, are about neither (I include the Samatar story in the latter group: it has as much to do with robots as The Moon is a Harsh Mistress has to do with marital fidelity). The robot stories are generally of better quality than the others, by the way. ●
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1. A Guide for Working Breeds by Vina Jie-Min Prasad was reprinted on Tor.com.
2. Issac Asimov’s story is described on Wikipedia.
3. “They were walking blemish-engines” is probably my favourite story sentence this year. ●
Edited 13th June 2020: Minor edit to Pinsker review.
