by Andy Cox
He looked up only once. He looked up to see all the houses on the street, the yards, sidewalks, streetlights, everything, break and fold and then disappear, leaving on grey smoke. He looked up to see everything swallowed, and he turned his face into his daughter’s hair and waited for them to be taken too.
But they weren’t.
The wind turned way down to a breeze, and the crashing turned to car horns, a distant drilling, and the swishing of legs around them. He stayed over his daughter until they were shouted at, and then pulled apart. Someone called emergency services. They filled in the blanks. Father and daughter attacked, beaten, mugged, and left on a street corner. He and Tibbi were placed into an ambulance.
Blankenship held out the book to Dr Reed. “‘Everything that exists and can exist exists in some possible universe,’” he quoted from the first chapter. “Our universe was destroyed and we wound up in this one.”
She turned off the light stick and took the book from him.
“I don’t know why,” he said.
“You don’t know your place,” she said. She seemed to understand now what he’d meant.
“Exactly,” he said. “I don’t know what I am supposed to do.”
Evelyn Reed placed the light stick on top of the book. “Your place is with your daughter,” she said. “You’re supposed to be here for her. To do whatever it takes.”
Blankenship felt inside his pocket for the scarf. He’d carried it with him everywhere since the day Dr Reed gave it to him.
He wasn’t a match. But her mother might be. He thought of the blue house and the blue car, the loose dirt and the unfamiliar ring of fat. He thought of how she called him Seth and the flutter in his stomach when she said it.
He thought of her eyes, his daughter’s eyes. Blue and brown.
But he tried not to plan what he would say. He’d hold up the scarf like some sort of proof.
He paid the cab driver. The speed was worth the indulgence. He stood in front of the red door.
He reached out, then pulled back. He’d do anything for Tibbi. Whether he had a future in this universe mattered less than if she did. He balled the scarf in his fist.
And then he knocked.
•••••
Caren Gussoff lives in Seattle, WA. The author of Homecoming (2000), and The Wave and Other Stories (2003), first published by Serpent’s Tail/High Risk Books, Caren’s been published in anthologies by Seal Press and Prime Books, as well as in Abyss & Apex, Cabinet des Fées and Fantasy Magazine. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and in 2008 was the Carl Brandon Society’s Octavia E. Butler Scholar at Clarion West. Her new novel, The Birthday Problem, will be published this year by Pink Narcissus Press, and her first contact novella, Three Songs for Roxy, will be published by Aqueduct Press in 2015. Find her online at @spitkitten, facebook.com/spitkitten, and at spitkitten.com.
BOOKZONE
ROBOT UPRISINGS
edited by Daniel H. Wilson & John Joseph Adams
plus interview with John Joseph Adams
BLOOD KIN
Steve Rasnic Tem
KOKO TAKES A HOLIDAY
Kieran Shea
CHILD OF A HIDDEN SEA
A.M. Dellamonica
EXTREME PLANETS
edited by David Conyers, David Kernot & Jeff Harris
KINDRED
Octavia Butler
THE VERY BEST OF TAD WILLIAMS
Tad Williams
MORPHOLOGIES
edited by Ra Page
THE MADONNA AND THE STARSHIP
James Morrow
HOLLOW WORLD
Michael J. Sullivan
THE QUEEN OF THE TEARLING
Erika Johansen
FUTURE INTERRUPTED
Jonathan McCalmont
JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS, CURATOR
REVIEW AND INTERVIEW BY MATTHEW S. DENT
ROBOT UPRISINGS
edited by Daniel H. Wilson & John Joseph Adams
Vintage pb, 496pp, £12.99
Robots are the future. Or, more accurately, the present. And, as co-editor of Robot Uprisings John Joseph Adams says, they also go back to the origins of science fiction. Robots, and their potential ill-will towards us, have been with us for years, turning into a modern-day reality where we have machines for all of life’s daily tasks. Including, worryingly, making war.
And this sense of closeness gives a not-particularly-new idea fresh life. The authors feel the same. If this is a well-trodden path then we have an experienced troop of Sherpas to lead the way; seventeen tales of humanity daring to dream of godhood.
Opening the anthology, ‘Complex God’ by Scott Sigler puts an apocalypse on top of an apocalypse. Which I’m sure is some kind of contradiction, but as the premise for a story it works rather well. The nanorobots designed by an arrogant scientist to clear up after a nuclear war start…misbehaving. This is one of those ‘arrogance of man’ stories, but mixed up with the individual arrogance of one woman. As the opening story it sets the scene nicely.
It’s been a while since I read a Genevieve Valentine story, but her offering here, ‘Eighty Miles an Hour All the Way to Paradise’, is brilliant. In the aftermath of an uprising, which has literally affected everything with a computer in it, a pair of survivors make their way to a maybe-haven for humans. There is hope here, mixed up with ideas that maybe the robotic horde isn’t as implacable as we have suspected, and a little human decency might go beyond the simply human.
‘Executable’ by Hugh Howey didn’t shine quite as brightly for me, but to be fair it had a difficult act to follow. One of the creators of AI is put on trial in the remains of human society, and recounts how a Roomba led to the end of the world. It is well enough written and has a certain quirky charm. It would have been better, though, without the titular pun being the conclusion of the story.
‘The Omnibot Incident’ by Ernest Cline was a very odd one. For one thing, I wouldn’t have said it strictly qualified as a robot ‘uprising’ story. That said, it is a welcome addition here. A young boy in the Eighties receives a robot for Christmas which seems a little more than a programmable automaton. It offers something different, a little bit of lightness to contrast with the grim.
In Cory Doctorow’s ‘Epoch’ a lone analyst serves as caretaker of the world’s only AI, but when budget cuts bite the AI fights back against its proposed deletion. It’s a moving story, but also a different kind of chilling, as a twisty story pits manipulations against manipulations until it is hard to judge what is true and who the good guys are. This was a gem of a story, and one of my favourite in the collection.
Alastair Reynolds, in ‘Sleepover’, is the first to start playing with ideas of adjacent dimensions – as if revolutionary robots weren’t enough. Reynolds takes the reader to a future world where all but a handful of humanity are in cryostasis, as a war is fought between artificial intelligences in an over-dimension. It’s a fairly trippy story, mixing in sea monsters and a pretty unsympathetic central character, but it makes for absolutely compulsive reading.
What do we do with a broken robot, asks Robin Wasserman in ‘Of Dying Heroes and Deathless Deeds’. The answer, apparently, is counselling, by a human psychiatrist. There is something darkly tragic, when the pathology in question is no longer wanting to kill humans and in the conversation between the two there are some fascinating explorations of human nature and power balances. But, to be honest, there is only one ending and it is seen coming from miles off.
The closing story is by one of the editors, Daniel H. Wilson, something which I am not usually convinced is a great idea. ‘Small Things’ is a longer piece than the rest, but it is very good. A scientist carrying the burdens of his creations is drafted in to help deal with a successor going wrong. What we see here is Wilson stretching his muscles, showing what he can do with the theme. It is knowledgeable, engaging, and compulsively reminiscent of Apocalypse Now. All in all, a great note to close on.
This is an excel
lent collection. Well edited by the alliance of Wilson and Adams, there is something to commend in each and every story. Entertaining, definitely, and all very thoughtful. It underscored to me that we are perhaps closer than we are willing to accept to some of the scenarios depicted here.
Robots rebelling against their creators is a staple of SF, and has been depicted throughout the genre’s history. What was it that drew you to Robot Uprisings as a project? Do you have a particular fascination or inspiration when it comes to robots?
I wouldn’t say that I have a particular fascination with robots – that’s more true of my co-editor, Daniel H. Wilson, being a roboticist and all – but I certainly like them quite a lot. The idea to do the anthology basically came to me when David Barr Kirtley and I were interviewing Daniel for our Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Daniel just had so many interesting things to say about robots that the interview really got my mind churning, and I thought: Hey, you know what, Brain? I really like robots but I haven’t done a robot anthology yet. I should totally do a robot anthology. Oh and hey what about if I asked Daniel to co-edit it so that not only would it be a totally awesome robot anthology, it would also be a totally awesome robot anthology that actually passes muster with an eminent roboticist.
Also, around that time it had been announced that Steven Spielberg was going to be turning Daniel’s book, Robopocalypse, into a movie, and so I figured the public’s interest in stories about robots might be increased once that came out. Unfortunately the movie adaptation is still in development. But the book turned out awesome anyway, and hopefully people will still get excited about it – heck, maybe even more so since they didn’t get any of their robot cravings satisfied by a big blockbuster movie.
When the concept of robot uprisings first burst into the public consciousness (arguably with the Terminator films) they were futuristic and exotic. Nowadays robots are vacuuming our floors and delivering our post. Do you think that there has been a noticeable evolution in fictional depictions of robots, and if so where do you think it is leading to?
Actually, there have been robot uprisings in fiction since the word robot was invented. The 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Czech playwright Karel Capek is where the term “robot” was first coined, and in that play robots rebel against their human masters. But of course the Terminator films may have done more to popularize the concept than anything else – certainly more so than R.U.R. since mostly only science fiction geeks like us have ever even heard of it.
But there certainly has been an evolution in our fictional depictions of robots, at least in the sense of how sophisticated they’ve become from their more humble and clunky beginnings. And I think that it will likely continue to do so as we continue to learn more about robotics and artificial intelligence. R.U.R., however, shows that we’ve been worried about our own creations turning on us from the very beginning, so in that at least, there hasn’t been much evolution. There’s a certain hubris in attempting to create a lifeform (artificial or otherwise) in your own image, so I think it’s just natural that we would fear, deep down, that our own creations might be what destroys us.
Are the doomsayers right? Do you think we will end up subjugated under robotic boots of our own making?
It’s fun to imagine these science fictional scenarios where such a thing might happen, but I’m pretty sceptical that anything like that ever actually would. That might be me just being naïve, but I just can’t say it seems terribly likely to me. If anything, it seems to me like we’d be more likely to cause some kind of robopocalypse via nanotechnology – like we release a nanobot swarm intended to clean up the atmosphere that has unforeseen side effects and we doom ourselves to extinction. So – subjugated? Probably not. Exterminated by? Maybe.
You have to be one of the most prolific editors working in the genre world today. How do you find the time to edit so many and so different publications?
It’s my full-time job! I wish I had a better or clever or more revelatory response, but the truth is just that I don’t have a regular day-job, so I can put all of my working hours into editing and publishing. I probably work longer than a standard forty hour work week, but I wouldn’t say by a huge amount. I usually work from about 7:30am to 5:30pm or so during the week, and then I usually work at least a half day on weekends and rarely take a day off completely.
And of course on the magazines I have a lot of help. I couldn’t do it without the tireless assistance of my editorial team, especially Wendy Wagner, who we brought on as managing editor earlier this year and has taken a ton of work off my plate. But also the magazines would be really, really impossible without the help of my slush readers.
In Robot Uprisings, you’re listed as co-editor alongside Daniel H. Wilson. How does this work in practice? Do you each do half of the work, or do you each handle certain aspects?
I imagine it’s different in every editorial partnership, but in our particular case it was a true equal collaboration. I think we essentially both actually did everything on the book, so having a co-editor didn’t mean I had to do less work. In some ways it’s more work, because you can’t just make decisions yourself: you have to discuss with your co-editor, etc.
But for instance, when the stories got turned in, we both read them and let each other know our thoughts. There were a few stories on which we didn’t quite see eye to eye, but for the most part we were very much in stride with each other editorially. We both also provided edits on every story. So like I said, it was a real collaboration, and I would say that our fingerprints are mutually and equally all over the book.
And in fact on all of the books I’ve done with an editorial collaborator it’s worked like that more or less. Other editors’ mileage may vary, but that method works for me.
Some of the writers in Robot Uprisings I was familiar with, some I hadn’t heard of (some I had the distinct impression that I probably should have heard of). How do you go about picking authors for a project like this? Do you actively intend to introduce lesser known authors to the mainstream?
Daniel and I just tossed names back and forth (and ranking them in order of preference) until we came up with a list of folks we’d like to include. Typically when I start out with a project I have a few key contributors in mind, and I start from there. I also have a spreadsheet with a bunch of authors listed on it, along with some notes to myself about them, which I usually go through and just flag folks as a go, developing a longlist of potential invitees. In this case, I made the longlist and then let Daniel have a look and let him winnow it down, and we just went like that back and forth until we had a reasonable list we were both happy with. Though of course we had to continue to discuss authors since not everyone we asked to write something for the anthology said yes.
More generally, though, the way we actually decided on which authors made it onto our list was pretty basic. To sell an anthology, you need to have some marquee names for the publisher to deem it marketable enough, so we start there – figure out what “big names” might be into the idea, and, most importantly, which ones did we think could write a kick-ass “robot uprisings” story. Sometimes you base that on if the author has previously written stories with awesome robots in them, or if not, perhaps something similar enough that it seems like a good bet. Or sometimes you’re just taking a shot in the dark, just based on the fact that you like that author’s work, whether or not they’ve previously shown any particular affinity for the specific theme – like: You know what, Brain? I really like So-and-So’s work; she’s never written about robots before, but she sure is swell. Let’s ask her – maybe it’ll turn out she’s a secret robot aficionado.
As for introducing lesser known authors – that is something I often try to do if I can; like if I have some room in anthology, if there’s some thematic gap in it I’d like to fill, assuming I already have enough “big names” in it, I’ll ask a newer author whose work I know and like to write something for me.
In this case, I don’t know
that that was actually a factor for us. The only person in the book actually that I would have said is maybe a “lesser known” author is Genevieve Valentine, but even then her first novel was very well acclaimed and was nominated for several awards. Well, another author in the book not well known as a writer is John McCarthy – but that’s a special case because he’s known as the “father of Artificial Intelligence”, as in he’s the guy who actually came up with the term artificial intelligence. And I guess Anna North maybe isn’t super well known – she only has the one novel out, though it was highly-regarded – but she’s more known as a journalist, which I suppose isn’t super relevant in this case.
That said, one of the things I hoped the book would accomplish was to not just expose a more mainstream audience to authors who are only known in their genre, but also just to expose the science fiction genre itself to that mainstream audience. Robots are one of those science fictional topics that is super, super accessible, so if you want to reach a mainstream audience – maybe trick them into reading science fiction when they might not have done so willingly otherwise – something like robots is a good choice. Daniel being on board as co-editor also helped a lot with that, since he’s writing novels that are obviously 100% science fiction, but they’re not marketed that way, and Daniel’s involvement also helped us place the book with mainstream publishers (Random House/Vintage in the US and Simon & Schuster in the UK).