ALSO BY JONATHAN STRAHAN
FROM SOLARIS
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volumes 8 - 13
Engineering Infinity
Edge of Infinity
Reach for Infinity
Meeting Infinity
Bridging Infinity
Infinity Wars
Infinity’s End
Fearsome Journeys
Fearsome Magics
Drowned Worlds
Mission Critical
First published 2020 by Solaris
an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,
Riverside House, Osney Mead,
Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK
www.solarisbooks.com
Cover by Blacksheep UK
Selection and Introduction © 2020 by Jonathan Strahan.
“A Glossary of Radicalization” © 2020 by Brooke Bolander.
“Dancing with Death” © 2020 by John Chu.
“Brother Rifle” © 2020 by Daryl Gregory.
“Sonnie’s Union” © 2020 by Peter F. Hamilton.
“The Endless” © 2020 by Saad Z Hossain.
“An Elephant Never Forgets” © 2020 by Rich Larson.
“Idols” © 2020 by Ken Liu.
“Sin Eater” © 2020 by Ian R. MacLeod.
“The Translator” © 2020 by Annalee Newitz.
“The Hurt Pattern” © 2020 by Tochi Onyebuchi.
“Chiaroscuro in Red” © 2020 by Suzanne Palmer.
“Bigger Fish” © 2020 by Sarah Pinsker.
“A Guide for Working Breeds” © 2020 by Vina Jie-Min Prasad.
“Polished Performance” © 2020 by Alastair Reynolds.
“Fairy Tales for Robots” © 2020 by Sofia Samatar.
“Test 4 Echo” © 2020 by Peter Watts.
ISBN 978-1-78618-271-5
The right of the authors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
Acknowledgements
MY SINCERE THANKS to my editor, Michael Rowley, who has been wonderful to deal with and who is largely responsible for the incredible cover, and to David Thomas Moore and the whole Solaris team for their support and their hard work on the book you now hold. My sincere thanks, too, to all of the writers who sent me stories for the book, whether I used them or not, and to everyone who wanted to be part of Made to Order. As always, my thanks to my agent Howard Morhaim who has stood with me for all of these years, and extra special thanks to Marianne, Jessica, and Sophie, who really are the reason why I keep doing this.
For my pal Jack Dann,
who opened so many doors for me,
with thanks.
CONTENTS
Making the Other We Need, Jonathan Strahan
A Guide for Working Breeds, Vina Jie-Min Prasad
Test 4 Echo, Peter Watts
The Endless, Saad Z. Hossain
Brother Rifle, Daryl Gregory
The Hurt Pattern, Tochi Onyebuchi
Idols, Ken Liu
Bigger Fish, Sarah Pinsker
Sonnie’s Union, Peter F. Hamilton
Dancing with Death, John Chu
Polished Performance, Alastair Reynolds
An Elephant Never Forgets, Rich Larson
The Translator, Annalee Newitz
Sin Eater, Ian R. MacLeod
Fairy Tales for Robots, Sofia Samatar
Chiaroscuro in Red, Suzanne Palmer
A Glossary of Radicalization, Brooke Bolander
Also by Jonathan Strahan
MAKING THE ‘OTHER’ WE NEED
JONATHAN STRAHAN
robot
/ˈrəʊbɒt/ noun
a machine resembling a human being and able to replicate certain human movements and functions automatically. “The robot closed the door behind us.” Similar: automaton, android, machine, golem, bot, droid.
COMPUTING
another term for crawler.
GOLEM. AUTOMATON. ROBOT. Android. Bot. Threepio. Opportunity. Artificial intelligence model. We have always been interested in artificial minds and artificial lives. Machines that are not us, but are like us. The idea of a machine, a device, an object that is similar in body or mind to a human being but is not human; an object that is built for purpose, made to order, to assist human beings; to do dirty, undesirable or dangerous work, or just to keep us company, dates back in some form or other to the days when Homer was writing and before—and it continues to fascinate us.
If you go to your bookshelves and pull a copy of The Iliad off the shelf, you will find references to Hephaestus, the god of metalwork. He was the first great roboticist, accompanied by female assistants made of gold that could talk, were intelligent, and assisted him with his work. Myths tell of Talos, a bronze giant, also made by Hephaestus, who protected the Cretan coastline from invaders. The Greeks were fascinated with machines and mechanical workings; something that shines most clearly in the Antikythera Mechanism, which wasn’t a robot, but was a computer, and fits into this story.
There are other examples, here and there through time, of artificial humans being made and working with, for, or against us. You can see them in Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica in the 3rd century BC; in references from Roger Bacon and others to ‘brazen heads’ as Arabic science was slowly introduced across medieval Europe; in the legends of the Golem, which was made of clay and animated by the word of G-d, and is mentioned in the Talmud; and even in Spenser’s The Fairie Queene. But it is in the 19th century that the idea takes hold of the popular imagination, becomes more widespread, and even begins to become a part of reality.
The most famous ‘made’ man of them all is surely Mary Shelley’s creature from the pages of Frankenstein, whose tortured mind and body made of scavenged parts resonates through the history of literature, influencing work being published today. The creature was the forerunner of an ever-increasing number of stories of mechanical men and women throughout the 19th century: powered by steam or electricity, entering popular culture in the pages of work by Edward S. Ellis, Luis Senarens, even unexpectedly appearing in comedies like Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat. Towards the end of the century, though, these various automatons become more and more convincing, more and more able to pass as human; even able to persuade someone to marry them, as happens in Ernest Edward Kellet’s “The New Frankenstein”.
The technological optimism of the early 20th century was reflected in the fiction of the time, with the idea of mechanical solutions to everyday problems becoming commonplace. Electricity was being run down the streets of cities across North America and around the world; the steelworks that would feed two world wars also churned out tonnes of metal that could be turned to making machines and devices to do other work for us, and an underpinning belief in technological solutions to the problems of humankind led to stories like Gustave Le Rouge’s La Conspiration des milliardaires with its Thomas Edison-like scientists creating metal automatons; L. Frank Baum’s Oz books with the tin man Tik-Tok; Ambrose Bierce’s “Moxon’s Master” with its robot chess player, and on and on.
This was also the time when the term ‘robot’ entered popular culture. In 1920 Czech playwright Karel Čapek wrote a play, R.U.R., about organic machines who are forced to work for humans but that ultimately engage in a rebellion that leads to the extinction of humanity. The word ‘robot’ itself comes from the Czech word ‘rab’, which means slave, and the play was very much a metaphor for the problems facing labour at the time, but the word wa
s taken up and became the common name for machines or devices that work for us.
During the 20th century, as science fiction became more and more popular, countless stories that involve some variation on robots or androids were published. H.G. Wells’ Martian tripods from The War of the Worlds begat John Christopher’s three-legged ‘Masters’ from The Tripods series. The robots in stories like Lester del Rey’s “Helen O’Loy” and Eando Binder’s “I, Robot” influenced Isaac Asimov, the most famous creator of science fictional robots of them all, when he created Robbie, Speedy, and Cutie in I, Robot, and R. Daneel Olivaw in The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun. Asimov’s own Three Laws of Robotics in turn influenced more fictional robots and their actions than I could possibly list. The idea that robots—made creatures—could be indistinguishable from us and could save or doom us never went away and can be found here in these pages.
And robots were present in some of our most popular entertainments during the same period, from the maschinenmesnch in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still and from Will Smith’s Robot in Lost in Space to the Daleks in Dr Who. It always seemed to me, though, that something changed in 1977 when George Lucas sent a whistling and trilling trashcan and a cranky, mannered, shiny golden ’droid on an adventure to save the universe. Iconic robots from Terminator, Blade Runner, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Battlestar Galactica placed robots and their clade of made-stuff at the forefront of public imaginations like never before. And they were all ‘intelligent’ for the most part—it’s not easy to tell a story about a Roomba—and they all embodied some aspect of comfort or threat, salvation or damnation, to those around them and to us.
I have my own theories about why we want machines to exist in the world with us and why we want them to be intelligent. Why, when Opportunity, a probe designed by NASA to remotely perform scientific experiments, was unable to recharge its solar batteries, we imbued its simple message that there was insufficient energy to continue and that it was shutting down with the much more emotive “My battery is low and it’s getting dark”, which in turn spawned memes about distant, dying friends in need of saving. Or even why we create ‘artificial intelligences’ that create photos and stories that they post to Instagram that tell of fake boyfriends, breakups, and social dramas the way fake influencers like @lilmiquela do. I think we might just be scared of being alone in the universe. I think the idea that there is no other intelligent life might scare us because we once lived in a world with other Human species, other Human intelligences, and now finding ourselves alone, we search for sapient life among the stars, in the beings that live on this planet with us—and when we don’t find them, we try to create artificial intelligences ourselves.
And that brings us to Made to Order: Robots and Revolution. It is nearly one hundred years since Karel Čapek’s robots rose up against and removed their human overlords. The bots and droids we find in the stories in this book may be different from Čapek’s robots, but they share DNA: the ideas of life, intelligence, dignity, and even rebellion. This book brings together sixteen stories by some of the best writers in science fiction today, all tasked with imagining new robots and new rebellions, and of thinking of how those revolutions might connect to our lives. I think they’ve done a heck of a job, and I think you will too. Here are robots and machines, artificial intelligences and made minds, all made to order, fit for purpose, and ready to go. Enjoy!
Jonathan Strahan
Perth, Western Australia
November 2019
A GUIDE FOR WORKING BREEDS
VINA JIE-MIN PRASAD
Vina Jie-Min Prasad (www.vinaprasad.com) is a Singaporean writer working against the world-machine. A graduate of Clarion West in 2017, her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Uncanny Magazine, and Fireside Fiction, and has been nominated for Nebula, Hugo, Astounding, Sturgeon and Locus awards.
Default Name (K.g1-09030)
hey i’m new here
thanks for being my mentor
although i guess it’s randomly assigned
and compulsory
anyway do you know how to make my vision dog-free?
Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)
Do you mean ‘fog-free’?
Your optics should have anti-fog coating if your body is newly issued.
Is the coating malfunctioning?
Default Name (K.g1-09030)
oh no no
i meant like literally dog free
there’s a lot of dogs here somehow but they don’t seem to be real ones?
the humans i’ve asked say that the things i’m seeing as dogs are actually non-dogs
at least i think i was asking humans
they might have been dogs
anyway i tried searching “city filled with dogs help???” but i just got some tips on travelling to dog-friendly places
did you know that we’re the fifth most canine-hostile city in the region?
Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)
Just send me the feed from your optics.
Default Name (K.g1-09030)
okay hold on where’s that function
think i got it
> Live share from K.g1-09030: Optics feed
Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)
Your optical input is being poisoned by adversarial feedback.
The misclassification will stop if you reset your classifier library.
Default Name (K.g1-09030)
oh hey
it worked!
although i kind of miss the dogs now
wonder if there’s a way to get them back
Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)
Please don’t try.
Default Name (K.g1-09030)
anyway thanks lots for the help
by the way how do you change the name thing
like yours says constant killer up there
everyone at the factory’s been calling me default all week
Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)
It’s in the displayName string.
Change the parts in quote marks to what you want them to be.
Testtest Test (K.g1-09030)
oh yeahhh there we go
guess i’ll change it again when i think of something
how’d you come up with yours though? it sounds pretty cool
Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)
I’m part of the C.k series.
Most embodied AIs choose names based off their series designation.
Testtest Test (K.g1-09030)
oh cool, it’s like a reverse acronym!
so you picked the words from a dictionary file or something?
Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)
Something like that.
I have to go now. Work calls.
> Constant Killer (C.k2-00452) has signed out.
C.k2-00452 (“Constant Killer”): Unread Notifications (2)
Killstreak Admin
CONGRATS! You’re the Ariaboro area’s top killer!! A bonus target, SHEA DAVIS, has just been assigned to you! Send us a vid of your kill for extra points, and don’t forget to...
iLabs Mentorship Program
Dear C.k2-00452, we regret to inform you that your exemption request has been unsuccessful. Mentorship enrolment is compulsory after chassis buyback, and is part of a new initiative to...
Kashikomarimashita Goshujinsama (K.g1-09030)
hey again
just wanted to ask
do you know how to be mean to humans
Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)
What? Why?
And what happened to your name?
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)
As I’m legally required to be your mentor, I suppose I could give some specific advice targeted to your situation.
Made to Order Page 1