Robot Fiction

McSweeney's is a literary journal based in San Francisco. In this piece by Ryan Boudinot, a hangdog robot searches for romance.

When Pete's friends don't want to play the same games as he does, Pete has a great idea - he'll build a robot that will do whatever he tells it to. But when Robo-Pete gets a little out of control, Pete learns an important lesson about friendship.

After achieving a decisive victory over the ruthless Ipis who rule the galaxy, Dante Carloman negotiated a treaty that saved all humans from extinction. The treaty allowed the humans and their allied species to become a semi-autonomous sector on the fringe of the Ipis empire—as long as the current Ipis empress, Fravashi, remains alive. This arrangement does not sit well with the Ipis nobility. Humanity, and especially its usurper leader, Dante, must be destroyed, and they will not allow anything to impede that endeavor. Over the next ten years, ethnocentric Ipis aristocrats put in place a...

Evelyn has a constant need for perfection that’s blown some fuses among her robotics teammates, and she’s worried nobody’s taking the upcoming competition seriously. Allie is new to school, and she’s had a history of short-circuiting on teachers and other kids. So when Allie is assigned to the robotics team as a last resort, all Evelyn can see is just another wrench in the works!

In "The Robot Who Looked Like Me," a busy man and a busy woman find a way to carve out time to romance each other—by having look-alike robots made to do the job—who then run away together.

Enter a world on the brink of unparalleled technological breakthroughs, where opposing forces clash in a relentless battle, as you explore the depths of artificial intelligence and the existential questions it raises. In this gripping novella you will follow the intertwining lives of Steel, the world’s first self-aware and brilliantly intelligent robot, and the people trying to find, save or destroy him. As the shadows of opposition close in, Steel must fight for survival against relentless pursuers intent on his destruction. Prepare to be spellbound as you ponder consciousness, the ...

When George’s father died, he left his son a watchmaker’s shop - and a whole lot more. But George has little talent for watches and other infernal devices. When someone tries to steal an old device from the premises, George finds himself embroiled in a mystery of time travel, wild music, and sexual intrigue.

When George finds a way to escape the spacecraft Artemis, where he has been trapped, he is overjoyed. Surely now he can return to Earth. But when George touches down, he knows immediately that something is wrong. There’s a barren wasteland where his home town used to be, intelligent robots roam the streets, and no one will talk to George about the Earth that he used to know. With the help of an unexpected new friend, can George find out what - or who - is behind this terrible new world, before it’s too late?

He knows the three laws, but they're really more what you'd call "guidelines." Two and a half million terras worth of contraband won't do Carl Ramsey any good unless he can find a buyer. But when dealing with that kind of money, any deal is liable to turn sour when it's time to make the exchange. So when things go smoothly, Carl knows his luck can't be that good. When the double-cross is revealed, the Mobius crew sets out on a chase to track down their stolen merchandise.

What would you do if you woke up and found yourself in a parallel universe under an alien sky? This is the question Zax Delatree must answer every time he closes his eyes. Every time Zax Delatree falls asleep, he travels to a new reality. He has no control over his destination and never knows what he will see when he opens his eyes. Sometimes he wakes up in technological utopias, and other times in the bombed-out ruins of collapsed civilizations.

A stellar graveyard hides a wondrous secret.The Sargasso: a vast, unclaimed region of galactic space that somehow traps passing starships into its mysterious veil. Only the bravest and most foolhardy of crews would dare venture into such a hazardous stellar graveyard to solve its deepest, darkest mysteries. In order to fulfill a matter of honor, the Nepenthe ventures into this dangerous sector to transport a group of religious pilgrims in search of their promised land. As they attempt to unlock the enigma of this strange and deadly area, the intrepid crew stumbles upon an amazing discovery:...

New to town, Bea is expecting her new best friend to be one of the girls she meets on the first day. You know the type: very cheery, very friendly, very average. But instead, the alphabet conspires to seat her next to Jonah, aka Ghost Boy, a quiet observer who hasn’t made a new friend since third grade. He’s not a big fan of people in general... but he’s willing to make an exception for her. Maybe.

Is BER-66 a human or a machine? As he navigates the corridors and locked rooms of a strange bunker, he must solve the mysteries of murderous doppelgangers, a slow-motion city on the verge of destruction and, ultimately, the all-powerful Mechanism itself.

Egil and Nix have retired, as they always said they would. No, really - they have! No more sword - and hammer - play for them! But when two recent acquaintances come calling for help, our hapless heroes find themselves up against the might of the entire Thieves Guild. And when kidnapping the leader of the most powerful guild in the land seems like the best course of action, you know you’re in over your head....

The Owl war is over, but for Snark, normal isn’t what it used to be. He's on his way home from seeing Jane crowned Queen, and the Kingdom of Hunter's Run come into being. The war might be over, and the trade deal he made at the end of it might finally be enough for this wayward cat to be allowed back into cat society. The only thing faster than human ships, is the stories about their entry into sector ten, which ripple into the adjacent sectors. On the Cat Homeworld in sector eight, this triggers long awaited, and long stifled change. For a Warlord in sector nine, human tech would allow ...

Thomas Usher has a terrible gift. Following a car crash in which his wife and daughter are killed, he can see the recently departed, and it's not usually a pretty sight. When he is called to investigate the violent death of the daughter of a prominent local gangster, Usher's world is torn apart once more. For the barriers between this world and the next are not as immutable as once he believed.

See How the End Began!!! Prequel to the Jack Castle's Bestselling Stranger World series. First came radio, then movies and television. Virtual reality only lasted until hologram-rooms became a household name. Still, the suspension of disbelief was never enough. Then… Henry Stranger revealed his full-immersion theme parks to the world, and within a single generation more people lived, worked and played in Henry Stranger Worlds than out of them. Real or imagined, historical or fantasy: it doesn’t matter, pick any story-world you like. What could possibly go wrong? Hard to believe the end ...

What do you do when pirates kidnap you for a ransom and a mad scientist injects you with a powerful and inevitably fatal concoction of aether? You get revenge. Matilda Katrine Myra is no one special, but her pirate abductors don’t know that. When they boldly kidnap her from an airship and sweep her away into the deadly wasteland of mutants and poisonous radiation, her life becomes a day to day battle to evade death. And she’s much closer to death than ever. A mad scientist has injected her with toxic condensed aether, the air of the gods, and now she’ll need frequent doses just to ...

On the vacuum surface of the moon, life for Ai-dan and a cohort of moon-dwelling androids is anything but a lunar wasteland of boredom. They spend their days maintaining lunar data centers with a quaint blue-green, and sometimes whitish, orb hanging in the sky. Between playing games and spirited debates on the meaning of the shimmering orb, the robots' existence is near idyllic. But when a malfunctioning system leads Ai-dan to stumble upon a mysterious box and then a soft-bodied android—total lunar oddities—the harmony of their world gets tossed into disarray.

Artemis Fowl is no stranger to trouble. In fact he's a magnet for it. Man-eating trolls, armed and dangerous (not to mention high-tech) fairies, flame-throwing goblins - he's seen the lot. He had decided to forego criminal activity of the more magical kind. However...now his mother is gravely ill. He must travel back through time to steal the cure from the clutches of the devious mastermind.... Artemis Fowl.