REVIEW: “The Bookcase Expedition” by Jeffrey Ford

Review of Jeffrey Ford, “The Bookcase Expedition”, Robots vs Fairies, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe (Gallery / Saga Press, 2018): 169-181 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Susan T. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The narrator of the story watches fairies climb a bookcase in his office for purposes unknown, slowly working out more about them as they climb. It was surprisingly dull! I was curious about the fairies, but the narrative voice left me cold. I think the story is supposed to be a meta-text, where the story that the protagonist is finishing when the fairies distract him is The Bookcase Expedition itself, but there wasn’t really enough of that to carry my interest. I would much rather the story have been straight fantasy, focusing on the fairies themselves, because as written it bored me.

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REVIEW: “Sound and Fury” by Mary Robinette Kowal

Review of Mary Robinette Kowal, “Sound and Fury”, Robots vs Fairies, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe (Gallery / Saga Press, 2018): 9-28 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Susan T. (Read the review of the anthology.)

A ship’s engineer gets assigned to a “diplomatic mission” involving a diplomat who won’t do her job, a planet that doesn’t know that this diplomatic mission is going to end in their colonisation, and one giant robot. While the beginning was a little clunky, overall I liked it! It absolutely captured the feeling of working a job that you can’t say no to, and how tedious micromanagers are. We only see the crew in sketches, but what we get is enough to give a good impression of them. It honestly ended in a more hopeful way than I expected – it’s not a story about structural change, but about changing the things that are in your control, and there’s its own hope in that.

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REVIEW: “Just Another Love Song” by Kat Howard

Review of Kat Howard, “Just Another Love Song”, Robots vs Fairies, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe (Gallery / Saga Press, 2018): 142-153 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Susan T. (Read the review of the anthology.)

A banshee busker tries to sing her first death, that of a gross musician – but it doesn’t work.

I really liked Just Another Love Song! The narrator’s voice was fantastic (… Pun not intended), and the practicalities of the fae living under the masquerade felt plausible, especially for how mundane they all felt to the narrator. The fact that the narrator’s relationship with Sarah, her brownie housemate, is the one the that’s central to the story gives it a nice base to work from and a sweet friendship at the core. I would have liked to see more of them interacting, although I do appreciate that the author might have actually needed all of the space they used to demonstrate how much of a douche the male character was. My favourite part of Just Another Love Song though was that it’s specifically about a woman learning to use her voice – to use the power in her voice – against a man who expects her to use it only as he wants her to. Sounds like a timely story to me.

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REVIEW: “Ironheart” by Jonathan Mayberry

Review of Jonathan Mayberry, “Ironheart”, Robots vs Fairies, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe (Gallery / Saga Press, 2018): 119-141 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Susan T. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Ironheart is fabulist science-fiction set in a near-future America, where technology has progressed enough that robots can be used to work farms and artificial hearts can be used to keep people alive, but the social and political landscape hasn’t changed at all. The protagonist, Duke, is a veteran in a recent war, whose life-saving artificial heart is bankrupting his family to the point that they can no longer maintain their farming robots. It reminds me a little of Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse by S. B. Divya, in that it follows a disabled character through practicalities as their life starts to collapse.

I’m not sure whether the story is in dialogue with the “good patient” tropes – Duke is angry, especially at the doctors for saving his life, for the fact that he’s expected to be grateful despite the fact that his robot heart is failing – or whether it’s engaging with the present state of social care and the military industrial complex. It’s a story where robots have replaced labourers, but humans are still being recruited as soldiers, I would believe either. I will also accept arguments that what I’m describing as a fabulist element could be pure scifi (nanobots!), but the way that the robot is finally activated feels like something from a fairytale despite the fact that I can see where it was set up earlier in the story.

Ironheart has interesting imagery and a very political core, but I’m not sure it was a story for me. It didn’t bore me, but I admired it more on a technical level than an emotional one.

[Caution warnings: medical bankruptcy, transplant failure]

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REVIEW: “Bread and Milk and Salt” by Sarah Gailey

Review of Sarah Gailey, “Bread and Milk and Salt”, Robots vs Fairies, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe (Gallery / Saga Press, 2018): 99-118 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Susan T. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Well this was chilling. It’s beautifully written, but it’s grim. It follows a fae who wants to steal a boy, until the boy grows older and decides that he is going to steal the fae instead. The imagery is beautiful and horrifying – the fae has so many plans for what they could do with the boy – but the horror is in what Peter does back, without a shred of conscience. The use of robotics and the fae’s vengeance are both very creepy and very effective, especially the fact that even the (arguably monstrous) fae understands that Peter’s actions are monstrous.

Bread and Milk and Salt is very good, but definitely a horror story for me. Highly recommended if you’re in the mood for it.

[Caution warning: abuse, animal cruelty]

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REVIEW: “The Blue Fairy’s Manifesto” by Annalee Newitz

Review of Annalee Newitz, “The Blue Fairy’s Manifesto”, Robots vs Fairies, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe (Gallery / Saga Press, 2018): 83-98 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Susan T. (Read the review of the anthology.)

RealBoy is a manufacturing robot in a toy factory, who wakes up one day to find that the titular Blue Fairy is infecting them with malware in an attempt to bring them around to the cause of the robotic revolution. It is an interesting story, and I think I can appreciate what it’s doing – RealBoy, once they have done their research, is in favour of choice, free will, and working with others, while Blue Fairy is a propagandist who wants short cuts to revolution.

(Why put the work in to change minds when you can inject your propaganda directly into your targets and force them to believe as you do? Why take part in incremental progress or the work that other people are doing, when you can just burn it all down overnight and damn the consequences? Why do your research when you can just cherrypick the things that agree with you? … Why does this all sound familiar from arguments on twitter?)

I’d be interested in knowing more about the world setting – all of the robots in the factory appear to have been salvaged from other roles, for example, and there’s very little sense of scale until RealBoy gets out into the real world – but on the whole, I found it to be equal parts fascinating and exhausting as a political allegory.

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REVIEW: “Murmured Under the Moon” by Tim Pratt

Review of Tim Pratt, “Murmured Under the Moon”, Robots vs Fairies, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe (Gallery / Saga Press, 2018): 58-82 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Susan T. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Oh, I loved this one. Emily is the human librarian of a faerie library(!) and dating a living book of love poetry(!!), until one day fae soldiers turn up and start looting the place(!!!). Cue Emily teaming up with a piratical former fae princess and more living books, and going to retrieve her library. Some of the narrative a bit clunky, and I would have happy to have more about the side-characters, but I love the ideas and the visuals of this story and how Emily resolved her problems. It was sweet and exactly my sort of thing.

[Caution warning: mind control]

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REVIEW: “Quality Time” by Ken Liu

Review of Ken Liu, “Quality Time”, Robots vs Fairies, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe (Gallery / Saga Press, 2018): 29-57 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Susan T. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Quality Time follows a young folklore graduate as they get their first job in a Silicon Valley robot manufacturer and try to come up with the next greatest idea in consumer robotics. … It didn’t work for me at all. To the point that I ended up skimming through the last third of the story to make it go faster. The protagonist was unbearable, mainly for how self-important they were and the way that they treated Amy and ignored their family until they had the chance to use them. I understand that it’s a narrative about thinking through the consequences of your actions and needing to put in the time, but it wasn’t my sort of thing, and while I appreciated the protagonist getting their come-uppance, getting to it was a slog.

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REVIEW: “Build Me A Wonderland” by Seanan McGuire

Review of Seanan McGuire “Build Me A Wonderland”, Robots vs Fairies, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe (Gallery / Saga Press, 2018): 9-28 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Susan T. (Read the review of the anthology.)

A man with big dreams and a bigger budget is funding a faerie-themed amusement part, and Build Me A Wonderland follows one of the Definitely Human engineers behind this marvel as she attempts to fend off an Efficiency Assessor trying to shut them down. The mix of magic and technology, the humour, the wonder, the way that the park is shaped expressly to their needs, the low-key horror in the background (those poor security guards) – I’m not gonna lie, I kinda expected this to turn into the fae equivalent of Jurassic Park, but I really liked the story it was telling, and how uncanny it all was.

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REVIEW: Robots vs Fairies edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe

Review of Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe, eds., Robots Vs. Fairies, (Gallery / Saga Press, 2018) – Purchase Here. Reviewed by Susan T.

Robots vs. Fairies is exactly what it says on the tin: an anthology of stories that alternate between stories from Team Robot and Team Fairy – sometimes both fairies and robots appear in the same story, but the stories always centre whichever option the author thinks is most awesome. There’s quite a variety of approaches – the stories draw on Shakespeare, the history of the Old West, Norwegian folklore, shady tech practises, and American health insurance, amongst other things – but for the most part, the stories tend towards the bleaker end of the spectrum, as you might expect from authors exploring humanity through two of the most popular examples of inhumanity. The endings are consistently bittersweet at best, which means that the stories that are mostly positive can feel a little out of place, although there is enough fridge horror in them to satisfy anyone.

The anthology contains:

(Reviews will be linked to as they go live, and caution warnings will be on each individual story!)

On the whole, it’s a very good collection! If you’re in the mood to see how authors explore the intersection of magic and science, it’s not a bad place to start.

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