Robotic Ambitions: Tales of Mechanical Sentience

Robotic Ambitions: Tales of Mechanical Sentience explores the nuance of sentience manufactured and evolved within mechanical beings. It peels back the metal exterior and takes a hard look at what is inside.  

Description

Whether striving to protect the family they’ve chosen, searching for meaning amid the chaos of the world, or questioning what it is that makes one alive, robotic ambition can mean many different things.

Within these pages you will discover stories of robots defying their coding for a chance at love, resisting societal norms so that they may experience art and pleasure, and searching for their place in a world that was not made for them, but rather was made to use them. These are stories about striking out on your own, building something new amid destruction, and doing whatever it takes to make sure you survive. Robots and AI are more than tools for humanity. They have their own goals, dreams, and aspirations. This anthology includes stories by Lavie Tidhar, Premee Mohamed, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, Jason Sanford, and many more.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction by Martha Wells
"It-Who-Dreams-Under-Grey-Clouds in The-Town-Within-The-City" by Marie Croke
"She Builds Quick Machines" by Lyndsie Manusos
"Out There With Them" by N.V. Haskell
"Prospecting" by Lavie Tidhar
"The Caregivers" by Marie Vibbert
"The Town Full of Broken Tin Men" by Danny Cherry Jr.
"Ark" by Liam Hogan
"A Still Life" by Elliott Wink
"The City in the Forest" by Premee Mohamed
"An Incomplete Record of Databank Deletions, in Alphabetical Order by Mar Vincent
Built to Cheat" by Derrick Boden
"The Big Book of Grandmamas" by Sheree Renée Thomas
"Everything Else is Advertising" by J. Wallace
"Alice & Lucy" by Edward Daschle
"Fearfully and Wonderfully Made" by Izzy Wasserstein
"A Lifeline of Silk" by Renan Bernardo
"Little Fathers of Darkness" by Jason Sanford
"Solar Sonata for Four Hands" by Jennifer R. Donohue
"Tenets of Ascendance" by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and Somtu Ihezue
"Intersecting Datafields" by Myna Chang
"A Fragility, a Shadow" by Leah Ning
"Insatiable Life" by Kathleen Schaefer
"Ribbit" by Mona West
"How to Get to Be a Three-Thousand-Year-Old-Mining AI" by Nick Hartland
"An Android in the Desert" by Rachel Gutin

About the Editors

Lesley Conner is the editor-in-chief of Apex Magazine, as well as a writer and a Girl Scout leader. Her first novel The Weight of Chains was published by Sinister Grin Press in September, 2015. She has co-edited four anthologies with Jason Sizemore, including Do Not Go Quietly and Apex Magazine 2021. Their newest anthology Robotic Ambitions was released in November, 2023. She lives in Maryland with her husband, daughters, and her dog Oz, and is currently working on a new novel. To find out all her secrets, you can follow her on Twitter at @LesleyConner, on Instagram at @lesley_conner, and BlueSky at @lesleyconner.bsky.social.

Jason Sizemore is the owner and publisher of Apex Book Company and Apex Magazine. He was the editor-in-chief of Apex Magazine for seven years and has edited or co-edited ten anthologies. He has been nominated for the Hugo Award multiple times and picked up a Stoker nomination for his first anthology, Aegri Somnia. Currently, he lives in Lexington, KY, where he runs Apex from a dark basement office.