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Robotic Ambitions: Tales of Mechanical Sentience

by Lesley Conner and Jason Sizemore

Regular price $ 24.95
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Cover art by Vincent Lefevre

ISBN 9781955765138

Pp. 354

Format
Expected delivery date:
15 Feb Usually ready in 2-3 days.

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. 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.

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.

Excerpt

From: "It-Who-Dreams-Under-Grey-Clouds in The-Town-Within-The-City" by Marie Croke

Between one step and the next, I reset.

The street is dark so my first action after rebooting to a prior me is to dial up my vision and engage an infrared scan. My internals tell me it's 23:00 hours with a waxing crescent long set behind the heavy pollution cloud. The sector is abandoned, overrun with fungi and fauna, with a high concentration of oil lingering from a pipe explosion decades prior. This sector is also where a large mound of humans had been piled. Bone now. A graveyard sector. 

There is nothing here. I should not even be here.

I check my logs out of habit, but they cease abruptly. Like a virus has eaten through my data, munched away at the bits and bytes. Except, there is nothing alien in my software. Nothing chewing at the wires of my hardware. 

Nothing except me. A logged line where I had executed a function to reset myself to a version of me from seven yearsyears...— ago in what seemed like a panic. I felt empty. My reason for being here lost in that prior version of me who no longer exists. 

I turn on my heel and head toward The-Town-Within-The-City. I have—had?—a backup hard drive there that would tell me what I'm missing of myself, thought not what had drove me to do an emergency reset out here, unprotected, in a graveyard sector.

The haphazard, leaning buildings of the old city envelope me. My feet tap against bridges of sheet-metal, against cracked asphalt, against the soft springy touch of bioluminescent moss that lights a patchy trail in my wake. The city sleeps in its pollution-haze. 

The-Town-Within-The-City had been walled off within the first decade after humanity had disintegrated and died out. It had become a space for bots and robos and even a few androids whose flesh-parts had eventually rotted, leaving them as metal chassis, naked with wiring exposed and drooping. The city has no name, at least not anymore, while our town had been named by our esteemed mayor, It-Who-Likes-To-Sing. 

The lights of the town glow upward against the crumbling hollows of skyscrapers, while below, I pass a metal mound that had never been there before, tiny ants of rounded metal frozen in the process of scurrying hither and tither over it. 

I duck under the dirt-clogged rusted mesh and find the door installed in the wall that creaks and groans more than I remember as I pull it open. Then I leave the quiet dead behind and enter the brightness of what should have felt like home. I have a home in here, my memory insists. It's in the upper levels, drapings of old green wires decorating my windows. Or at least they had. Perhaps I have moved in the last seven years. Perhaps I don't live here any longer and the graveyard sector had become home to the past me—present me?— I could not remember. 

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. 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.

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.

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

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.

From: "It-Who-Dreams-Under-Grey-Clouds in The-Town-Within-The-City" by Marie Croke

Between one step and the next, I reset.

The street is dark so my first action after rebooting to a prior me is to dial up my vision and engage an infrared scan. My internals tell me it's 23:00 hours with a waxing crescent long set behind the heavy pollution cloud. The sector is abandoned, overrun with fungi and fauna, with a high concentration of oil lingering from a pipe explosion decades prior. This sector is also where a large mound of humans had been piled. Bone now. A graveyard sector. 

There is nothing here. I should not even be here.

I check my logs out of habit, but they cease abruptly. Like a virus has eaten through my data, munched away at the bits and bytes. Except, there is nothing alien in my software. Nothing chewing at the wires of my hardware. 

Nothing except me. A logged line where I had executed a function to reset myself to a version of me from seven yearsyears...— ago in what seemed like a panic. I felt empty. My reason for being here lost in that prior version of me who no longer exists. 

I turn on my heel and head toward The-Town-Within-The-City. I have—had?—a backup hard drive there that would tell me what I'm missing of myself, thought not what had drove me to do an emergency reset out here, unprotected, in a graveyard sector.

The haphazard, leaning buildings of the old city envelope me. My feet tap against bridges of sheet-metal, against cracked asphalt, against the soft springy touch of bioluminescent moss that lights a patchy trail in my wake. The city sleeps in its pollution-haze. 

The-Town-Within-The-City had been walled off within the first decade after humanity had disintegrated and died out. It had become a space for bots and robos and even a few androids whose flesh-parts had eventually rotted, leaving them as metal chassis, naked with wiring exposed and drooping. The city has no name, at least not anymore, while our town had been named by our esteemed mayor, It-Who-Likes-To-Sing. 

The lights of the town glow upward against the crumbling hollows of skyscrapers, while below, I pass a metal mound that had never been there before, tiny ants of rounded metal frozen in the process of scurrying hither and tither over it. 

I duck under the dirt-clogged rusted mesh and find the door installed in the wall that creaks and groans more than I remember as I pull it open. Then I leave the quiet dead behind and enter the brightness of what should have felt like home. I have a home in here, my memory insists. It's in the upper levels, drapings of old green wires decorating my windows. Or at least they had. Perhaps I have moved in the last seven years. Perhaps I don't live here any longer and the graveyard sector had become home to the past me—present me?— I could not remember. 

Robotic Ambitions: Tales of Mechanical Sentience Anthologies Apex Book Company Softcover

Robotic Ambitions: Tales of Mechanical Sentience

Regular price $ 24.95
Sale price $ 24.95 Regular price