Books tagged with: robots

A Choice of Gods is a science fiction novel by Clifford D Simak. The novel raises a number of very interesting issues including: Robot society structure and religion Human society reaction to removal of technology Man developing psychic powers to travel to the stars and interstellar communication U...

Adam Robots is a collection of science fiction shorts by the irrepressible author Adam Roberts. Each little story explores a different style, sub-genre or convention and yet each is quite clearly a product of the authors mind. There is a certain momentum to Roberts prose, a hustling and yet elegant...

Alternate Reality Ain't what it used to be by Ira Nayman is a collection of news stories from alternate realities, as told by the intrepid reporters from the Alternate Reality News Service. The book is split into different sections for technology, relationships, games, politics etc. and each...

City is set sometime in the future at a time when mankind's acheivements are immense with intelligent robots, genetic modifications, commonplace space travel and genetically uplifted animals. This technical progress comes at a cost, humanity itself has become tired and society has broken down into...

Code of the Lifemaker is a science fiction novel by James P Hogan. I can hardly believe that this is the same author, which wrote Realtime Interrupt. Okay, it's not exactly a character driven story, but it's much better than RI and Hogan has a lot of interesting things to tell here. Code of the Lif...

Crossed Genres Year 2 is a collection of twelve short stories featured in the Crossed Genres magazine between issues 13 and 24. Crossed Genres has a different theme each month so there is quite a varied mixture on offer here. All have been written to a high standard and each have a distinct voice....

I'm often saying that there just isn't enough well written comic fantasy, aside from the likes of Pratchett, Holt, Howard and Rankin the laugh-out-load novels still being written are few and far between and in large the genre is being propped up by writers such as Rob Knipe and RJ Astruc. Thankfull...

Dreaming of Eden is a science fiction novel by James Lucien. In the dystopian future of 2049, a ravaged world, divided into four Super States, is locked into a continuous war for diminishing resources. Under the oppression of a totalitarian government, an Elite DHS hacker, a robotics scientist, an...

Empire State is the début novel of the talented author Adam Christopher, combining a superhero tale with an alternative reality prohibition era noir-esque New York. Throw in gangsters, private investigators and a rogue robot and even a slight nod to steampunk then you have one daring mix. The para...

A companion volume to the collection Stainless Steel Visions, this volume collects several of Harrison's best stories, such as Space Rats of the CCC; At Last, the True Story of Frankenstein; and Bill, the Gallactic Hero's Happy Holiday. Includes a hilarious new adventure of Bill, the Galactic Hero....

I, Robot is a collection of nine short stories by Isaac Asimov, which originally appeared in Super Science Stories and Astounding Science Fiction between 1940 and 1950. The fictional character Dr Susan Calvin (robopsychologist for U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men Inc) relating these stories to a repor...

Utopia takes place five years into the reign of Alvar Kresh as the governor of Inferno, who is now married to robotisist Fredda Leving. The re-terraforming effort is doing fairly well, but many believe still doomed to failure. The plot centers around a plan created by an Infernal named Dalvo Lentral...

These days Science Fiction is a crowded market. To 'make it' is a difficult and relative term. Each writer has their own journey to an audience and John Scalzi's has been an interesting one since Old Man's War was first serialised in 2002. His writing has a polish and shine to it that makes you thin...

If you can imagine what a science fiction novel written by Raymond Chandler might be like (while Chandler is known to have hated Science Fiction stories rumours persist he did write one) then Made to Kill is about as close as you will likely ever get (short of resurrecting the late author). It pays...

Makers is a near future science fiction novel of economic, social and technological change, written by the very talented author Cory Doctorow. Perry and Lester are inventors, but more than that they make things from Junk, the most environmentally friendly inventors possible. Some of their invention...

Man Against The Future is a collection of short stories by Bryan Young, author of “Lost at the Con”. I love short story collections, not just because I have the attention span of a small yapping dog, but they can be a great introduction to a new author or genre. They can be quite hit and miss thou...

Alex Lamb's Roboteer paints a picture of a future, that in the political climate of today, feels far too possible.  In this book, a war rages between two sides of humanity, two different and opposing ideologies and lifestyles.  One side, combining genetic and induced mutation with advance...

R.U.R. (Russum's Universal Robots) is a "play" written almost 100 years ago and first introduced the world to the word "robot" which was derived from the Czech word "robota" meaning serf labor or hard work. ?apek has actually credited his brother (the painter and writer Josef ?apek) as the actual in...

Shakespeare's Planet is a science fiction novel by Clifford D Simak. The plot of the novel lacks overall action. There is some exploration of the ruins, pond and hill by Carter Horton but this come to very little information or help to solve the problems the characters face. Most of the time the ch...

Sunshine Republic is a dystopian science fiction novel by Ted Brownstein. It's the year 2130 and the newly independent Republic of Florida is deeply divided over the use of technology, the Futurist party believe that their society could be vastly improved by the use of cheap, abundant robot labour...

Terminal Earth is a collection of original short stories that all feature the end of the world in some way, edited by Michael Stewart and Neil Thomas. With 23 tales of the apocalypse, Terminal Earth offers a great deal of compelling tales from talented authors. Despite the common theme there are so...

Terminator Salvation: From the Ashes is a tie-in novel by Timothy Zahn, published in hardback by Titan Books in March 2009 and timed to appear roughly two months before the film it prepares the ground for, McG's Terminator Salvation. It is, on the face of it, exactly the kind of book that the hardba...

"Originally written 24th July 2008, expanded 2026" The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories is a collection of eleven Isaac Asimov short stories and a poem, first published by Doubleday in 1976 to coincide with the United States Bicentennial year, and the title is not accidental. Asimov had been commi...

Seen as how BOB has been hanging around the website for some time now (he's the robot at the top left) I thought it was about time that I reviewed The Black Hole, the book (and film) that features BOB. The book is a direct novelisation of the 1979 Disney film of the same name, written by Alan Dean F...

The Caves of Steel is a classic science fiction novel by Isaac Asimov and could be considered the first in the Robot series. It has been about twenty years since I read this book first and ten years since I read it last. I've grown older and hopefully wiser since then and The Caves of Steel is cree...

The Forge of God is a science fiction novel by Greg Bear. First Europe (as in the sixth moon of Jupiter) disappears, then a strange cinder cone/spaceship including a sick and dying alien is found in Death Valley and a giant new mountain/spaceship including robots is found in the desert of Australia...

The Naked Sun is the second volume in the Robot series by Isaac Asimov. This is the second book in the Elijah Baley series. The simple fact that it's the number two in a series, gives it a couple of advantages and a couple of disadvantages. On the plus side is that we know the main characters and t...

The Robots of Dawn is the third volume in the Robot series by Isaac Asimov Written nearly thirty years after The Naked Sun this, the third volume in the Elijah Baley series, is one of Asimovs greatest accomplishments. His writing has matured a lot in those thirty years and he has, in countless robo...

Reviewed by Philip Graham. Kurt Vonnegut was, until recently, my personal Leo Tolstoy. By that I mean that I knew his name, I knew he was a famed author, and I knew that I really should have read more, or even some, of his work. So finally I went out and got "The Sirens of Titan". I chose this book...

The Stone Canal is the second volume in the Fall Revolution Series, following on from the events of the Star Fraction, written by Ken Mcleod. The third book from this soon to be grand master (if I have anything to say about the matter). Stone Canal takes place in two threads, the first one takes pl...

Philip K Dick's novel The Man in the High Castle is one of my favourite all time reads. An alternative history novel that sees the Axis winning the second World War and splitting the USA between Germany on the East coast,Japan on the West and a small neutral zone in the middle. There is an author wh...

In the near future, the world is falling apart. Wars, unrest, economic collapse and ecological disasters plague the globe - as it tries to hold the pieces together, the USA deploys a new weapon, the Tin Men. They are remote controlled drones piloted by American soldiers who have their minds virtuall...

Transformers Exodus is the official history of the war for Cybertron, written by Alex Irvine. Before Autobots and decepticons, before Optimus Prime and Megatron, Cybertron was a planet with a strict caste system, each bot assigned a role according to their own caste. Orion Pax is a data clerk, sor...

USU is a clever, clever book. Set after some cataclysmic event has rendered the Earth free of it's human infestation, the novel follows the stuffed and robotically animated rabbit known as Usu. He searches the broken, twisted wasteland for something, something he will only know when he finds it. The...

What were once Miracles are now Children's Toys by Ira Nayman is a collection of news stories from alternate realities, as told by the intrepid reporters from the Alternate Reality News Service and is the second volume in the collection. The Author Ira Nayman is the recent winner of the "2010 Sw...

I was quite unprepared for Mechanical Failure. While the blurb mentions it as a "sarcastic adventure", such a description doesn't do justice. Set in the far future after Humanity has spread to the stars and now live in a different Galaxy, mankind has managed to endure Two Hundred years (and c...

While many stories depict the fight between man and machine, Sea of Rust shows a future where the machines have already won. Humankind has been wiped off the face of the Earth by the very robots that were built to serve them. Now the planet is controlled by vast intelligences (known as One World...

Killing is my Business (not to be confused with Megadeth's debut album) is the second novel in Adam Christopher's LA Trilogy, following on from Made to Kill. Featuring the robot Assassin Raymond Electromatic, disguised as LA's only artificial private investigator. it's a unique bl...

It's great to see Philip K Dick stories continue to be explored and consumed in different forms of media. His writing still popular long after his death. For those who aren't aware, the UK TV station Channel 4 (Broadcast in the US via Amazon Video) has started a new 10 part anthology series...

I missed reviewing Sleeping Giants when it first came out. I've finally got round to picking up a copy to find out it's now been out long enough that there are two further novels in the series: Waking Gods and Only Human. Back in 2016 It was one of those break-out novels such as The Martian...

Mecha Samurai Empire follows on from the United States of Japan, an alternative history novel which continues the story of Philip K Dicks seminal novel The Man in the High Castle (now an established TV series). For those who are aren't aware, the idea is that the "Allies" lost World War two and as a...

Murderbot, the gruff yet lovable, media obsessed Security AI is back in Rogue Protocol, the latest tale in Martha Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries, a Tor.com series of novellas. In the first story, the Nebula Award winning All Systems Red, Murderbot, a self-nicknamed security robot, secretly hacks...

The 53rd and penultimate book in the epic Horus Heresy series and the brave soldiers of the Emperor attempt to hold back the armies of chaos from reaching Terra. The line is drawn on Beta-Garmon and god-machines of the Adeptus Titanicus are at the front. Horus has defeated all that have stood...

When embarking on a new work based on a beloved IP the creator must have a haunting voice whispering in their ear…. “Fear the fan.” The most ardent supporters of a property can also be the most adamant to tear it all down if something is not to their liking. How many times have yo...

As a football fan it is sometimes hard to understand that some people just don’t care about it. They see it as a frivolous game of kicking a pig’s stomach around a patch of grass. In the context of life and death, it is just something to keep you busy on a Saturday afterno...

For those who haven't heard of him, Yoss is a Cuban science fiction author. He's one of Cuba's most iconic figures in literature, having written over twenty books so far, run science fiction workshops and even found time to be the lead singer of Heavy Metal band Tenaz. Red Dust (translated from Span...

The genre of Science Fiction has always been a wide one in terms of ideas. You can set a book on our own Earth with only one or two tweaks to the norm. This Speculative Fiction is Sci Fi, but so are the Space Operas that span eons and are inhabited by alien races. Although the nature of Sci Fi can c...

Asimov’s ‘Three laws of Robotics’ have become synonymous with any book that contains robots. Nearly all these books will not allow their robots to hurt humans, but what happens if these rules broke? In C. Robert Cargill’s Day Zero the m...

Artificial intelligence is an exciting field that could help enrich the lives of most people on the planet from simple things like shopping to making life more inclusive for those with disabilities. AI will also come with a human cost. Many of the jobs that we do today could be redund...

As a fan of the expanded Star Wars Universe of novels, I pinch myself with the amount of quality content there is. These are not just novelisations of the films, or even expansions of the most well-known characters, the novels are cutting deep and exploring corners of the&nb...

Artificial Condition is the second book in The Murderbot Diaries, and the follow up to All Systems Red. It won the 2019 Hugo and Locus awards for best novella, and like the others in the series, has received a great deal of praise. It is highly recommended (but not imperative) you read All Systems R...

Social Media has changed the world we live in today by accelerating the polarisation of opinion. No longer is a debate a two-way conversation between people discussing their own point of view, but a slanging match in which neither side can see the others’ point of view. Until the last couple o...

There are two ways of writing a trilogy of books. One way is to produce three separate novels that can be read independently or viewed as a whole. The other way is to start each book as soon as the last one ends and power through the tale a great speed. This is how P. J. Flie’s Darkness Falls,...

I am all for a retelling of a classic story, but some of them are not that close to the source material. Pinocchio is having a renaissance with two recent film adaptations and now a new cyber future take in T J Klune’s In the Lives of Puppets. I can see a puppet like creature, someth...

The world will not die with a bang, but with a whimper. Similarly, it won’t be the robots that uprise and destroy humans, but our own incompetence when it comes to programming. Build and programme things correctly and everything should be fine, but this is modern life and doing things correctl...

I picked this book up after learning about it being short-listed and eventually winning the Arthur C Clarke Award. It's proof of not judging a book by its cover because I'd have completely passed it by sitting on a table, with its shockingly bright pink swirlyness and quote by Sheena Patel that says...

Invent any innovative technology and it won’t be long until someone finds a way to use it to make money via base entertainment. We are talking wine, woman, and song. The same can be said of future worlds; the Emperor may have thought he had an iron grip on all his subjects, but just below the...

As a Librarian I deal regularly with some of the topics raised in Ugo Bienvenu’s System Preference. I do not have firsthand experience of a robot bringing up my children, but I do know about data; what needs to be stored and what needs to be deleted. Do we just keep it all in the hopes that we...

One of the best things about Science Fiction is that it also works as Science Fact. Much of the science and fantasy in the books are based on real research; taken to the nth level, but with a basis in truth. Exiles by Mason Coile layers this with some fundamentals in philosophy. Occam’s Razor...

A science fiction story that describes the gradual development of artificial intelligence and demonstrates the inadequacies of human beings as they try to train it and interact with it, The Peachy Paradox begins with a lightness and humour, but as it continues, the humour is satirical, sporadic and...