Guardian Angels and Other Monsters

So I obviously didn't read the description of this book closely enough, because it wasn't until I hit “One For Sorrow - A Clockwork Dynasty Story” that I realized this was the same author that wrote Clockwork Dynasty, a book I read last year! We'll blame it on my goldfish memory. My goldfish memory is a large part of why I keep this blog, so I can look back and remember what I've read and what I thought about it! I randomly plucked this book off the New Book display while grabbing my holds from the library; I didn't recognize the author's name at the time. So I'm highly amused.

These stories are . . . hard to quantify.  Some of them I really enjoyed - “Miss Gloria” is probably my favorite - she's a little girl with a robot guardian. When kidnappers disable the guardian and take her, the guardian's programming jumps to the closest possible hardware - being the getaway car. From there to one of the kidnappers' smart helmets, and so on. I very much disliked “The Blue Afternoon That Lasted Forever” but to say why would spoil it entirely. The Clockwork Dynasty short story was quite good - I'm still hoping he'll write another full-length novel in that world.

I haven't read his other novel, Robopocalypse, and I wasn't thrilled with the short story from that universe, but the synopsis of it sounds amazing. I don't know if I want to read it or not!

This was a fascinating, if weird, collection of stories. I like how he explores the possible consequences of things like teleportation, AIs, robots, and battle armor. As a race, our capacity for invention tends to outpace our consideration of the consequences. We try to figure out how to do a thing before stopping to consider if we should. In this book, over and over again, I feel that Wilson is asking us “Is this the future we want?” which has often been the case with truly visionary science fiction. That's why people complaining about politics in science fiction make me laugh - science fiction has ALWAYS been political!

This is a book for mature audiences. There are deaths, sacrifices, pain, sex, war, and other mature themes - it's definitely not the lightest of reads. But it's good.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.