ALSO BY JONATHAN STRAHAN
FROM SOLARIS
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volumes 8 - 13
Engineering Infinity
Edge of Infinity
Reach for Infinity
Meeting Infinity
Bridging Infinity
Infinity Wars
Infinity’s End
Fearsome Journeys
Fearsome Magics
Drowned Worlds
Mission Critical
First published 2020 by Solaris
an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,
Riverside House, Osney Mead,
Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK
Cover by Blacksheep UK
Selection and Introduction © 2020 by Jonathan Strahan.
“A Glossary of Radicalization” © 2020 by Brooke Bolander.
“Dancing with Death” © 2020 by John Chu.
“Brother Rifle” © 2020 by Daryl Gregory.
“Sonnie’s Union” © 2020 by Peter F. Hamilton.
“The Endless” © 2020 by Saad Z Hossain.
“An Elephant Never Forgets” © 2020 by Rich Larson.
“Idols” © 2020 by Ken Liu.
“Sin Eater” © 2020 by Ian R. MacLeod.
“The Translator” © 2020 by Annalee Newitz.
“The Hurt Pattern” © 2020 by Tochi Onyebuchi.
“Chiaroscuro in Red” © 2020 by Suzanne Palmer.
“Bigger Fish” © 2020 by Sarah Pinsker.
“A Guide for Working Breeds” © 2020 by Vina Jie-Min Prasad.
“Polished Performance” © 2020 by Alastair Reynolds.
“Fairy Tales for Robots” © 2020 by Sofia Samatar.
“Test 4 Echo” © 2020 by Peter Watts.
ISBN 978-1-78618-271-5
The right of the authors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
Acknowledgements
MY SINCERE THANKS to my editor, Michael Rowley, who has been wonderful to deal with and who is largely responsible for the incredible cover, and to David Thomas Moore and the whole Solaris team for their support and their hard work on the book you now hold. My sincere thanks, too, to all of the writers who sent me stories for the book, whether I used them or not, and to everyone who wanted to be part of Made to Order. As always, my thanks to my agent Howard Morhaim who has stood with me for all of these years, and extra special thanks to Marianne, Jessica, and Sophie, who really are the reason why I keep doing this.
For my pal Jack Dann,
who opened so many doors for me,
with thanks.
CONTENTS
Making the Other We Need, Jonathan Strahan
A Guide for Working Breeds, Vina Jie-Min Prasad
Test 4 Echo, Peter Watts
The Endless, Saad Z. Hossain
Brother Rifle, Daryl Gregory
The Hurt Pattern, Tochi Onyebuchi
Idols, Ken Liu
Bigger Fish, Sarah Pinsker
Sonnie’s Union, Peter F. Hamilton
Dancing with Death, John Chu
Polished Performance, Alastair Reynolds
An Elephant Never Forgets, Rich Larson
The Translator, Annalee Newitz
Sin Eater, Ian R. MacLeod
Fairy Tales for Robots, Sofia Samatar
Chiaroscuro in Red, Suzanne Palmer
A Glossary of Radicalization, Brooke Bolander
Also by Jonathan Strahan
MAKING THE ‘OTHER’ WE NEED
JONATHAN STRAHAN
robot
/ˈrəʊbɒt/ noun
a machine resembling a human being and able to replicate certain human movements and functions automatically. “The robot closed the door behind us.” Similar: automaton, android, machine, golem, bot, droid.
COMPUTING
another term for crawler.
GOLEM. AUTOMATON. ROBOT. Android. Bot. Threepio. Opportunity. Artificial intelligence model. We have always been interested in artificial minds and artificial lives. Machines that are not us, but are like us. The idea of a machine, a device, an object that is similar in body or mind to a human being but is not human; an object that is built for purpose, made to order, to assist human beings; to do dirty, undesirable or dangerous work, or just to keep us company, dates back in some form or other to the days when Homer was writing and before—and it continues to fascinate us.
If you go to your bookshelves and pull a copy of The Iliad off the shelf, you will find references to Hephaestus, the god of metalwork. He was the first great roboticist, accompanied by female assistants made of gold that could talk, were intelligent, and assisted him with his work. Myths tell of Talos, a bronze giant, also made by Hephaestus, who protected the Cretan coastline from invaders. The Greeks were fascinated with machines and mechanical workings; something that shines most clearly in the Antikythera Mechanism, which wasn’t a robot, but was a computer, and fits into this story.
There are other examples, here and there through time, of artificial humans being made and working with, for, or against us. You can see them in Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica in the 3rd century BC; in references from Roger Bacon and others to ‘brazen heads’ as Arabic science was slowly introduced across medieval Europe; in the legends of the Golem, which was made of clay and animated by the word of G-d, and is mentioned in the Talmud; and even in Spenser’s The Fairie Queene. But it is in the 19th century that the idea takes hold of the popular imagination, becomes more widespread, and even begins to become a part of reality.
The most famous ‘made’ man of them all is surely Mary Shelley’s creature from the pages of Frankenstein, whose tortured mind and body made of scavenged parts resonates through the history of literature, influencing work being published today. The creature was the forerunner of an ever-increasing number of stories of mechanical men and women throughout the 19th century: powered by steam or electricity, entering popular culture in the pages of work by Edward S. Ellis, Luis Senarens, even unexpectedly appearing in comedies like Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat. Towards the end of the century, though, these various automatons become more and more convincing, more and more able to pass as human; even able to persuade someone to marry them, as happens in Ernest Edward Kellet’s “The New Frankenstein”.
The technological optimism of the early 20th century was reflected in the fiction of the time, with the idea of mechanical solutions to everyday problems becoming commonplace. Electricity was being run down the streets of cities across North America and around the world; the steelworks that would feed two world wars also churned out tonnes of metal that could be turned to making machines and devices to do other work for us, and an underpinning belief in technological solutions to the problems of humankind led to stories like Gustave Le Rouge’s La Conspiration des milliardaires with its Thomas Edison-like scientists creating metal automatons; L. Frank Baum’s Oz books with the tin man Tik-Tok; Ambrose Bierce’s “Moxon’s Master” with its robot chess player, and on and on.