Made to Order

This collection of short stories comes 100 years after "Czech playwright Karel Čapek wrote a play, R.U.R., about organic machines who are forced to work for humans but that ultimately engage in a rebellion that leads to the extinction of humanity. The word 'robot' itself comes from the Czech word 'rab', which means slave, and the play was very much a metaphor for the problems facing labour at the time, but the word was taken up and became the common name for machines or devices that work for us."

"This book brings together sixteen stories by some of the best writers in science fiction today, all tasked with imagining new robots and new rebellions, and thinking of how those revolutions might connect to our lives".

Writers included: Jonathan Strahan, Vina Jie-Min Prasad, Peter Watts, Saad Z. Hossain, Daryl Gregory, Tochi Onyebuchi, Ken Liu, Sarah Pinsker, Peter F. Hamilton, John Chu, Alistair Reynolds, Rich Larson, Annalee Newitz, Ian R. MacLeod, Sofia Samatar, Suzanne Palmer and Brooke Bolander.

(Quotes are from the opening essay, Making The 'Other' We Need, by Jonathan Strahan).