The Year’s Top Robot and AI Stories: Fifth Annual Collection edited by Allan Kaster: Review by Alexandra Pierce

The Year’s Top Robot and AI Stories: Fifth An­nual Collection, Allan Kaster, ed. (Infinivox 978-1-88461-259-6, $18.99, 234pp, tp). October 2024.Cover by Maurizio Manzieri.

In my review of The Year’s Top Robot and AI Stories: Fourth Annual Collection, I noted that AI was gaining more presence in our lives – something that has increased over the last year. I also noted that the stories in that anthology were overwhelmingly bleak. This is something that has changed: There is a much wider range of emotional tones across these eleven stories: some are positively uplifting. There’s also a range of settings with several set the world as it is now, others in the far future (on Earth or elsewhere), and one not set in our universe at all.

I found that one of the most intriguing factors across these stories is whether the AI or robot is itself a character, or whether they are a tool. In the most interesting stories, the artificial being begins as a tool, and then develops into a charac­ter. R.S.A. Garcia’s “Tantie Merle and the Farm­hand 4200” – 2024 Sturgeon and Nebula winner for short story, and my favourite in the anthology – is an excellent example of this change. The Farmhand 4200 changes in response to external stimuli: interacting with its owner and eventual friend, Merle, and with a particularly ornery goat, Ignatius. The process begins with Merle naming the Farmhand – something that had previously only happened to one other model. Garcia’s story emphasises the self-development of the AI, as it explores both new ways to achieve its programmed goal (containing Ignatius) as well as developing hobbies of its own (cooking and crocheting). It’s also a prime example of a story that is not at all bleak.

Other stories also feature AI that start out as tools but become self-aware. Rajan Khanna’s “The Bends” is narrated by an AI dive assistant set to “Male Australian” and named Sydney. He experiences conflict between parts of his programming and what his diving partner, Dolf, does. Through their dives, Sydney also develops his own appreciation of the ocean, which leads to his finding a way to finesse (or weasel around) his programmed priorities. In “Xhova,” by Adelehin Ijasan (part of the Mothersound Anthology, and therefore of the Sauútiverse), the narrator is an automaton responsible for raising children. The experience of raising their child, Nitiri, changes the way they think about themselves and their own creator, Orisis, to the point of rebellion. Fi­nally, Andy Dudak’s “Games without Frontiers” is about future entertainment, specifically current fears of AI replacing human actors: Some charac­ters in an entertainment are played by humans, while others are AI. Thanks to their experiences, some AIs then become self-aware; one of the issues in the story is whether that’s a problem.

Another set of stories present an AI or robot who is always seen as a character. David Ira Cleary’s “My Year as a Boy” features a metal valet, Reggie. Taggie, a young person on Rumspringa and experi­menting with being a man, is off on an adventure, accompanied by Reggie. Interestingly, Reggie is basically treated as a tool – but it’s about his role as a servant, rather than because he’s artificial, which is an idea that has been explored before and will continue to benefit from discussion. On the other hand, both “Prospecting” (Lavie Tidhar) and “Zeta-Epsilon” (Isabel J. Kim) focus on robots or AI as complete individuals. Tidhar’s is entirely focused on Mendl the robotnik, who was once human and was resurrected inside a machine body, and is now searching for a purpose. Kim writes of a symbiosis between human and AI; the AI is absolutely their own person.

This leaves stories where the AI or robot is only a tool. Kylie Lee Baker’s “The Infinite Endings of Elsie Chen,” another of my favourite stories, is about a young woman obsessed with understanding how and why people die when they do. Baker uses AI to understand causality, but there’s no sense that the AI is thinking for itself. Instead, Elsie’s focus is giving the AI enough data to teach it to understand links between events, to distinguish causation from correlation. “Personal Satisfaction” (Adrian Tchai­kovsky) begins as the story of a dandy who lives in a world where people send “representatives” of themselves – bots – to attend events, when they can’t be bothered to go themselves. Eventually it is revealed that the world is a lot more sinister than it appears – thanks to the bots – but the focus is on the humans, rather than what has inspired the bots in their actions. In Premee Mohamed’s “At Every Door a Ghost”, two scientists developing nano-mites as a medical tool are resentful of drastically increased government surveillance in the wake of a terrorist attack – which used the work of an AI to kill hundreds of people. While that AI is also pres­ent, it is only a background character; the focus is on the human scientists and how they want to continue their work in defiance of government and public fear. And David Ebenbach writes of a city brain in “Everybody Needs a Conditions Box”, designed to manage a Venusian cloud city but beset by worries as soon as they are switched on. The focus of the story is the chief technician, who is concerned that she hasn’t done a good job in programming the brain. This focus on the human in this story is a bit jarring, in the context of the other stories, and especially so given the technician’s solution to the city brain’s concerns: It amounts to trickery at best and deception at worst, and doesn’t engage with the idea that this AI should be treated as a rational being deserving of consideration.

We’re more than a hundred years on from the invention of the word robot. As these stories show, there is still plenty of room for the exploration of what robots and artificial intelligence can and should mean.

Interested in this title? Your purchase through the links below brings us a small amount of affiliate income and helps us keep doing all the reviews you love to read!

This review and more like it in the January 2025 issue of Locus.

While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely on reader donations to keep the magazine and site going, and would like to keep the site paywall free, but WE NEED YOUR FINANCIAL SUPPORT to continue quality coverage of the science fiction and fantasy field.

©Locus Magazine. Copyrighted material may not be republished without permission of LSFF.