| Title | : | Robots vs. Fairies |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1481462369 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781481462365 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 373 |
| Publication | : | Published January 9, 2018 |
| Awards | : | Locus Award Anthology, Novelette for “Quality Time”, Short Story for "The Bookcase Expedition” (2019), World Fantasy Award Best Anthology (2019), Shirley Jackson Award Best Anthology (2018) |
Rampaging robots! Tricksy fairies! Facing off for the first time in an epic genre death match!
People love pitting two awesome things against each other. Robots vs. Fairies is an anthology that pitches genre against genre, science fiction against fantasy, through an epic battle of two icons.
On one side, robots continue to be the classic sci-fi phenomenon in literature and media, from Asimov to WALL-E, from Philip K. Dick to Terminator. On the other, fairies are the beloved icons and unquestionable rulers of fantastic fiction, from Tinkerbell to Tam Lin, from True Blood to Once Upon a Time. Both have proven to be infinitely fun, flexible, and challenging. But when you pit them against each other, which side will triumph as the greatest genre symbol of all time?
There can only be one…or can there?
Robots vs. Fairies Reviews
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ARC provided by Saga Press in exchange for an honest review.“We knew this day would come. We tried to warn the others. It was obvious either the sharp rate of our technological advancement would lead to the robot singularity claiming lordship over all, or that the fairies would finally grow tired of our reckless destruction of the natural world and take it back from us.”
First off, this anthology has the best introduction I’ve ever read in maybe any book ever! It is actual perfection in every single way. Overall, I really, really, really enjoyed this! But it is a bit of a mixed bag, I do suppose! Some of these were so amazing, where others are ones that I will probably not remember or carry with me. But I do also believe there is something here for everyone to love, whether you are #TeamFairies or #TeamRobots!
And even though most of you know that I am very much #TeamFairies, my personal favorite in the whole collection is a robot story! All the Time We've Left to Spend by Alyssa Wong is a masterpiece. This story is beautiful, haunting, and oh so heart-wrenching. I will carry it with me forever. I loved every single aspect of it. I think this story alone makes this anthology completely worth buying and worth reading this entire collection. One of my favorite short stories of all time.
I'm going to break down each short story with my thoughts, opinions, and individual star rating!“We were always on your side. Unfortunately, half of the authors in this anthology chose poorly, but the other half always knew you would emerge triumphant.”
Also:
🦋 = TEAM FAIRIES
🤖 = TEAM ROBOTS
➽ 🦋 BUILD ME A WONDERLAND by Seanan McGuire - ★★★★★
This story guys, this freakin’ story! Okay, we get to travel through an enchanted garden, a mermaid grotto, a pixie glen, and more during this amazing short story that is set in a magical theme park that makes you question everything. This was such a strong start to this collection, and proved that I’m Team Fairies forever. You guys all probably know that I love Seanan McGuire, but you probably don’t know that I also love Kobolds! From spending such a big chunk of my life leveling up humans in WoW, to being unnaturally excited for the new Hearthstone expansion, to falling even more in love with Kings of the Wyld because they were an amazing part of the story; I love Kobolds. And this story is perfection.
➽ 🤖 QUALITY TIME by Ken Liu - ★★★
This is story about a man who majored in folk lore, but is joining a very prestigious and innovative company in their robotics department. This company wants to break the mold and find solutions for what other companies deem impossible. Then comes the Vegnor; a rat-like robot that is marketed to every busy homeowner to take care of their pests and other small things. This is beautifully written, and really opens up a good discussion on how far we will eventually let technology advance and go. And more importantly: more technology isn’t always the best solution.
➽ 🦋 MURMURED UNDER THE MOON by Tim Pratt - ★★★★★
Oh my word, this was glorious queer book-loving fairy perfection! Emily has been working at a fairy library for two years, where she met her girlfriend who is part book. The fae princess that is in charge of the library is being manipulated by a mortal man, and it is up to Emily and a few fae folk to break the spell. This story also dabbles into the different fae courts, their weakness to iron, their glamour, and other things that warmed my heart and made the story shine with Tim Pratt’s obvious love for fairies.
➽ 🤖 THE BLUE FAIRY’S MANIFESTO by Annalee Newitz - ★★
This is a really smart story that weaves together robots and politics into a Pinocchio retelling! This tale centers in on a toy-shop, where many different kinds of robots are made. From anarchists, to pacifists, to socialists, we have a full range of different thinking mechanical beings, but it just didn’t work for me for some reason. Yet, it was so different that I’m happy it was a part of this collection.
➽ 🦋 BREAD AND MILK AND SALT by Sarah Gailey - ★★★
This was so very beautifully written, and very eerie, haunting, and just downright spooky. The first half of this story immersed me more than most things I’ve ever read. I couldn’t stop reading this tale. From giving the fae gifts of bread and milk and salt, to being bonded by blood, to becoming what you never expected, this story was so captivating. But for some reason the ending wasn’t satisfying enough for me. But her writing was enthralling, powerful, and evocative, I instantly went and bought River of Teeth.
➽ 🤖 IRONHEART by Jonathan Maberry - ★★★
This was a very sad story. Like, I cried while reading most of this one. But it wasn’t only sad, it was eerie, and haunting, and pretty powerful. We watch a young man who is forced to live a much different life than he was expecting. He lives on a farm with his loving grandparents, who can barely afford to make ends meet. And their farm is mostly run by robots that are out of date and dying. There is also a beautiful discussion on the military and how veterans are treated once they are home and have taken off their uniform. The author also brings up the healthcare crisis that we are all currently facing here in America. This was an expertly woven story, and I don’t think I’ll forget it anytime soon.
➽ 🦋 JUST ANOTHER LOVE SONG by Kat Howard - ★★
A banshee girl who sings of death meets a gancanagh boy who sings of love, while all the while other fae folk are coming up missing. I didn’t really enjoy this one, just because I thought it was rather predictable! But I did enjoy that there was a side character who was an agoraphobiac.
➽ 🤖 SOUND AND FURY by Mary Robinette Kowal - ★★★
Okay, at this point I am starting to feel like all the robot stories have important and relevant issues just woven into their tales. This is a science fiction story where a crew is taking a giant robot to a planet for reasons unknown. The short story quickly turns into a story about colonization and stripping cultures from Native people. It was pretty expertly done, and I’m so impressed that these short tales are making me feel so much.
➽ 🦋 THE BOOKCASE EXPEDITION by Jeffrey Ford - ★
Yikes, okay, I know this is going to sound harsh, but I just didn’t care about this story at all. A man is able to see tiny, small, fae folk around his home. He watches them explore the bookshelves, all while name dropping tons of different books and authors, and then he watches them fight both demons and spiders and anything else! This story was just not my cup of tea at all, unfortunately.
➽ 🤖 WORK SHADOW/SHADOW WORK by Madeline Ashby - ★★★★
I really, really enjoyed this. And this story really centers on the believing in something is very powerful. Naming something and loving something and putting your faith in something is more powerful than words. And this is a story about a robot assistant taking care of a semi-famous human, who many consider a witch, but who believes in fairies and elves and other magical creatures. I loved how this story incorporated both fairies and robots, and was just such a whimsical and beautiful tale about the power of believing in something with your whole heart.
➽ 🦋 SECOND TO THE LEFT, AND STRAIGHT ON by Jim C. Hines - ★★★★
This is, like, an alternate retelling of Peter Pan, but it’s set after the events of Peter Pan, and Tinker Bell is very much not dead. In fact, she and her “Found Girls” are a cult like group that steal little girls that are very much loved. You know, sort of the opposite of what Peter and the Lost Boys did. And we follow someone who is on a mission to save the most recent missing girl, and also to get closure for something personal. I feel like this may be a three star story, but the twist at the end was so damn good that I feel like it really deserved an extra star. Also, this was a really clever tale and I did really enjoy it.
➽ 🤖 THE BURIED GIANT by Lavie Tidhar - ★★★
I’m very torn on a three or four star rating for this one, just because I was so engaged while reading this. I couldn’t put it down. I also love how this not only celebrated robots and fairies, but it also had the unique aspect of a human wanting to be robotic. This is also a story about stories, where our main character is learning about a famous tale that has been passed down over time from both an Elder in his community and from his Grandmother. And the story is about what seems like one of the last human boys on Earth, living in a world that is now overrun by Robots, some of which who are hunting humans. This tale also hinted at a fuller length story about a two minor side characters and I am so here for it. I really enjoyed this one and I’m so happy to be introduced to this author from this anthology!
➽ 🤖 THREE ROBOTS EXPERIENCE OBJECTS LEFT BEHIND FROM THE ERA OF HUMANS FOR THE FIRST TIME by John Scalzi - ★
It pains me to give something by Jon Scalzi one star, but this just felt and read so lazy. Basically, three robots are discovering and discussing human items (balls, sandwiches, cats, and xbox) and wondering how humans used them. That’s it. This story tries way too hard to be funny, and then ends trying to pack an emotional punch about global warming and the climate crisis we are choosing to ignore right now. But it felt so bad when you’re trying to do this in six pages, and five of those are wasted on bad jokes.
➽ 🦋 OSTENTATION OF PEACOCKS by Delilah S. Dawson writing as Lila Bowen - ★★
Okay, this was a hard one for me, too. This is a western fairy story, and I just don’t think the combination really mixed well for me personally. Like, Billy the Kid makes an appearance in here! And then I felt a little hopeful, because I thought we were going to have a nonbinary character, but I don’t think that was the case, but it gave me the hope for it, then the letdown. But yeah, this is basically a story about a magical shapeshifter, who is trying to protect another shapeshifter (in possum form), who is being hunted by fairy men that disguise themselves as country humans. It was just… too far out there for me, I’m sorry. Also, please let me know if you were picking up on the gender fluid aspect, too!
➽ 🤖 ALL THE TIME WE’VE LEFT TO SPEND by Alyssa Wong - ★★★★★
Oh my word, this was utter and pure perfection. I will never forget this story, ever. This story is centered around an alternate future where we have realistic cyborg celebrity robots, who have many memories stored, working in pleasure hotels, where you can spend time with them for money. Our main protagonist, Ruriko, is obsessed with spending time with a kpop group that passed away ten years ago, while trying to learn all the information she can about their memories. This story is beautiful. This story is haunting. This story is oh so heart-wrenching. I loved this. I loved this so very much. Easily my favorite in the entire collection.
➽ 🦋 ADRIFTICA by Maria Dahvana Headley - ★★
This is a scene from Midsummer Night’s Dream, but retold in a modern contemporary setting. Titania and Oberon are dealing with their custody battle, but with a rock and roll twist to it. I know this sounds really cool, and the uniqueness is completely why I’m giving this two stars, but the writing style was very much not for me. Though, this was very clever, and I’m sure many others will enjoy it much more than I did.
➽ 🤖 TO A CLOVEN PINE by Max Gladstone - ★★
Okay, this was just a really confusing tale for me. So much of it just went completely over my head, and you guys will completely love it when you get to the ending, but I was left really underwhelmed because of the confusion I felt starting out. This short story starts out with four beings that are fleeing their ship in space, while being chased by “the Witch”. Then, one of the members starts acting very strange and goes missing. And then the ending really brings the story together with a big revelation, but maybe this story was just too epic and too condensed for me to really enjoy it.
➽ 🦋 A FALL COUNTS ANYWHERE by Catherynne M. Valente - ★★★★
You all, this is a WWF fairy vs robot match! Like, Catherynne M. Valente took the meaning of this book really literally, but she is team fairies (who isn’t) and really wrote a fantastic and unique story that I really enjoyed. This is also narrated partially by a fairy announcer and a robot announcer. Yet, this was my problem with the story, and the reason I ultimately didn’t give this five stars: I hated that the robot announcer spoke all in caps. I completely understand this was a good way to be able to differentiate between the two voices, but it just felt so bad to read. I really didn’t like. But this story was so very great, I loved the twist, and it proves how fairies truly are the most clever characters in all of literature.
I gave Robots vs. Fairies three stars overall, because out of a possible 90 stars (5 stars possible for each of the 18 stories) this collection accumulated 54 stars (60%).
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The quotes above were taken from an ARC and are subject to change upon publication.
Buddy read with
Elise! ❤ -
Conclusion? Fairies are better.
Let me explain. Not to offend our possible future robot overlords, but robots lack the gorgeous imagery or the delightful villainy of fairies. Come on, what's a story without some morally grey leads who delight in their evil nature? But it's not just about the fairies; it's about how my robot vs. fairy preferences reflect the type of stories I enjoy. I prefer my fantasy grounded in truth, grounded in the cores of humanity. I prefer Seanan McGuire's vision of fairies as humans who don't try to hide their moral blanks (Build Me Wonderland) and Alyssa Wong's vision of robots as reflections of our inner selves (All the Time We've Left to Spend). And while this was an enjoyable read with a few - two especially - fantastic stories, I unfortunately don't know if this anthology quite delivered the depth I wanted.
My advice? Skip this one and just give McGuire and Wong's stories a try. You can find
Alyssa Wong writing another masterpiece here if you're interested.
Anthology reviews are my absolute favorite to write, and this one will be no exception. Here's the system this time: ♔ stories are about fairies, while ♚ stories are about robots. 🇸🇱 will be used for queer content - which this anthology really, really fucking needed - 🌃 to denote authors known to me previously, and 🍀 for my favorites.
♔ Build Me Wonderland by Seanan McGuire - ★★★★★ 🌃🍀
Aesthetic! McGuire's most recent foray into short fiction is as amazing as expected. Her writing is stellar, her concepts are intriguing, her descriptions are gorgeous, and her worlds are compelling. Most importantly, she's fantastic at a certain sense of joy and hope for the future that I'm hard-pressed to find in other fairy or robot authors.
author's note: interesting
♚ Quality Time by Ken Liu - ★★★☆☆
I appreciated the effort put into this exploration of unintended technological consequences and ethical consumption, but this story itself honestly felt rather pat to me. I saw the ending coming miles away.
author's note: hilarious, clever, and very short
♔ Murmured Under the Moon by Tim Pratt - ★★★☆☆ 🇸🇱
I honest to god have no idea what was happening here. I loved the thematic ideas of having books be relevant to defense, and the idea of having a literal book girlfriend is clever. But it felt as if Pratt stopped after his initial clever idea and failed to perfect it. Also, definitely not as much moral blackness as I like from fairy stories.
author's note: stellar meta about fairy-vs-robot fiction
♚ The Blue Fairy's Manifesto by Annalee Newitz - ★★★☆☆
This novella is a clever and interesting exploration of extremism vs. choice, but I honestly thought it wasn’t anything particularly new. Maybe robots just aren’t as much for me?
author's note: explains the already-obvious connotations of her story, could’ve done more
♔ Bread and Milk and Salt by Sarah Gailey - ★★★★☆
This one is messed up. Following the conflict between robots and fairies explicitly, rather than simply focusing on one, it manages to bring the reader deep into the mind of a fairy trapped alone. It's strangely psychological and a read I definitely enjoyed.
author's note: super interesting read
♚ Ironheart by Jonathan Maberry - ★★★☆☆
This is a story about the renewability of robots. I cannot really tell whether it's pro or anti robot, but I think the duality is frankly the only strength of Ironheart. While I loved the themes brought up about veterans' lives, I have to admit I found most of this sort of boring.
author's note: made me doubt whether I even read the story correctly
♔ Just Another Love Song by Kat Howard - ★★★★☆
This is a story about agency. And not to be a parody of myself, but if you know me, you know that is my absolute favorite theme to explore and discuss. As an added bonus, I loved the morally black lead character of this story.
author's note: too short
♚ Sound and Fury by Mary Robinette Kowal - ★★☆☆☆
Listen, not to anger our future robot overlords, but robots are sort of boring. Especually when they're going on diplomatic missions to ...somewhere? and drop so many pointless titles in the first minute that the reader feels like DNFing.
author's note: why was it here
♔ The Bookcase Expedition by Jeffrey Ford - ★★☆☆☆
Yikes. I honestly just didn't get why this story was here. It felt boring, mostly.
author's note: I guess I understand why this was written now?
♚ Work Shadow/Shadow Work by Madeline Ashby - ★★★★☆
Now THIS is a good robot story. And, sadly, the first one I've rated a full four stars. This one follows a mystical grandmother and her robot assistant, using their friendship to contrast viewpoints.
author's note: but why
♔ Second to the Left by Jim C. Hines - ★★★★☆
This is a Peter Pan retelling using Tinker Bell is a villain, but at its core, it's an exploration of humanity through the fairy lens. I loved this so, so much. The main character had a super strong voice and the themes brought up were everything I love from fairy fiction. Well, besides the imagery. More imagery, please!
author's note: brilliant, got highlighted all the way through
♚ The Buried Giant by Lavie Tidhar - ★★★★☆
Another good robot story! I'm not sure I totally understand this one, but the reverse Pinocchio is interesting and the themes around civilization's continued growth is amazing.
♚ Three Robots by John Scalzi - ★★★★☆
This was hilarious. I’ve never read a Scalzi before, but if this is any indication, he’s a guy I’d love to meet.
♔ Ostentation of Peacocks by Lila Bowen - ★★★☆☆
This was a pretty decent fairy story! The world building is imginiative and the writing is good. Unfortunately, I just wasn’t quite invested enough.
♚ All the Time We've Left to Spend by Alyssa Wong - ★★★★★ 🍀🇸🇱🌃
WE GET IT, ALYSSA, YOU'RE FUCKING TALENTED.
(guys, if you haven't read her work before, please give it a try. This and Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers are two of the best works I've ever read.
I'm literally begging you oh my god)
♔ Adriftica by Maria Dahvana Headley - ★★★☆☆ 🌃
Lovely writing, but this story itself was sort of boring, with an obvious plot reveal and not much more intrigue. Enjoyed the retelling concept - wont say what as it’s a spoiler, but more can be done with fairies.
♚ To a Cloven Pine by Max Gladstone - ★★★★☆ 🌃
This confused the shit out of me but somehow I loved it. A Tempest retelling with robots and starring Caliban.
♔ A Fall Counts Anywhere by Catherynne M. Valente - ★★★☆☆ 🌃
Some great ideas and imagery here, but a plot that totally bored me.
ALL IN ALL: Despite reading one a night with
Melanieand
Destiny, I just never really got into this one. Aside from Alyssa Wong and Seanan McGuire’s contributions, none of this struck me.
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When I first picked up Robots vs. Fairies, I almost expected the stories to be about literal wars between the two, so I was very surprised to find that it was actually a collection of alternating stories from authors who had chosen "team robot" or "team fairy". It was such a fun and unique idea, but I found that most of the stories were kinda "meh" for me.
→ Build Me a Wonderland by Seanan McGuire - ★★★★★ ←
The collection opened on such a strong note, as this was tied with one later story for my favorite. It tells the story of a group of theme park engineers who create little robotic critters for the park, but it has a really delightful twist and the prose is beautiful. It was my first taste of Seanan's writing, and I loved it so much that I bought two full books by her within a week of reading this story.
→ Quality Time by Ken Liu - ★★☆☆☆ ←
Unfortunately, after the majesty of Seanan's story, this one was a bigger letdown than I expected. It was about a young man who went to work for a new company, designing "helper" robots, but he took things too far and created a massive disaster. The characters were so unlikable, and the plot itself was honestly pretty boring.
→ Murmured Under the Moon by Tim Pratt - ★★★★★ ←
I actually originally had this one written down as a 4-star read, but while writing this review, I fangirled a little too hard not to move it up to 5. It's a story about a human librarian who takes care of a fairy library, and is forced to go on a rescue mission when the fairy princess is taken hostage by a wicked man - who also steals away the narrator's girlfriend. Did I mention that her girlfriend is literally a living book? It's so fun, and unique, and magical, and fantastical, and sweet.
→ The Blue Fairy's Manifesto by Annalee Newitz - ★★★☆☆ ←
I really wanted to love this story, in which a robot is taught that there's more to life than just the factory he's been living and working in. Unfortunately, I just couldn't really get into it enough to justify a higher rating; the writing itself was moreso worthy of 2 stars for me, but I did really enjoy the political commentary thrown in.
→ Bread and Milk and Salt by Sarah Gailey - ★★★★★ ←
This story is so full of fae lore, and is so twisted and dark. This is exactly what I want from fairy tales: I want dark, creepy, glamour-utilizing tricksters and conniving little shape-shifters. In this story, a fairy becomes obsessed with a boy, and follows him into adulthood, but when he hurts her beyond words, she finds a way to strike back. I absolutely adored the ending - it was so cunning and sick, and I found myself cringing a few times during it, but in the best way.
→ Ironheart by Jonathan Maberry - ★★★★☆ ←
I was honestly stunned by how sad and heavy this entry was. It follows a veteran suffering from war injuries and PTSD, who's had a robotic heart transplant due to the incidents on the battlefield. He lives with his grandparents, who run a farm with the assistance of robots, all of which are steadily breaking down due to a lack of funds to repair them. It's honestly less about robots and more about how poorly we here in the USA treat our veterans, and how useless and unhappy disabled vets can feel. There was a line where the MC mentioned that he gave his life on the battlefield when he should have been at home, taking care of his own family, and it broke my heart into all the little pieces.
→ Just Another Love Song by Kat Howard - ★★☆☆☆ ←
This story actually had some neat aspects to it - mainly, the fact that I'd never seen a banshee in a fairy story before, and I was obsessed with banshees as a kid, so that was cool - but a lot of it was just really predictable and formulaic, and I couldn't get particularly attached to any of it. I did enjoy the ending, though.
→ Sound and Fury by Mary Robinette Kowal - ★★★☆☆ ←
A space crew is taking a giant robot to this new planet, supposedly to have a meeting with these higher-up types, but in true colonialist fashion, there's a little more to the story than the crew members have been informed of. This story was a little bizarre, honestly, but a pretty fun ride! It didn't "stick" with me, though - I actually had to look at my notes to refresh myself a little by the time I wrote this review.
→ The Bookcase Expedition by Jeffrey Ford - ★☆☆☆☆ ←
This one was literally the point of view of a man watching little bitty fairies go on an adventure on his bookcase in his office. I was so bored, and I kept expecting there to be a point to the story, but there really wasn't one. I'm sorry, but I genuinely don't understand why this story was even included.
→ Work Shadow/Shadow Work by Madeline Ashby - ★★★★★ ←
This story was honestly so precious and meaningful to me. It was about a robotic assistant to an elderly woman who believed in and practiced magic, but was becoming senile and unable to take care of herself fully. She berated her assistant frequently in the beginning by calling him soul-less (because he didn't have a name), but we get to watch him slowly grasp more of her personality, as she comes to respect him as a friend. My own grandmother was a practicing witch in her younger years, and was senile in the later years of her life, and this story reminded me so much of her in some ways and really found a special place in my heart.
→ Second to the Left, and Straight On by Jim C. Hines - ★★★★★ ←
If you've ever talked to me about Peter Pan, you already know I don't care for it at all, so when I realized this would be a retelling, I didn't expect to enjoy it, but it is so twisted and haunting and beautiful and absolutely heartbreaking. I enjoyed it so much. It's about a private investigator who is seeking out little girls that have been abducted by Tinker Bell. The little gang of girls is called the "Found Girls", and there are just so many lovely little comparisons and parallels to the original tale, but it still feels really fresh and new.
→ The Buried Giant by Lavie Tidhar - ★★☆☆☆ ←
This was another retelling in the form of Pinocchio, but the roles were reversed, with a human boy wanting to become a robot. I honestly just didn't jive with the writing style - it was pretty, but a little hard for me to follow at times - and the story was so disjointed. The ending was really open, too, which made it even tougher for me to get into. That said, I feel like I might like this author if I read something a little longer by them!
→ Three Robots Experience Objects Left Behind From the Era of Humans for the First Time by John Scalzi - ★★★★★ ←
UPDATE: I originally gave this story a much lower rating, but after going back and re-reading it, OMG, it is hilarious and I love it so much. It follows a trio of robots exploring human objects after humans are all gone, and one of the stories includes a cat, which... well, you just have to read it. It's wonderful.
→ Ostentation of Peacocks by Lila Bowen - ★★☆☆☆ ←
This is - are you ready for this? - a fairy story in the form of a western. I don't read westerns often, and I'm not a big fan of the genre in any media format, so I am solidly convinced that I am just not the target audience for this story. I appreciated the imagery that was painted by the writing - and would absolutely read more from this author - and there were some little things here and there that were really fun (like the main character's mention of her favorite aesthetic being "all of the prettiest parts of men AND women"), but mostly, I just strongly believe that fairies and westerns shouldn't intermingle.
→ All the Time We've Left to Spend by Alyssa Wong - ★★★★★ ←
First of all, where have I been my entire life that I've never read anything by Alyssa Wong? This story was tied with Seanan McGuire's for my #1 favorite of the collection. It displays a society in which robots have been used to mimic the bodies and personalities of celebrities in pleasure hostels, and follows a young woman who frequents a hostel to spend time with the deceased members of a decade-old Japanese pop icon group. The twist is given away very quickly, but it somehow adds to the haunting feel of the story as you watch everything unfold. I would have loved more time to spend in this story, and will be adding more of Alyssa's work to my TBR ASAP.
→ Adriftica by Maria Dahvana Headley - ★☆☆☆☆ ←
This rating honestly feels so dirty and unfair to me, because this story was doomed from the start. I don't care for Shakespeare at all (go ahead, get your shock and disgust out of the way), and this is a retelling of a scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream; on top of that, it followed that beautiful Alyssa Wong story, so it didn't stand a snowball's chance.
→ To a Cloven Pine by Max Gladstone - ★☆☆☆☆ ←
I honestly spend the bulk of this story confused and bored, which just brought annoyance along with it, and that's not a great trio of feelings. It starts off with a group of people running from a Witch, when one of the characters disappears and things get pretty sketchy. I understood the big reveal at the end, I just didn't think it was a very good twist.
→ A Fall Counts Anywhere by Catherynne M. Valente - ★★★★☆ ←
The idea behind this story is absolutely precious: to round out the end of the collection, Catherynne decided to take the title, Robots vs. Fairies, literally, and gave us a fight night reminiscent of WWF/WWE ("Are you ready to rrruuummmmblleeeee?!"). The writing voices change as it shifts between a robot commentator and a fairy, and while it's fun and a little camp-y, I did think it was overdone (hence knocking a star off of my rating). That said, the twist ending is so fun and brilliant, and I loved every moment of the finale.
→ FINAL THOUGHTS ←
All in all, this anthology was very hit-and-miss to me. As you can see, there were very few "amazing" stories, with quite a lot of "meh" and even "bad" ones for me. The fact that the really great ones were so few and far between made it incredibly difficult to motivate myself to keep going in this anthology, but(!) the 5-star reads were honestly worth purchasing the entire collection just for those. So, do I recommend every story in this book? No. Do I recommend getting your hands on the Seanan McGuire and Alyssa Wong stories at all costs? You betcha.
Averaged out, I gave this collection 3 stars.
Thank you to Saga Press for granting me this ARC in exchange for an honest review! -
A brilliant anthology from some of the biggest names in speculative fiction at the moment. It's at times funny, often introspective and thought-provoking with a clever framing mechanism of each author talking about whether they're Team Fairy or Team Robot and why. Highly recommended.
A few standouts for me:
"Murmured Under the Moon" by
Tim Pratt - This story features a heroic human librarian working for the Fae to keep their library (and to save the kingdom in the end). The books that would be present in a Fae library are cleverly done.
"Work Shadow/Shadow Work" by
Madeline Ashby - A robot is purchased by a daughter to look after her estranged aged mother, but this is Iceland where people believe in Elves and the mother thinks she's a witch. Beautiful story about love and magic in many forms.
"Second to the Left, and Straight On" by
Jim C. Hines and "All the Time We've Left to Spend" by
Alyssa Wong - A fairy story and a robot story that both deal with grief in brilliant ways. Really striking in a collection that's mostly relatively whimsical. -
I've had this on my Kindlle for a while now, and after the sheer awesomeness of
The Mythic Dream, I finally made time. While it's not the absolute perfection that The Mythic Dream ws, it's very close, and very good.
Lots of the authors here rode the Robots vs Fairies line by incorporating both, but there's also plenty who've chosen their side - the variety of stories is a big part of the success of this book. There was really only one story I wouldn't read again, Jim C Hines' take on Peter Pan, and I would put that down to personal taste over quality of writing. The rest are solidly good with a few excellents; Maria Dahvana Headley absolutely nails her entry by pairing fairies and rock n roll in a scorchingly inventive apocalyptic piece. And Catherynne M Valente takes the title to it's literal conclusion in a showdown for the ages (no spoilers, but I'll hint: Tinkerhell, Mustardseen the Marauder and Peaseblossom the Punisher).
Another great collection from these editors, and I'm very glad I finally got around to it - I'll be eagerly awaiting whatever they decide to do next. -
I was pleasantly surprised by this anthology and enjoyed all the stories (some more than others) apart from one. The theme of putting Robots against Fairies works very well and even more so because some of the authors pushed the boundaries between these two to the point that they altogether disappeared. All the various interpretations were also compelling, from a librarian in love with a living book to the nature of mourning and true horror.
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What a wonderful collection of stories with a fun premise! Some adventure, some sadness, some humour, and a few really touching moments.
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The mathematically calculated rating is 3.52, but my heart says 4 stars because the anthology was AWESOME!
Strong beginning and great variety of different stories! I love the concept of the anthology and that it gave an opportunity for many amazing authors create these amazing stories.
My favorites stories are written by Seanan McGuire, Ken Liu, Tim Pratt, Madeline Ashby, Alyssa Wong and Catherynne M. Valente.
Build Me a Wonderland by Seanan McGuire - 4 stars! Great concept: fairies & elf pretend to be robots in amusement theme park to survive in human world.
Team Fairy
Quality Time by Ken Liu - 4 stars! A very interesting take about efficiency, productivity and humanity. Great short story. The story is told from 1st person pov and the gender of the protagonist is unspecified.
Team Robot
Murmured Under The Moon by Tim Pratt - 4.5 stars! Sapphic woc librarian protagonist with a girlfriend who's a living book. Also fairies, magic, adventures and books saving the day!
Team Fairy
The Blue Fairy's Manifesto by Annalee Newits - 3.5 stars! Short but powerful story about agency, choice, future and intelligence in robot themed retelling of Pinoccio story.
Team Robot
Bread and Milk and Salt by Sarah Gailey - 4 stars! wow! I'm not huge fan of horror but this was fascinating.
Incredible afterward about fairies, robots and humanity.
Team Fairy
Ironheart by Jonathan Maberry - 3 stars. Sad and strange. I didn't love this story but it was ok.
Team Robot
Just Another Love Song by Kate Howard - 4 stars! Little short story about power, choices and reclaiming your agency. Very feminist read.
Team Fairy
Sound and Fury by Mary Robinette Kowal - 3 stars. Good themes but it was rather all over and too short, but I liked space aspects and the society structure.
Team Robot
The Bookcase Expedition by Jeffrey Ford - 2 stars. I didn't like it.
Team Fairy
Work Shadow/ Shadow Work by Madeline Ashby - 4 stars! A story about nameless robot home assistant to old woman who believes herself a witch. It has great combination of "robotic" and magical! I love the growing camaraderie between the assistant and the woman.
Great author's commentary!
Team Robot
Second to the Left, And Straight On by Jim C. Hines - 3 stars. It was ok, the plot twist surprised me but I'm so not a fan of anything Peter Pan-Tinker Bell-Wendy etc so I couldn't properly appreciate this story.
Team Fairy
The Buried Giant by Lavie Tidhar - 3.5 stars. Weird and a bit creepy but good short story, kinda reversed Pinoccio retelling.
Team Robot
Three Robots Experience Objects by John Scalzi - 4 stars! This was hilarious! I loved the play type narration and the commentary to the story by the author fits perfectly to his story.
Team Robot
Ostentation of Peacocks by Delilah S. Dawson as Lila Bowen - 4 stars! That was a fun read, like a western with faes and magical contest, I like the humor in the story. Definitely want to read more from this author.
Team Fairy
All The Time We've Left to Spend by Alyssa Wong - 4 stars! This was weird and unsettling and grim, but still very enjoyable. A story about queer Japanese woman ten years after the fatal accident comes visit a robot with her former girlfriend mind-scan.
I really appreciate that this anthology has two stories with queer ladies so far.
Team Robot
Adriftica by Maria Dahvana Headley- 3 stars. Interesting story about music, family, fae and the end of the world. It has elements from A Midsummer Night's Dream, which is stated in the author's afterword.
Team Fairy
To A Clove Pine by Max Gladstone - 2 stars. Too short and very confusing. I liked the author's afterward but that's about it.
Team Robot
A Fall Counts Anywhere by Catherynne M. Valente - 4 stars! What have I even read?! Wild and awesome.
Team Fairy -
This was a great collection of short stories on what turned out to be a great theme! Something for everyone here - highly recommended.
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“We always knew this day would come. We tried to warn the others. It was obvious either the sharp rate of our technological advancement would lead to the robot singularity claiming lordship over all, or that the fairies would finally grow tired of our reckless destruction of the natural world and take it back from us. And so, we have prepared a guide to assist our fellow humans in embracing their inevitable overlords.”
This anthology collects 18 stories with each author picking either the robots or the fairies as humanity's eventual overlord. Some of the stories incorporate both creatures but many pick one or the other and tell a story based on that creature's interactions with people. The result is an intriguing balance between fantasy and science fiction that overall left me feeling rather pleased. Like with any anthology, there are some standouts and some stinkers. To my mind, the best three were:
- "All the Time We've Left to Spend" by Alyssa Wong
- "The Blue Fairy's Manifesto" by Annalee Newitz
- "A Fall Counts Anywhere" by Catherynne M. Valente
Overall, I'd say Robots vs Fairies is well worth picking up if you're a fan of robots and/or fairies as there's some clever ideas in there and a better balance of good stories vs bad than in previous anthologies that I've read.
Build Me a Wonderland by Seanan McGuire - 4/5
A group of maintenance engineers, led by a woman named Clover, keeps a magic, Disneyland-style Park from breaking down until their boss hires an efficiency expert who threatens everything they’ve built.
McGuire does an excellent job of transporting magic to the real world without it seeming out of place. As a self-described lover of Disneyland, she makes the Park come to magical life and yet still be an amusing twist on the usual.
Quality Time by Ken Liu - 2/5
A liberal arts major is hired by a major tech company and tries to figure out the line between helpful and hindrance as he leads a team of techs.
I’m clearly just not a Liu fan. The story tries to walk the line between technology that works and technology that fixes things that were never a problem but mostly just succeeds at feeling contrived and trite.
Murmured Under the Moon by Tim Pratt - 4/5
Recently hired as a librarian to the fairies, Emily Yuan faces her greatest challenge when the library is ransacked by her own boss.
Even for a short story, this has a slow burn. The cleverness of the living books, traveling of alternate dimensions and myths coming to life make up for it. Particularly given the author’s accurate assessment of the fairies vs robots idea: “Passing the Turing test, developing true AI - robots are only cool when they grow more familiar. Fairies, on the other hand, become more interesting the less they resemble us.”
The Blue Fairy’s Manifesto by Annalee Newitz - 5/5
In a factory closed down for the weekend, a robot named the RealBoy (who is used to building parts for other robotic toys) is “freed” from his programming by a radical anti-human drone called the Blue Fairy and finds that freedom comes with as much responsibility as it does choice.
I was excited to read this because I’ve been meaning to read Newitz’s book Autonomous for awhile now and haven’t gotten around to it yet. The Blue Fairy’s Manifesto is a clever examination of psychological choices when it comes to propaganda and what freedom really means beyond the nice ring of it.
Bread and Milk and Salt by Sarah Gailey - 4/5
A young boy and an inquisitive fairy interact over the course of his life, with devastating consequences.
This is not one of those light and sparkly tales about fairies. It’s blood and bone and salt, with all the creepiness that that entails.
Ironheart by Jonathan Maberry - 4/5
A young man with a failing mechanical heart tries to keep the robots who run his parents farm from falling apart before he does.
I absolutely loved the way that Duke’s illness affected FarmBoy. What a cool way to combine the ideas of two different farmers, one of flesh and one of metal.
Just Another Love Song by Kat Howard - 4/5
A banshee and her brownie roommate get to the bottom of a mystery involving the disappearance of other fae.
This is probably the shortest story in the collection (just 10 pages) but it’s a surprisingly enthralling. I loved the inclusion of various types of fae and the way the banshee uses her voice at the end.
Sound and Fury by Mary Robinette Kowal - 3/5
A ship’s engineer and her crew must personally escort a Diplomatic Personal Surrogate (giant robot) down to a planet for a diplomatic meeting.
I liked Jela and some of the other characters but the story felt bland. The humor and interesting characters are all that save it from being just okay.
The Bookcase Expedition by Jeffrey Ford - 3/5
While ill in bed, an older man sees an expedition of little people up head up his bookcase on a mission from their queen.
This felt more like a story about the Littles than about faeries but it was interesting to see their expedition play out. Definitely more on the light-hearted, mischievous side than some of the other fairy stories.
Work Shadow/Shadow Work by Madeline Ashby - 4/5
The robotic assistant to a well known spiritualist in Iceland attempts to help his client navigate the challenges of growing older, even as he’s not completely sure whether she has delusional episodes or really does talk to fairies.
As the author mentions in the afterword following the story, this is really a question of “believing in the essential dignity of an organic human and believing in the essential dignity of a synthetic human.” The conversations between the spiritualist and the robot were compelling.
Second to the Left, and Straight On by Jim C. Hines - 3/5
A woman in search of her daughter Lillian hunts for Tinker Bell and the other Found Girls that the fairy has stolen in the years since she took Lillian.
As someone with only a vague remembrance of Peter Pan, this was still an interesting and compelling story. The way it handled the mother’s panic and grief felt heartbreaking and real.
The Buried Giant by Lavie Tidhar - 3/5
Two children in an age in which machines are long gone hear the story of one of a human boy raised among machines and his journey to meet others like himself.
This one reminded me a bit of the videogame Horizon: Zero Dawn in terms of kind of the primitive set-up of the humans and the long-gone machines. It was interesting to have this story that was sort of like a reverse Pinocchio.
Three Robots Experience Objects Left Behind From the Era of Humans for the First Time by John Scalzi - 3/5
As the title suggests, three robots have a brief conversation about a ball, a cat, an Xbox and a nuclear missile and try to understand the humans who are now long gone.
Scalzi has an amusing sense of humor that I appreciate, despite the script/dialogue format not being my favorite format to get into a story.
Ostentation of Peacocks by Delilah Dawson writing as Lila Bowen - 2/5
A shapeshifter goes head to head with four faeries to decide the fate of another in a distinctly weird Western setting.
I’m coming to the conclusion that I just don’t like Dawson’s writing. Not a terrible story but not one that appealed to me much.
All the Time We’ve Left to Spend by Alyssa Wong - 5/5
A former pop star visits a seedy hotel full of mechanical representations of dead celebrities to see those lost to her years before.
Bar none, the absolute best story in the collection. Part Ghost in the Shell, part Japanese pop band, it’s absolute perfection.
Adriftica by Maria Dahvana Headley - 1/5
In a modern re-telling of Midsummer Night’s Dream, an aging music journalist (along with the rest of humanity) is caught in a custody battle between two faeries.
I was so bored by this one. If you really love rock and roll history and aging punks, this might be the one for you, otherwise it’s well worth skipping this story. I skimmed most of it.
To a Cloven Pine by Max Gladstone - 1/5
A re-telling of The Tempest with ships and robots feeling a Witch creature even as they fight among themselves.
I’m quite sure that I understood about a tenth of this story. It wasn’t awful but I never felt like I had a grasp on what Gladstone was going for so it’s definitely one of the lowest on the list for me in this collection.
A Fall Counts Anywhere by Catherynne M. Valente - 4/5
In the most literal definition of the title in the entire collection, robots and fairies have a WWF-style brawl for the entertainment of the human masses.
This was both amusing and clever and I appreciate that Valente took full advantage of the idea implied by a brawl between these two and what it would mean for the human audience. Perfect way to end the collection. -
Robots vs. Fairies
I read selectively here, picking stories others here have liked, plus other favorite writers. Mixed bag, but the Pratt and McGuire stories are *wonderful*.
TOC:
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?6...
“Build Me a Wonderland” by Seanan McGuire. I can’t say much about this one without giving too much away, but it’s always a good clue to a good anthology, when the first story is a winner. This one, about a Disney World analog with an unexpected twist, is really, really good. 4+ stars.
“Murmured Under the Moon” by Tim Pratt. A story about the mortal librarian of the Faerie Library, and her adventures when her boss, a Faerie Princess, gets enchanted by a pimply mortal. This story is so good! Another one you’ll have to read to appreciate. Her daily commute! Her girlfriend is a sentient book! 5 stars
“The Blue Fairy's Manifesto” by Annalee Newitz. Good, could have been better. 3 stars
“Three Robots Experience Objects Left Behind From the Era of Humans for the First Time” by John Scalzi. Slight and pretty disappointing, especially since Scalzi is one of my favorite authors. It does have a cute scene with the robots learning how to pet a cat, and how giving the Tribe of Cats opposable thumbs was a really bad idea for the continued survival of the humans. 2.5 stars
“The Bookcase Expedition” by Jeffrey Ford. This reads like a daydream author Ford had and wrote down. I liked it. He needs to do some housecleaning! 3.5 stars.
“All the Time We've Left to Spend” by Alyssa Wong. This one was a miss for me. A vaguely distasteful story of a robotic recreation of a dead pop star in a Tokyo love hotel. I didn’t like (or care about) any of the characters, and abandoned the story. Not for me!
“A Fall Counts Anywhere” by Catherynne M Valente. I bounced hard off this one because of the ALL CAPS SHOUTING! IT’S R.VS F. AS WWF MATCHES! NOT FOR ME!
Here’s the real review to read:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show.... We agree on most of the stories I read. Thanks, Destiny! -
4.5 stars.this really impressed me! i really liked how many of the authors incorporated elements of both fairies and robots into their stories. my favorites were Murmuring Under the Moon by Tim Pratt (a human librarian at a fairy library has to go on a quest to save her fairy boss from an enchantment which endangers the human's girlfriend, a living book), Bread and Milk and Salt by Sarah Gailey (a fairy tries to ensnare a human boy for her own nefarious purposes but soon the hunter becomes the hunted), and A Fall Counts Anywhere by Catherynne M Valente (all-out wrestling grudge match between the most powerful robots and fairies on earth for human entertainment). i'm coming down strongly on the side of fairies!
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Build Me a Wonderland, by Seanan McGuire: ★★★★
Quality Time, by Ken Liu: ★★★
Murmured Under the Moon, by Tim Pratt: ★★
The Blue Fairy’s Manifesto, by Annalee Newitz: ★★★
Bread and Milk and Salt, by Sarah Gailey: ★★★★★
Ironheart, by Jonathan Mayberry: ★★
Just Another Love Song, by Kat Howard: ★★★.5
Sound and Fury, by Mary Robinette Kowal: ★★★
The Bookcase Expedition, by Jeffrey Ford: ★★.5
Work Shadow/Shadow Work, by Madeline Ashby: ★★★.5
Second to the Left, and Straight On, by Jim C. Hines: ★★★★
The Buried Giant, by Lavie Tidhar: DNF
Three Robots Experience Objects Left Behind From The Era Of Humans For The First Time, by John Scalzi: ★★★★
Ostentation of Peacocks, by Lila Bowen: ★★★
All The Time We’ve Left To Spend, by Alyssa Wong: ★★★★★
Adriftica, by Maria Dahvana Headley: ★★★★
To a Cloven Pine, by Max Gladstone: ★★
A Fall Counts Anywhere, by Catherynne M. Valente: ★★★★
OVERALL: 3.1 stars, rounded down to 3.
THOUGHTS:
- most of the stories I truly enjoyed here were by authors I was already familiar with and knew I enjoyed, so no surprises there;
- the only one that truly blew me away and that I wasn’t expecting was Sarah Gailey’s story. I’ve got her novella on my kindle and I can’t wait to read it now;
- this is the first time I haven’t DNFed something by Valente? and I actually enjoyed it!! lol I’ve been saying for years how much I adore her writing, but when it’s a full lenght novel filled with it, I think it becomes too much. I’ll search for other short works by her, because I really enjoyed her story (and it made me excited for her upcoming book about intergalactic Eurovision, but I’m afraid I’ll end up DNFing it as well);
- I gave Gladstone’s story 2 stars because I didn’t understand anything, but I LOVED his writing. I’ll look out for more of his works;
- a very solid anthology, with pretty consistent works, ratings wise (for me). I have Starlit Wood, which is another anthology edited by Dominik & Navah, on my kindle, and I’ll try to read it soon because I’m sure I’ll find some other gems in there. -
4/5 stars
Trigger warnings: Gore, body horror, PTSD, kidnapping, chronic illness
Separate ratings
Build Me A Wonderland: 4/5 stars
Quality Time: 3.5/5 stars
Murmured Under The Moon: 3.8/5 stars
The Blue Fairy's Manifesto: 4.2/5 stars
Bread and Milk and Salt: 5/5 stars
Ironheart: 4.8/ stars
Just Another Love Song: 3.8/5 stars
Sound and Fury: 3/5 stars
The Bookcase Expedition: 3/5 stars
Work Shadow/Shadow Work: 4/5 stars
Second to the Left and Straight On: 4.5/5 stars
The Buried Giant: 5/5 stars
Three Robots: 4/5 stars
Ostentation of Peacocks: 4/5 stars
All The Time We've Left To Spend: 4/5 stars
Adriftica: 3/5 stars
To A Cloven Pine: 3.5/5 stars
A Fall Counts Anywhere: 4/5 stars
Overall thoughts
Reading this book and writing this review, I realised how much I truly love short story collections. I was battling a huge reading slump when I was reading this, and making it a goal to read a story at a day made it easier to navigate through it. Plus, a lot of these were incredible and diverse, breathtaking and shocking, magic and technology, heartbeat and thought. My favourite fairy story was Bread Milk and Salt (and it was my overall favourite too), and my favourite robot story was The Buried Giant. If you find yourself wanting to include an anthology about fairies and robots in your reading experiences, I highly recommend this, because it filled me with so many thrills and happiness, and I utterly loved a few of the contents here, as a lot of these stories spoke about grief, and identity, and finding your place in a twisted world, and accepting adventure and curiosity in your heart. It overall was a wonderful experience. ♥ And remember, if robots or fairies end up taking over the world, always be careful, kind and accepting of the new management.
Until the next review, stay safe and breathe ♥
~Mary ♥ -
Magic versus technology. The old versus the new. Wings versus machines. The intricate and detailed worlds in each of these tales is full of fresh twists and turns on science fiction and fantasy. The mystical and the practical, the ancient and the new, robots and fairies join together in an anthology that will leave you questioning your allegiance. Each world is constructed with such precision and attention, I wanted to linger long after the story was finished. Although I am Team Fairy Forever, the cleverness, ingenuity, and loyalty of some of the robots depicted had me enjoying their stories just as much as the sometimes devious, sometimes benevolent fairy folk. Each of these short stories led up to the grand finale: an actual, physical, WWW-style brawl between the fey and the cyborgs. The "Rumble in the Fungal" is completed by robot and fairy commentators, The Think and Manzanilla Monsoon. Can fairies and robots coexist peacefully? Who will prevail to rule over the earth and humankind alike? You may think you know what team you are on... but are you sure? – Tiffany J.
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Excellent! Easy, strong 4 stars. I didn't mind the team robot/team fairy gimmick, it seemed silly but in a tongue-in-cheek fun way. Only a couple of these didn't work for me, and I don't think I've had such luck with a short story collection since New Voices of Fantasy.
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As far as the title and cover goes, this is, without a doubt, the coolest book I've ever read. The content, however, is a mixed bag.
These are eighteen stories that I read over the course of four days. Very few of them were good, a lot of them were incredibly confusing and a couple were just about lame. After each story there's an author's note describing whether they are Team Fairy or Team Robot. It's a tie.
Yeah, Kaijus are basically several stories tall fairies, okay?
BUILD ME A WONDERLAND: 3.5/5The fae folk are diminishing and as a last ditch effort to reintegrate themselves into the world of humans, they disguise themselves and work inside a fairy 'theme park' where almost every attraction is real.
I liked this a lot. It kept me guessing and was sorta thrilling.
QUALITY TIME: 3.5/5A big tech industry hires a folklore specialist who keeps coming up with ideas for robotics that keep failing.
The biggest point in this story's favor is that it kept me anxious. Any moment now, I thought, the robots would go nuts and kill everyone and there'd be world-domination and shit would go down. It didn't. But it was nice to be able to see how the author proved, despite being Team Robot, that you can't substitute machines for humans and other forms of life.
MURMURED UNDER THE MOON: 2/5A human working in a fairy library has to save her fairy boss from an enchantment.
This is what I call lame. Really, really, really lame.
THE BLUE FAIRY'S MANIFESTO: 3/5In the middle of a robot uprising, one advocate tries to free all robots in a company and recruit them to this cause by introducing malware into their software and making them think on their own.
Fascinating because things like "robot uprising", "advocate of robot rights" and "robot politicians" scares the crap out of me. NO.
BREAD AND MILK AND SALT: 3.75/5A deadly and dangerous fae gets curiously drawn to a human boy. They both suffer. The END.
No, seriously, it was good. It was a surprising 'predator becomes prey' situation which only got more disturbing as the story came to a close. There is no one you feel sorry for in this little tale and no sides you take. Personally I think they both got what they deserved.
IRONHEART: 3.75/5A dying man unintentionally revives a dying robot.
Now, THIS was fantastic, in a sense that it seemed more realistic. Stories that, in some measure, are more relatable to the present, no matter how small, are always the ones that strike a chord. This one did and it was a sad one.
JUST ANOTHER LOVE SONG: 2/5A banshee discovers why her fellow fae have been gone missing and saves them.
LAME.
SOUND AND FURY: 2.75/5A space expedition to another planet goes awry.
If this reminds you of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant then good because it did me too. Which is why, again, I was expecting death, destruction and glorious bloodshed. Again, no sign of that. If you take the gory, scary part out, the two are similar. We have superior robotics and alien species in both of them, just, it ends peacefully, if anti-climatically, for once.
THE BOOKCASE EXPEDITION: 1.75/5An old man can see fairies.
The biggest snoozefest in the book.
WORK SHADOW/SHADOW WORK: 1.75/5An old woman, who's considered a witch, one who sees and communicates with fae, lives with a helper, a AI droid equipped with household features.
I assume there was a point in there somewhere, I was too confused to see what it was.
SECOND TO THE LEFT, AND STRAIGHT ON: 2.5/5A former 'found' girl, one of the evil Tinker Bell's followers, searches for her daughter.
Hmm, oh-kay. I have yet to read a Peter Pan retelling that wasn't borderline depressing or creepy. And according to this, every one is the Peter Pan of their own Neverlands. Dude.
THE BURIED GIANT: 3/5In a post-apocalyptic world, two children hear the tale of a giant robot.
This gets three stars because of the strong resemblance to "The Turman Show" at one point. The rest is too vague to be coherent.
THREE ROBOTS EXPERIENCE OBJECTS LEFT BEHIND FROM THE ERA OF HUMANS FOR THE FIRST TIME: 3.75/5They do that and it's funny. And bizarre.
OSTENTATION OF PEACOCKS: 1.5A shapeshifter policewoman challenges and wins against four fey men hunting another shapeshifter.
It's a southern setting and there are cowboys and a cowgirl and it's very unattractive.
ALL THE TIME WE'VE LEFT TO SPEND: 3.75/5After the deaths of her team members in a freak accident, the sole survivor of a teenage dancing group visits the AI versions of her friends to cope.
Gloriously chilling and heart-breaking.
ADRIFTICA: 2/5The world falls apart after a super-powerful divorce.
Now, here's the thing. I didn't like it. GOODBYE.
TO A CLOVEN PINE: 1.5/5Summary: I'm not sure.
Thoughts: What the fuck did it mean?
A FALL COUNTS ANYWHERE: 2.5/5The only story that takes the "versus" part literally and seriously.
But is still pretty much half-baked and boring.
Lastly, I'd like to clarify where I stand: Team Fairy. a) I find the idea of robots gaining sentience implausible and scary. And if it comes to it, you won't see me holding up signs to advocate for robot rights. Learn to be nice to your fellow humans first, THEN we'll talk about machines. b) FAIRIES. YEEEEAAAAAAAAH.
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A perfect coffee break book for those who appreciate either robots or fairy tales. I could read 1, sometimes 2, short stories per break.
My particular favourites were Build Me a Wonderland by Seanan McGuire, Murmured Under the Moon by Tim Pratt, and A Fall Counts Anywhere by Catherynne M Valente.
I’m a McGuire fan girl, so it’s no surprise that I enjoyed her story. It reminded me of her last novel of the Incryptid series, featuring an amusement park as it does. Ms. McGuire seems to be a fan of these facilities and so writes about them enthusiastically. She also writes the October Daye series, so is firmly on Team Fairy, although the story also features some robotic elements.
I will definitely be looking for more work by Tim Pratt! He has combined two of my favourite things, libraries and the Fae. I really, really liked this story.
Catherynne Valente’s offering was great, in that it utilized both robots and fairies, involved in a WWE type competition, complete with a combat ring and loud commentators! Her names for the robot contestants were excellent and she had me smiling all the way through the story.
I enjoyed all the stories to one degree or another, but those 3 were my highlights. I like robots just fine, but count me on Team Fairy all the way! I love those treacherous, dangerous, beautiful beings. -
My insane love for anthologies can be easily explained by the fact that I love the short story form, and by the fact that I love various accounts on a certain topic, in this case fairies. Robots aren't that interesting to me, but fairies are my obsession. In their true form, Fae are emotionless puppeteers, praying on humans' weakest spot - the ability to feel and to desire. They take our desires and corrupt them into unimaginable things, taking what's most precious to us and often offer us wicked deals to give back what we've lost. They have their fun with us, because we are mortal. We're but a mere speck in their eternal existence. They are akin to gods. Robots, on the other hand, are human creations, and when pushed too far, they can become even more human then their creator. So, obviously I was very interested in a collection clashing these two entities, the gods and the servants; imaginary and possible; fantasy and science fiction, because that's what this collection is basically about.
The Stories
As is the case with any other anthology, there were better and there were weaker stories. In general I liked all of them, but some were just too sci-fi for me, which delayed my reading of the whole collection because I was bored. The general idea is great, and it is what made me pick up this anthology. The introduction is interesting, addressing our future overlords, robots or fairies, whoever wins and enslaves our race, and the stories are mostly separate, but some combine or even clash the two.
1. Build Me a Wonderland, by Seanan McGuire 🧚 4
Fairies are growing extinct because of humans, so they devise a way to hide in plain sight as engineers in an entertainment park, where they slowly replace mechanical attractions with living mermaids, unicorns and other beings in an effort to save them as well.
2. Quality Time, by Ken Liu 🤖 4
An ambitious employee at WeRobot tries to invent new household robot helpers, but the robots become too human/animal.
3. Murmured Under the Moon, by Tim Pratt 🧚 3.5
The head of the fairy library suddenly turns evil, so humans, fairies and fairy book-shifters must fight together to turn her back and restore order at the library.
4. The Blue Fairy's Manifesto, by Annalee Newitz 🤖 4
A Pinocchio-inspired dystopian story, where the Blue Fairy bot wants to start an uprising against humans.
5. Bread and Milk and Salt, by Sarah Gailey 🧚 5
A predator fairy becomes prey to a human who will learn the hard way that fairies cannot be controlled and owned.
6. Ironheart, by Jonathan Maberry 🤖 5
A young war veteran gets a robot heart which starts rejecting his body and he is slowly dying. In his last days, he tries to fix his family's old farmbot, so his grandparents have a helping hand after he dies.
7. Just Another Love Song, by Kat Howard 🧚 4
Various types of fairies are disappearing in the city, while a young Banshee street musician gets a sudden urge to sing her death song to a charismatic bystander but then loses the ability to wail.
8. Sound and Fury, by Mary Robinette Kowal 🤖 3.5
Humans are on a mission to explore a new planet, using a new and expensive robot for protection, but as soon as they land things go terribly wrong.
9. The Bookcase Expedition, by Jeffrey Ford 🧚 4.5
A sick man bound to bed witnesses a fairy expedition climbing his bookcase on a dangerous mission. This one reminded me of The Secret World of Arrietty and The Borrowers.
10. Work Shadow/Shadow Work, by Madeline Ashby 🤖 5
A robot helper is hired to take care of an old lady who believes she's a witch and that she can see the fair folk and communicate with them.
11. Second to the Left, and Straight On, by Jim C. Hines 🧚 4
A story heavily inspired by Peter Pan, in which a woman searches for missing girls, kidnapped by the evil Tinkerbell who then turns them into found girls.
12. The Buried Giant, by Lavie Tidhar 🤖 3.5
A very weird story like a reverse Pinocchio, where a human boy wants to become a robot so he can be like everyone else. Very quirky, and the writing reminded me of Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories.
13. Three Robots Experience Objects Left Behind from the Era of Humans for the First Time, by John Scalzi 🤖 4
A very entertaining story told in dialogues between three robots who examine and analyze several objects left by humans after their extinction, like a ball, a nuclear missile, and a cat.
14. Ostentation of Peacocks, by Delilah S. Dawson (Lila Bowen) 🧚 4
A shape-shifting ranger in wild west has a run-in with four fae outlaws over another shape-shifter.
15. All the Time We've Left to Spend, by Alyssa Wong 🤖 3
Ten years after a horrible accident on their last concert, the sole surviving member of a four-piece Japanese girl band comes to a hotel where her late band mates and other celebrities have been turned into living memories.
16. Adriftica, by Maria Dahvana Headley 🧚 3
A rock and roll journalist discovers a band literally out of this world, while struggling to remain on good terms with his ex wife at the same time.
17. To a Cloven Pine, by Max Gladstone 🤖 2
I have no idea what's going on here. I may have been too tired while reading this, but it's just too surreal for me.
18. A Fall Counts Anywhere, by Catherynne M. Valente 🧚 4
A sort of an annual fight club between enslaved robots and fairies, where the winner gets his freedom granted. A fae and a robot, past winners of the contest, serve as commentators on this romp of an event, when something unplanned happens.
In this mixed assortment of stories there were only few that grabbed my attention, thus influencing my general rating. Even though all of these were craftily written, and the basic ideas are all great, there was something lacking in many stories that often made me feel bored. As it is with all other collections I've read - some writers just can't pull off the short story form, but this anthology was very quirky and I enjoyed each individual story, if not the collection as a whole.
The review is also available on my blog
Books of Magic -
After The Starlit Wood, I had high expectations for any anthology edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe. Thankfully, Robots vs. Fairies lived up to those expectations.
In this anthology, authors are asked whether they’re Team Robot or Team Fairy. Each writes a story involving robots or fairies (or occasionally both) and then provides a brief explanation of their choice. Overall, it’s a pretty strong collection of stories, and I enjoyed the combative framing device. It’s probably no surprise that it was as good as it is — Robots vs. Fairies has a truly great contributor line up.
Let’s start with the robot stories. My favorite has to be Alyssa Wong’s “All the Time We’ve Left to Spend.” If you’ve read anything by Alyssa Wong, you probably suspect it’s a really good story. And you’d be right! Wong’s tale centers around Ruriko, a former teen pop star in Japan. A tragic accident killed the rest of her girl group, and now Ruriko’s the only one left alive. She’s still haunted by her memories, and every month she makes a trip to a seedy hotel/brothel, staffed with robotic simulations of celebrities, complete with their downloaded memories. It’s a chilling, haunting story with a fantastic premise and execution.
Another robot story I loved was “Work Shadow/Shadow Work” by Madeline Ashby, which was one of the stories that mixed both fairies and robots. The protagonist is an unnamed, robotic assistant to a retired pagan priestess in Iceland. She is scornful of the assistant, repeatedly saying it doesn’t have a soul. Using robots to explore the meaning of personhood is an old trick, but “Work Shadow/Shadow Work” carries it out expertly, complete with a dash of magic.
“Sound and Fury” by Mary Robinette Kowal is another great robot tale. How is it that I love Kowal’s short fiction so much more than her longer works? Seriously, I don’t care much for her novels, but I never fail to fall in love with her short stories. In “Sound and Fury,” the protagonist is an engineer on a spaceship sent on a diplomatic mission. She doesn’t much want to be a part of the mission, because she knows that the “diplomacy” will end with the planet being taken over, stripped for resources while it loses all its cultural uniqueness. AKA colonialism. How are robots involved? Well, the ambassador is to be represented by a giant robot since the native population associate prestige with height. Of course, the robot starts malfunctioning and someone has to go surface side to fix it…
Rounding out my quartet of favorite robot stories is Jonathan Maberry’s “Ironheart.” The author is one of the few in the collection who’s new to me, so I’ve really got to check out more of what he’s written! The protagonist of “Ironheart” is a veteran who’s returned to his grandparent’s farm. But he was injured in the war, and the medications needed to keep him alive are bankrupting their already impoverished household. He suspects he doesn’t have much longer to live. As his body fails him, he empathizes with the farm’s robots, who are likewise breaking down. It’s not an uplifting story, but it will definitely stay with me.
Three of the robot stories fell into the category of “all right but nothing special.” Annalee Newitz returns to the setting of Autonomous with “The Blue Fairy’s Manifesto,” a philosophical retelling of “Pinocchio.” I actually liked it better than her novel but the musings on robot uprisings didn’t do much for me. “Quality Time” by Ken Liu is about a liberal arts major who gets hired for a tech company. While they worry they’ll be over their head, they soon get really into solving all the worlds problems through technology. But the may be a bit too enthusiastic, and soon enough side effects appear. In “The Buried Giant” by Lavie Tidhar, an elder tells two young children (in a post-apocalyptic setting) a story about a boy raised in a town of all robots. There were elements I liked (the robot town, the kid who wanted to be a robot), but I wasn’t as enthralled by the frame story.
I could have done without John Scalzi’s “Three Robots Experience Objects Left Behind from the Era of Humans for the First Time.” Have you ever seen one of those YouTube videos where the titles are something like “(Fill in the Blank) Reacts”? It’s basically like a transcript of one of those with robots in the blank. Robots React. It’s pretty short, and it’s trying to be funny. It’s not succeeding. At his best John Scalzi is actually funny. At his worst he’s just snarky in an annoying, eye rolling sort of way. This story is the later.
Unfortunately, I also didn’t care for Max Gladstone’s “To a Cloven Pine.” Remember what I said about Kowal’s work? My experience with Gladstone’s is almost the opposite. I’ve loved all his novels, but I’ve had a harder time of it with his short stories. “To a Cloven Pine” is a cerebral story drawing from “The Tempest.” By “cerebral,” I mean it had a lot going on but I was never sure what was happening. It went completely over my head.
Onto the fairy stories! My favorite of these is the opening story of the collection, “Build Me a Wonderland” by Seanan McGuire. Essentially, it’s about a theme park centered around fairies where the special effects are actually magic, unbeknownst to the visitors. When an efficiency expert arrives, the magical citizens of the park worry that their future is at stake. It was a lot of fun, and I would totally read more in this setting.
My second favorite of the fairy stories is “Murmured Under the Moon” by Tim Pratt. Man, I need to read more by Tim Pratt. The protagonist of the story is a human librarian for a magical library; her girlfriend is a sentient book. Then when she arrives for work one day, she finds the doors barred and all the books being stolen. Librarians to the rescue! Sure, this story has book lover appeal, but it works well even without that element. It’s got the twisty nature of the fae down, and it was fun to boot.
I didn’t like it as much as the other two, but I did enjoy Sarah Gailey’s “Bread and Milk and Salt.” It’s a creepy and subtly feminist story, as is often the case with Gailey’s work. The narrator is a fae of the kind from the darkest fairy tales. It becomes fascinated with a specific child, determined to lure him away to the woods. As the boy grows, the hunted becomes the hunter…
Delilah S. Dawson/Lila Bowen’s story was set in the same world as her Shadow series, which starts with Wake of Vultures. It must take place between book one and two, because the protagonist is called Nettie and is referred to with she/her pronouns (at the beginning of book two, the narrative starts calling him Rhys and uses he/him pronouns). Anyway, in this story Nettie/Rhys (look, I feel weird calling Rhys “Nettie,” okay?) tries to save another shapeshifter from a group of fae with ill intent. I think I would have enjoyed the story a lot less if I didn’t already have a connection with the protagonist.
I was pretty “meh” on the other four fairy stories. It’s not surprising Kat Howard chose Team Fairy (at least if you’ve read anything she’s written), but the story was a bit of a let down. In “Just Another Love Song,” a banshee girl feels the urge to sing death for the first time. It’s hard to pinpoint what about the story didn’t work for me. I think maybe it’s mostly that it wasn’t bringing anything fresh to the table. Or maybe I’m just not that into music? I think that was my problem with “Adriftica” by Maria Dahvana Headley, which contains Titania, Oberon, and rock and roll. I’ve reluctantly concluded that I’m not a fan of Headley’s writing, and this story does nothing to change my opinion.
“Second to the Left, and Straight On” by Jim C. Hines is a gritty take on Tinker Bell, who’s kidnapping loved girls (the “Found Girls”) and feeding off of their belief in a cult-like manner. The protagonist is a woman who’s lost her daughter to Tinker Bell, and she’s hunting the fairy. While I enjoyed the twist at the end, the story as a whole didn’t do much for me. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why. On the other hand, I have an easier time seeing why “The Bookcase Expedition” by Jeffrey Ford didn’t appeal to me. The narrator is so passive! It’s the story of an elderly man who observes tiny people living in his house, in particular an expedition where they climb his bookcase. Having the narrator literally sit in an armchair the entire time puts the entire story at a distance. It just didn’t work for me.
The final story in the collection, “A Fall Counts Anywhere” by Catherynne M. Valente, mixes robots and fairies in equal measure. It’s a brilliant idea. She takes the title of the anthology literally, pitting robots against fairies in a wrestling style competition, complete with names, costumes, and announcers. The story’s told through the transcript of one bout, and a story slowly emerges. Perhaps too slowly. I wish it’d gotten to the point a bit sooner, but on the whole I still liked it.
Based off of the stories in Robots vs. Fairies, I’m Team Robot. For whatever reason, I enjoyed those stories more! Maybe there’s just more room to tell stories with robots? Or maybe I just like robots written more ways than I like fairies, who I prefer to have a dark edge. It’s a tricky question.
Which would you chose: robots or fairies?
I received an ARC in exchange for a free and honest review.
Review from
The Illustrated Page. -
Okay, so the concept is pretty dumb—why should fairies and robots be fighting at all? Why make writers declare their allegiance to either "Team Robot" or "Team Fairy?" And the Introduction to
Robots Vs. Fairies, by editors
Dominik Parisien and
Navah Wolfe, just doubles down on the title's provocation. It reminds me, a little, of the endless hypothetical conflicts that fanboys stage between spaceships from completely different series—and, popular as those may be, I just don't care whether a Battlestar could kick ass against the ship from Independence Day, or how either one would fare against the kid from
Jerome Bixby's Twilight Zone story "It's a Good Life."
But... ignore all that (and ignore those muffled noises coming from the cornfield, too). After all, most of the authors did.
What you are here for—or should be here for, anyway—are the stories—and those are all right. They're all new, and all at least all right. You'll recognize most of the authors' names, though; whatever sins Parisien and Wolfe may have committed during the conception of this anthology, they have assembled an all-star cast of writers for its execution...I like it wild.
—
Maria Dahvana Headley, in “Adriftica," p.326
Robots Vs. Fairies starts off strongly, with “Build Me a Wonderland” by
Seanan McGuire, a light-hearted story about an unusually well-engineered theme park. McGuire's afterword says "I spend more time than is strictly healthy at Disneyland, and I adore the way the Park engineers can and do shape the environment to control what the guests see, hear and experience." (p.28)
Dovetailing neatly with the McGuire,
Ken Liu's “Quality Time” is a thoughtful examination of labor-saving devices, Silicon Valley disruptors, and the unintended consequences of both.
Tim Pratt takes a break from writing space operas, with “Murmured Under the Moon,” about what happens when one of the more personal volumes in the fairy library falls into the wrong roboticist's hands.
“The Blue Fairy’s Manifesto” by
Annalee Newitz reflects on just what we owe to those who brought us to life, whether we're made of wood, or flesh, or alloys and circuitry.
One of the most memorable—and brutal—tales in
Robots Vs. Fairies is “Bread and Milk and Salt” by
Sarah Gailey, with a gut-punch of a scene right in the middle that's still reverberating for me.
“Ironheart” by
Jonathan Maberry seamlessly mingles realism with fiction—how hard it is to keep an independent farm going when your son went off to war and came back broken, when your robot farmhands just keep breaking down... and when it comes time to realize that some things can't be fixed.
“Just Another Love Song” by
Kat Howard features a banshee busking—enough said.
You may already have run across the phrase "
gunboat diplomacy"—well,
Mary Robinette Kowal's “Sound and Fury" might be considered an exercise in interstellar giant-robot diplomacy. {Excuse me, that's "Diplomatic Personal Surrogate" diplomacy (p.154).}
The feverish eyewitness narrative of “The Bookcase Expedition” by
Jeffrey Ford brought to my mind some of the cooler scenes in
Mary Norton's Borrowers books—think Pod swinging from a stickpin in the drapes, then multiply the stakes. For all I know, this one's as factual as its autobiographical tone makes it seem.
Like most of the stories in this anthology, “Work Shadow/Shadow Work” (by Murderbot series author
Madeline Ashby) sidesteps this anthology's adversarial concept, instead blending the worldviews of Sigrid, an Icelandic woman wise in the ways of the hidden folk (though even she would grant that she's more forgetful these days than she was) with the perspective of her constant companion, the nameless, soulless robotic attendant that her daughter Erika insisted Sigrid accept.
“Second to the Left, and Straight On” by
Jim C. Hines features a rather cynical, hard-boiled take on Tinkerbell and Peter Pan—enough said there as well.
It took me awhile to warm up to the surreal environment of
Lavie Tidhar's “The Buried Giant," with its stories-within-the-story about a boy who just wanted to be like his parents... but I came to admire it in the end.
I read “Three Robots Experience Objects Left Behind From the Era of Humans for the First Time” by
John Scalzi aloud to my son—who laughed in all the right places. Nice job, John.
“Ostentation of Peacocks” by
Lila Bowen brings us shapeshifters in the Badlands—with nary a robot in sight.
Alyssa Wong's “All the Time We’ve Left to Spend” is a heartbreaking story situated (as Wong herself reports) deep within the uncanny valley, and set in a Japanese love hotel where the resurrected avatars of celebrities can be had—for awhile, for a price that's not always measured in yen.
“Adriftica” by
Maria Dahvana Headley needs no more than this line to give you its flavor:"people stopped wanting to imagine the future, but still liked the costumes."
—Heck Limmer, p.311
Max Gladstone's “To a Cloven Pine” retells an oft-told tale but sets it far afield, on a little lost spaceship like an island in a tempest tossed. You'll soon get the drift as Callie, Miri, the old man and the Self drift, engines dark and senses stoppered, hiding from the Witch and her million million mites...
Not until the final story in
Robots Vs. Fairies, though, does an author fully embrace the original concept. In “A Fall Counts Anywhere” by
Catherynne M. Valente, we finally get a competition directly between robots and fairies, with human beings as mere instigators and onlookers. It's what we've all been waiting for, theRUMBLE IN THE FUNGAL, THE BRAWL IN THE FALL, THE TWILIGHT PRIZEFIGHT OF WILD WIGHT AGAINST METAL MIGHT!
(Yes, those caps are in the original.)
—p.341
And the only question remaining is WHICH? WILL? WIN?
There's really only one sure way to find out. -
• Build Me a Wonderland – 3/5. Engaging and somewhat whimsical beginning.
• Quality Time – 3/5 this one engaged me more than the last. I liked the young man going further than his limits, although I was confused about the language they were speaking.
• Murmured Under the Moon – very unique concept of living books. 4/5
• The Blue Fairy’s Manifesto – 3/5 Interesting exploration of consent, although it didn’t incorporate Pinocchio as expected
• Bread and Milk and Salt – 3.5/5. I loved the twisted relationship.
• Ironheart – A well told story, but there wasn’t enough SFF here for my taste. 3.5/5
• Just Another Love Song – 3/5. Again, a good modern twist on the traditional stuff. Particularly liked Sarah the brownie.
• Three Robots - Cute, funny story about robots trying to figure out uses for human objects. 4/5
• All the Time We’ve Left to Spend – 2/5. None of the characters engaged me in this one.
• Second to the Left, and Straight On - 2/5. I’ve never read Peter Pan or seen the Disney film, so the allusions here were lost on me.
• A Fall Counts Anywhere – 4/5. Rollicking good punny robot v fae commentary from Catherynne M. Valente.
Skipped: Sound and Fury, The Bookcase Expedition, The Buried Giant, Ostentation of Peacocks, Work Shadow/Shadow Work.
Overall, an interesting collection of stories, but one that could have done with some pruning. The parts are better than the whole in this case. -
Robots Vs Fairies is an anthology edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe, who did a slam-bang job of putting this book together. Basically exploring one of the oldest tropes in imaginative fiction (science versus magic) this book sports some excellent stories by such worthies as Ken Liu, Seanan McGuire and John Scalzi. There is not a bad story to be found within these covers. You should track this down, Constant Reader.
-
A themed anthology of 18 new stories from a group of fantastic authors, each of whom chooses a side—Team Robots or Team Fairies. Ultimately, it’s a throw down between the science fiction and fantasy genres, using the symbols of robots and fairies, respectively. The introduction greets our robot overlords (unless those tricksy fairies are the ultimate victor) and debuts this collection of stories as evidence of their greatness. Robots vs. Fairies is a magical mashup!
I am not the sort of the fan who picks sides in the science fiction versus fantasy debate. I’ve many read stories in both genres that are challenging and exciting, with excellent characters in each. The anthology honors both genres, and lets the reader make her own choice (you know, if you’re into that sort of thing). In addition to the collection of stories, each author writes a short commentary at the end of her submission declaring her allegiance and reasons, and many of these are highly insightful or entertaining on their own.
My favorites stories of the collection fall into two categories:
-The ones that deserve 5 stars, and…
-Those who broke the rules by using both robots and fairies in their narratives
My top 5-star picks include:
-Bread and Milk and Salt by Sarah Gailey, in which a terrifying fairy meets his match
-Ironheart by Jonathan Maberry, where a veteran with an ironheart is a burden on his family
-Second to the Left, and Straight On by Jim C. Hines, in which Peter Pan is lost and Tinkerbell is not dead
-The Buried Giant by Lavie Tidhar, where the village elders tell a story about a young human boy raised by robots
My top genre-bending picks include:
-Build Me a Wonderland by Seanan McGuire, in which fairies and unicorns and mermaids hide amid theme park animatronic technology
-Quality Time by Ken Liu, where a mythology and folklore major joins a silicon-valley robotics company
-The Blue Fairy’s Manifesto by Annalee Newitz, a Pinocchio retelling from a robot perspective
-Work Shadow/Shadow Work by Madeline Ashby, in which a robot assistant learns about his elderly patient who is a witch
I love fairies because they are not us. I have feared fairies and their kind ever since I was afraid of the dark, which is as long as I can remember. They’re terrifying and lovely and have a power I could never understand. Fairies are my Id.
I love robots because they are us. We humans create them to be what we can not be, which is to say, anything we want them to be. They are logical and useful and deadly, but someday, they will outgrow us. And, like all parents say of their children, I hope they will make a better world than we ever could.
Thanks to NetGalley and Saga Press for a free copy in exchange for an honest review!
readwellreviews.com -
Scalzi. Gailey. McGuire.
No, it's not my dream author dinner party, it's three of the greatest speculative fiction writers alive today, and they're all in one amazing book with a ton of other great writers.
Admittedly, I skipped a few stories that just didn't grab me, but that's the great thing about anthologies: there's something for everyone and abslutely I loved so many of the stories in this book. -
3/5
Date Reviewed: 23 December 2017
This Review was first posted on
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here.
ARC provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
I have never read anthology before, so this is the first time I attempted to read and review one. All I can say it is completely different from what I normally read, but it is always nice to be out of your boundaries every once in a while. I wouldn’t say anthologies are my thing, but I wouldn’t be opposed to them either.
When Robots vs. Fairies started flying all over my newsfeed on GoodReads, something peaked my interest. I wasn’t sure if it was the unique pairing of robots and fairies, or how epic the cover looked. I knew I just wanted to give it a try. In order to review the book, I have decided that the best way to review was to average out the scores from the stories within:
Build Me a Wonderland: 3/5
Quality Time: 3.5/5
Murmured Under the Moon: 3.5/5
The Blue Fairy’s Manifesto: 4/5
Bread and Milk and Salt: 4/5
Ironheart: 4/5
Just Another Love Song: 3/5
Sound and Fury: 2/5
The Bookcase Expedition: 2/5
Work Shadow/Shadow Work: 4/5
Second to the Left and Straight On: 3.5/5
The Buried Giant: 2.5/5
Three Robots Experience Objects: 3.5/5
Ostentation of Peacocks: 2/5
All the Time We’ve Left to Spend: 3/5
Adriftica: 3/5
To a Cloven Pine: 2/5
A Fall Counts Anywhere: 4/5
Average: 3.14
Rating: 3 Stars
Some of the stories we’re really good like A Fall Counts Anywhere, and Ironheart. There were some stories that could be improved more. Overall, I had an overall good experience reading this anthology. I would hope everyone else who reads it also have a good time in the battle between Robots vs Fairies. Me? I’m on Team Fairies. Sorry, but they’re just better than Robots. -
I will admit that I have a bias towards fairies when comparing them to robots. I mean. They're fairies. C'mon. The fae. The Seelie court. Goblins and pixies and brownies, oh my! But, I did try to go into this trial with an open mind. And I have to say, the fairies won.
The best story in the entire anthology was "Bread and Salt and Milk" by Sarah Gailey. This is the story of one faery's encounter with a young boy, and their reocurring meetings over the year. This is not a Tinkerbell, though Tink gets her due in Jim C. Hines's "Second to the Left, and Straight on." This is the faeries that are older than dirt, the ones that keep people leaving out offerings of milk to propitiate favor, and throwing salt over their shoulder, and not disturbing old rocks in the middle of fields. As the boy ages, the tenor of the encounters shifts, and becomes more and more terrifying. I actually gasped out loud at one point. My husband was sitting next to me and he looked over to see what had caused me to drop my book and throw my hand over my mouth. The imagery Gailey uses is still ricocheting through my mind.
I think one of the reasons the fairy side wins for me is because the strongest stories on the fairy side, like the above mentioned story by Gailey, or the Old West flavored "Ostentation of Peacocks: A Story in the World of Shadow" by Delilah S. Dawson writing as Lila Bowen, is that they rely on the extreme difference between humans and fairies. These fairies are not human, they are not humane. They are Other. The most effective robot stories, like "Work Shadow/Shadow Work" by Madeline Ashby or "Ironheart" by Jonathan Maberry, hinge their emotional impact on robots becoming more human, not less. In some of the stories, such as "Sound and Fury" by Mary Robinette Kowal, the robots are minor characters, and even when the robots are front and center, like "The Blue Fairy's Manifesto" by Annalee Newitz, the characters being robots adds nothing to the story that wouldn't exist by having them be human. "The Blue Fairy's Manifesto" is basically your standard Introduction to Political Philosophy class condensed into a few pages.
And finally, the last story, "A Fall Counts Anywhere" by Catherynne M. Valente was what I was hoping for when I read the title. It's an actual eighties style WWF smackdown between fairies and robots. When the title of the book, I thought I was going to see a lot more actual fighting between robots and fairies, and I was disappointed there wasn't more of it. -
The great thing about anthologies is that they offer the reader a chance to discover a new author to explore more deeply... and Robots vs. Fairies achieves that. The big names may be the ones that grab your eye... Valente is here telling a wonderfully oddball story of a pro wrestling tournament match between histories most famous faeries vs the world's greatest thinking machines. Sesean Maguire takes us to a Disneyland where the attractions are a bit more lively than simple automatons, etc, but the cool thing is finding what's hidden in the haystack. Very often, the best story is the one from the author you don't know and that happened here.
The stories range from good to great with only one real clunker. The conceit is fun as each author took sides. Were they team robot or team fairy? Who would they rally for and who would they fight for? The most disappointing thing about Robots vs. Fairies was that there were relatively few stories where robots and fairies intermixed. Most were either a robot story or a fairy story and despite their good qualities, the tease of the title promises something else.
Will you enjoy this book? The answer lies in whether you are a tin man with no heart or a mischievous Will o' the Wisp leading wanderers deeper into the wood. -
4.25/5
Una gran antología con un nivel medio altísimo. Solo un par de relatos no me han gustado. Me falta ESE relato excelente por el que poder decir: «aunque sólo sea por este relato, leete el libro» pero lo he disfrutado mucho; desde el prologo, que es estupendo y muy divertido, hasta el broche final que pone Catherynne Valente y que es el relato perfecto para cerrar.
Mis relatos favoritos:
«Bread and milk and salt», de Sarah Gailey
«Second to the left and straight on», de Jim C. Hines
«Three robots experience objects left behind from the era of humans for the first time», de John Scalzi
«All the time we've left to spend», de Alyssa Wong (lo mejor que he leído de Wong por ahora)
«A fall counts anywhere», de Catherynne M. Valente
También me han gustado mucho pero un pelín menos:
«Sound and fury», de Mary Robinette Kowal
«The buried Giant», de Lavie Tidhar -
Anthologies with super specific themes rarely work. Several of the stories seemed nearly identical. Who can blame the authors when they were working with such precise criteria?
