Let’s take that business of remote-controlled weapons, for example. In other words, Conklin’s archaic-sounding “thinking machines” turns out to be one of the few classic SF ideas that doesn’t require a fillip of wishful thinking, that we can actually do something about, and that we in fact already have. With robots, though, what once looked like magical thinking – the casual assumption that if you build something that looks like a human it will be able to think like a human, perhaps aided by a bit of handwaving about positronic brains and such – is already with us in everything from neural networks, to service and manufacturing bots, to remote-controlled weapons. The fact is that we haven’t made significant real-world progress in these areas since they became staples a century or so ago (and we aren’t likely to). There has always been a degree of magical thinking baked into SF’s favorite tropes: of course we’ll be able to travel faster than light, or go back and forth in time, or develop powers of telepathy or telekinesis we just haven’t figured out how yet. It’s an intriguing argument, but the sophisticated AIs in the stories he presents – some of which strike disarmingly close to home – suggest there might be another factor at work. In his introduction, Strahan argues that the continuing popularity of robots may be partly due to our failure to find evidence of other intelligent life in the universe, and so we create artificial intelligence just to keep from feeling lonely.

Anthologies about robots may be nearly as important in SF history as individual novels and stories, from one of the earliest, Groff Conklin’s 1954 Science-Fiction Thinking Machines (which included Capek’s play, probably presented for the first time in the context of genre SF) to the more recent and playful (such as Dominik Parisien & Navah Wolfe’s Robots vs. Hamilton, Alastair Reynolds, Ian McLeod), more recently ascendant (Ken Liu, Annalee Newitz, Brooke Bolander), and broadly international (Vina Jie-Min Prasad, Saad Z. will have us reconsidering the long and varied history of robots in SF, and an excellent way to start that conversation is by reading Jonathan Strahan’s Made to Order: Robots and Revolution, which brings together 16 original stories from writers long established (Peter F.

I suppose it’s both appropriate and inevitable that the coming centennial of Karel Capek’s R.U.R.

Made to Order: Robots and Revolution, Jonathan Strahan, ed.

Made to Order by Jonathan Strahan