Andrew Skinner now works as an archaeologist and anthropologist, and is interested in folklore, rain-making arts, and resistance.Steel Frame is his first novel.
At Tor.com, Skinner tagged "five stories about the lives of artificial objects, finding their own paths, making their own mistakes," including:
Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha LeeRead about the other entries on the list.
The artificial lives I’ve mentioned so far have had some strain of the familiar, in whole or in part. The objects we have nurtured into sentience, or brought to it by accident; things built on body-systems that could easily pass as our own. In Ninefox Gambit, we catch glimpses of lives very much unlike our own. In thebackground of this world, we see servitors, the social equivalent of your toaster. They are present in every part of daily life; surprisingly complex machines that spend their lives cleaning up after human beings, and doing the menial jobs that keep society running.
What we learn, as Ninefox Gambit plays out, is that servitors are a society of artificial objects; their artificial lives playing out behind bulkheads, in service tunnels, and across network frequencies. All with their own motives, and their own politics. What’s more, this society is everywhere humanity goes, and this is what makes them so potent. They are a piece of the everyday; the powerful little things that share our lives, able to change the course of history.
Yoon Ha Lee's Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire series is among Jenn Lyons's five villains who see themselves as heroes, Jeff Somers's fifty greatest debut sci-fi and fantasy novels ever written and T.W. O'Brien's five recent books that explore the secret lives of robots.
My Book, The Movie: Ninefox Gambit.
--Marshal Zeringue