Six Great Stories about Robots

The Bossy Bookworm
Jun 6
6 min read

The Robot Books

It's been a long time since I've talked about science fiction and robot stories. I just love a good artificial intelligence or robot-focused story that explores what it means to be human--and allows creatures existing outside of that designation to puzzle over what makes humans tick.

If you like books like this, you might also want to check out the Greedy Reading List Six Great Books about Robots, Humans and Alien Life, and AI. And you can find Bossy science-fiction favorites at this link.

Have you read any of these books? Which other books should I add to my to-read robot book list?

01 The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers #1) by Becky Chambers

Chambers's science fiction is full of heart, heartbreak, and hope--with a fascinating backdrop of space travel and interspecies relations.

This is one of two Becky Chambers books on this short list.

In The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, the first science fiction title in Becky Chambers's Wayfarers series, young Rosemary feels lucky to have landed the job of clerk for the quirky, ragtag, but welcoming crew of the Wayfarer ship.

The group is made up of various creatures from around the galaxy, and they've already built bonds through working together for ages. Yet they make room in the mix for Rosemary, who's grateful--and who's frankly glad to leave her significant personal troubles behind.

Chambers's story is science fiction that's full of heart, heartbreak, and hope. The book feels much more focused on the characters--with a backdrop of space travel and otherworldly creatures--than on exploration or adventure. Much of the story is about acceptance and openness and finding ways to get along. Interspecies relations are prickly, comfortable, romantic, puzzling, or all of the above.

I love that the crew of the Wayfarer feels like a close-knit group of summer camp counselors somehow, palling around, sometimes irritating each other, each with special gifts and the ability and desire to help crewmates reach their full potentials, emotionally or otherwise.

I just adored this. For my full review, check out The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.

02 Annie Bot by Sierra Greer

This story features supporting AI and robot characters in an intriguing futuristic setting. Lora Beth Johnson hooked me immediately with the premise of Goddess in the Machine and with main protagonist Andra's voice.

Teenage Andra wakes up after being cryogenically preserved for a century-long journey to a new planet. She's a little creaky and sore, sure, but she's ready to be reunited with the team, which includes her mother and the rest of her family, plus many others involved in the complex project. They'll begin the work of bravely populating and building a society on this new planet.

But Andra soon realizes she wasn't sleeping for 100 years. She was asleep for 1,000. The people, terrain, and language are not what she studied for or expected, everyone she once knew has already lived and died--oh, and the general population, whoever they are, thinks she's a goddess, and they've been waiting excitedly for her to wake up and save them.

There's a twist/double twist in Goddess in the Machine that I didn't see coming, and I found the whole story compelling.

For my full review, please see Goddess in the Machine. The sequel to this book is Devil in the Device.

03 Nightwatch on the Hinterlands by K. Eason

An unlikely pair who get on each other's nerves work together to determine who is responsible for a puzzling murder and other strange occurrences that threaten their world.

In K. Eason's science fiction mystery Nightwatch on the Hinterlands, a templar, Iari, and a spy, Gaer, have built a somewhat formal working relationship. Neither is quite sure where the other's loyalties begin and end, nor are they intimately acquainted with the other's history or personal motivations.

They begin to forge a stronger bond (despite how irritating they each find the other), but there's no time to waste, because high-stakes danger is quickly building to a crisis point around them.

Searching for the truth leads the unlikely duo on a search to uncover who is controlling a riev that shouldn't have been capable of killing, but did--and they're led to someone with nefarious goals that go much farther and are much more elaborately imagined than one isolated killing.

I think this was because of personal timing and my reading-during-vacation distraction circumstances, but I did have ongoing trouble following the logistics and political machinations and motivations here.

It didn't matter, though, because I was most invested in and engaged by the interplay of characters--particularly the grudging friendship and grumpily built but rock-solid loyalty between Iari and Gaer. And I was wholly charmed by the rievs (former battle robots) who mysteriously show sentience and surprising preferences for personal pronouns, and who are set on reinventing themselves in drastic fashion.

Click here for my full review of Nightwatch on the Hinterlands.

04 August Kitko and the Mechas from Space (Starmetal Symphony #1) by Alex White

White's first Starmetal Symphony installment offers deadly deep-space robots, showcases the power of music, and illustrates how love can persist even in the face of imminent demise. I loved the main characters' fashion, banter, and stubbornness.

Gus is a jazz pianist whose biggest hope for the pending end of the world was to play at the most epic goodbye party of all time. After all, the Vanguards, giant, deadly AI robots, are headed from deep space to destroy Earth at any moment.

But when the Vanguards arrive, the sudden, brutal ending Gus has envisioned for himself doesn't happen. Instead, Gus and a few other Earthlings are pulled in by a small group of traitorous Vanguards--and tasked with being modified, temporarily melded with the robots, battling other robots--and saving all of humanity.

The robots and the imminent demise of the human race that the robots seem perched to enact serve as a catalyst for the human main characters to assess their own purposes and consider what makes life worth living. They forge desperate, deep connections and struggle with loss and an uncertain future, and I loved the impractical, invigorating, stubborn love in the book.

I really enjoyed Alex White's Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe, the first in the Salvagers series. Click here for my full review of August Kitko and the Mechas from Space.

05 Activation Degradation by Marina J. Lostetter

Lostetter's standalone science fiction is a story about robots, a ragtag space crew, friends like family, and reimagining one's place in the universe.

Activation Degradation begins with Unit Four's initial activation. It has just become sentient, and like its robot sisters, it has been programmed to fight the aliens currently attacking its ship.

But whether it's a glitch or instincts that shouldn't be possible, Unit Four realizes that the situation as its handler has explained it doesn't quite add up.

When Unit Four is taken onto the enemy alien ship as a prisoner and is unable to communicate with its handler, it begins to understand that all is not black and white, and that it may need to rethink all it has been taught to believe.

Lostetter's book started off with a lot of logistics that slowed things for me, but as of page 66 the action and character development and exploration of morality and friendship and life purpose began clicking along.

Activation Degradation explores what makes a person worth saving--or simply existing--as well as unconventional love and relationships, personal responsibility, sacrifice and bravery, and staying open to revolutionarily new ideas and ways of looking at the world--and the universe.

Click here for my full review of Activation Degradation.

06 Hum by Helen Phillips

The dystopian future of Hum is haunting in its familiar elements, its plausible, terrible climate-change effects, the extreme reliance on technology, and the chilling power of the ubiquitous AI hums who are constantly manipulating the extensive information they gather.

After years working to advance artificial intelligence in a near-future dystopian world decimated by climate change, May's own job becomes obsolete.

Intelligent robots, "hums," have taken over much of the workforce, with their relentless advertisements and sales pitches, manipulative impressions of caring (also meant to promote sales of various items), and their extensive surveillance capabilities.

May finds herself willing to surgically alter her facial features for a sum that might keep her family financially stable for a time. But when she dares to dream of a brief family escape to a nature-filled wonderland (molded on tales they've heard of a lush, past world), her lack of control over her family's fate is shown to be terrifyingly tenuous.

The power of social media and the impact of resulting perceptions in the book are chilling--and chillingly familiar.

For my full review, please check out Hum.