Posted on [August 18, 2026](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/08/18/the-big-idea-james-patrick-kelly-2/)
Posted by [Athena Scalzi](https://whatever.scalzi.com/author/athenascalzi/)
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Humans have been fascinated by robots for as long as the idea of a machine with a heart has existed. Hugo award-winning author James Patrick Kelly is no exception, evidenced by his newest collection of short stories all about robots and AI. He even threw in two brand new pieces just for The Book of Bots, so even if you’re a long time fan you won’t want to miss this release.
JAMES PATRICK KELLY:
It’s 2026 and we’ve got robots. We’ve got AI. We‘ve got digital agents. Why are we surprised?
Should we blame ourselves, fellow citizens of the science fiction community? Maybe. Weren’t our writers supposed to prepare us for these garrulous chatbots? LLMs that could make a movie in a minute from a single prompt? Shouldn’t readers have voted with their credit cards for the kinds of cutting edge stories that acknowledged that Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws were at best aspirational? I knew Isaac, and revere him as giant of the Golden Age, but I Robot was published in 1950.
And why did we all make fun of those working to develop AI when they made predictions about the next breakthrough? Remember the old tech-industry wisecrack? AI is ten years away — always has been, always will be. The problem was that we didn’t know what AI meant back when and we’re not one hundred percent sure what it means today. But believe this: the things our digital constructs can do right now would have astonished most of the naysayers of the last century.
As long as we’re pointing fingers, let me point at myself. The first robot story in my new collection, The Book Of Bots, is the Locus Award winning “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” published in 1997. It’s an emotional, character-driven tale about a middle-aged woman who reluctantly visits her long estranged father. She discovers that he’s suffering from dementia and that his caregiver is a robot child built to resemble her at age seven.
It’s not the first robot surrogate story ever, but what sets it apart is that the robot assumes the child identity while interacting with the confused father but has its own agenda when talking to the real daughter. And part of their fraught conversation is about ownership, since the robot will be part of the estate when the father dies. Make no mistake: this is a robot story in the Asimov tradition, published in the magazine that bears his name. But Isaac devised his laws in part to defuse the slave narrative in robot literature, but it comes up here and again in the other stories in The Book of Bots.
There are twelve robot and AI stories in the collection. They are about sentient houses and cars and spaceships. There’s a trio of companion bots that have more on their minds than mere sex and a couple of time travelling robots. Some of the stories were award winners or nominees; many were Best of the Year selections. I mention this not so much to boast (of course that’s what I am doing!) but to make the point that this book is very much in the mainstream of genre thinking about robotics and artificial intelligence.
The most recent story, “Je Ne Regrette Rien,” just published in Clarkesworld in this January, is set in a Chinese research facility run by China’s largest robot company. At present the West may be slightly ahead of China in AI development, while the Chinese are well ahead of us in deploying AI in humanoid bodies. Most of the prototype robots in the story are enhanced industrial robots, loaded over time into increasingly advanced bodies, some including ultra-realistic humanoid robots capable of self-programming. Changing bodies changes who the robots are, so while they remember all their previous “lives,” it is as if they are remembering the history of a stranger. Questions of identity often come up in my bot stories.
The stories in The Book Of Bots are presented in chronological order to help make the point that thinking about robots has changed a lot over the last three decades. To document my own evolution on artificial intelligence, I wrote two new nonfiction pieces for the book. “The Comedy of Science” is a look at the history of robots and AI in science fiction based on my own extensive (but by no means comprehensive) reading.
You want to know my influences? Here they are! “Robots on Parade 2026” is science journalism that looks at the current state of robotics and attempts to balance the techbros and their hyperbolic promises against the prophets of AI cultural doom. I’ve been writing a column about sf and the internet for Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine for more issues than I care to remember and both pieces represent the fruits of my own best research for that column and serve as guides to the big ideas that have informed these stories.
Despite all the thought I’ve put into this book, I still haven’t wrapped my head around AI. I take cold comfort in observing that people smarter than me are flummoxed too. But The Book Of Bots is the best I’ve got.
For now. **The Book of Bots: **Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop
**Author socials: **Website|Facebook