Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽'s Reviews > Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 148, January 2019

3.5 star average for the two stories I've read in this issue so far, which are both free online here at Clarkesworld magazine. Reviews first posted on Fantasy Literature:

3 stars for "Fire in the Bone" by Ray Nayler, a humans-vs.-robots tale: While robots work in the field harvesting pakata for the great harvest ship that looms overhead, the unnamed narrator watches them. He somewhat impatiently listens to the philosophical musings of an acquaintance, Albert, who obliquely warns him of youthful desires that should be put away. But the narrator isn’t listening; he’s much more interested in his upcoming clandestine meeting with his forbidden lover … a robot. She meets him in the hallway, and they make arrangements to meet after the upcoming “ritual meal.”

The little church where they meet has stained glass windows that tell a story of his ancestors’ landing on this planet and their dealing with an uprising of the robots. (Some strange Christian symbolism here, BTW.) Despite his love for the robot, the narrator is uneasy about the future. But there are more reasons to be uneasy than he realizes.

It’s an interesting story, but relies too heavily on the surprise factor of an event toward the end, building up to that climactic point. It wasn’t a particularly successful build-up for me, because several events in the story seemed either highly improbable in light of the final reveal (view spoiler)[why would robots need a giant harvest ship? (hide spoiler)]or simply innately unlikely.

4 stars for "They Have All One Breath" by Karl Bunker. It's a reprint from the Dec. 2016 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction and I've posted my review there, but I'll copy it here for convenience:

James is walking down the street late one night when he meets an old friend, Ivan. They walk together toward their apartment building, talking about the huge changes that have occurred ever since the AIs started taking over. It began with weapons falling apart in soldiers’ hands and missiles and tanks fizzling out and dying, averting a war in the Middle East. At the same time, flying bots were dropping tons of food and other necessities on refugee camps to alleviate the suffering.

No one claimed ownership of these Good Samaritan cargo-bots, nor of the gremlinesque nanoes that were screwing up the mechanisms of war. It soon became known that these were machines built and run by other machines. It was becoming undeniably evident that something new was moving upon the face of the land. Indeed, that the world was being rebuilt around us, disassembled and reassembled under our feet. The AIs were taking over, and they were changing the rules.

Over the next months and years the AIs continue changing our world in ways that seem clearly benevolent, or at least intended to improve society. They create nano-bots that cure disease, they solve worldwide problems of hunger and needs, and resolve other problems … often in surprising ways. But not everyone is fully on board with the actions of “the Machine.”

“They Have All One Breath” is strongly reminiscent of Jack Williamson’s well-known classic 1947 novelette With Folded Hands..., but takes a somewhat more ambivalent, nuanced approach to the takeover of society by robots. Karl Bunker effectively uses flashbacks to relate the details of the takeover by the AIs, with the division of opinion about the benefits of the takeover being represented by James and his former partner Lisa. Though Bunker owes a major conceptual debt to Williamson, his story is a thought-provoking and well-written one that’s worth reading.

Content note: several F-bombs.