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elliel_nook 's review for:
Maradia's Robot Emporium
by Mary E. Lowd
I requested and received this book from BookSirens. My opinions are my own.
I have mixed feelings about this book. It's one of the first ARCs I've ever received that I regretted requesting but actually finished.
(Mostly because I needed it to fill a prompt in my local library's annual reading challenge. But also because I didn't read the dedication page until after I finished the book.)
The author dedicated the book to famous media robots, which makes sense and is kind of cute. But she also didicated this book to specifically generative AI. The dedication quote menti ned generative AI :"But also for MegaHAL, DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Suno, ChatGPT, Claude, and all the other little seeds just beginning to grow." As a creative person I don't know how to feel about that. The aut or could have just been inspired to write this book about robots and AI because of these AIs. But... What if? I don't know I'm conflicted.
This book was thought provoking and had many examples of bigotry, micro-aggressions, gender & self expression as told through robots & AI characters. But I also hated Maradia after reading the story Xeno-Nativity".
I put down the book for over a week and nearly DNFed it because of this story. There was one quote from "Xen -Nativity" in particular that made him rage boiled up from the very depths of my childhood trauma. The quote: "By growing a child’s body with her own, she was giving it a gift. Once the child was born, it would feel indebted—no, grateful—to her. It would be hers. It would belong to her". This entire story made me feel uneasy for more reason than can be inferred by this quote alone. this story put me in a reading slump. I did not want to pick up any book after reading this story.
However, I did finish the book. And while I loved characters like Gerangelo and Rariel 77 I didn't like the book as a whole. There were multiple instances where it was very repetitive. I know that this is a collection of mostly previously published stories. But, I hated hearing Gerangelo's backstory every time he was in a story. Which was often. Something else that bugged me was several of the stories featured/are told by characters whose ending you don't get to see. For example, the AIs from the first few stories, Nancy, the egg, and the horse-like dancers.
It was overall a little disappointing. I don't think I'll be reading more of this author's work.
I have mixed feelings about this book. It's one of the first ARCs I've ever received that I regretted requesting but actually finished.
(Mostly because I needed it to fill a prompt in my local library's annual reading challenge. But also because I didn't read the dedication page until after I finished the book.)
The author dedicated the book to famous media robots, which makes sense and is kind of cute. But she also didicated this book to specifically generative AI. The dedication quote menti ned generative AI :"But also for MegaHAL, DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Suno, ChatGPT, Claude, and all the other little seeds just beginning to grow." As a creative person I don't know how to feel about that. The aut or could have just been inspired to write this book about robots and AI because of these AIs. But... What if? I don't know I'm conflicted.
This book was thought provoking and had many examples of bigotry, micro-aggressions, gender & self expression as told through robots & AI characters. But I also hated Maradia after reading the story Xeno-Nativity".
I put down the book for over a week and nearly DNFed it because of this story. There was one quote from "Xen -Nativity" in particular that made him rage boiled up from the very depths of my childhood trauma. The quote: "By growing a child’s body with her own, she was giving it a gift. Once the child was born, it would feel indebted—no, grateful—to her. It would be hers. It would belong to her". This entire story made me feel uneasy for more reason than can be inferred by this quote alone. this story put me in a reading slump. I did not want to pick up any book after reading this story.
However, I did finish the book. And while I loved characters like Gerangelo and Rariel 77 I didn't like the book as a whole. There were multiple instances where it was very repetitive. I know that this is a collection of mostly previously published stories. But, I hated hearing Gerangelo's backstory every time he was in a story. Which was often. Something else that bugged me was several of the stories featured/are told by characters whose ending you don't get to see. For example, the AIs from the first few stories, Nancy, the egg, and the horse-like dancers.
It was overall a little disappointing. I don't think I'll be reading more of this author's work.