Robot Uprisings (Vintage Original)
From the Terminator and Matrix movies to Isaac Asimov’s robot novels, the theme of man’s mechanistic inventions turning against their creators has been a popular one in science fiction both on the page and in film for decades.  Capitalizing on the still high demand for these apocalyptic scenarios, editors Wilson and Adams offer a colorful mix of cutting-edge original tales from some of speculative fiction’s leading talents.  Charles Yu’s  “Cycles” is narrated by a self-aware robotic personal assistant that  contemplates killing its sleeping owner every morning before setting off the alarm clock.  Genevieve Valentine’s “Eighty Miles an Hour All the Way to Paradise” features two women trying to survive after the worldwide grid of interconnected machines becomes unaccountably “awake” and deadly to humans. In Alan Dean Foster’s “Seasoning,” a biochemistry professor discovers that a surprising international cessation of hostility has been engineered by sentient robots for possibly insidious reasons.  Readers who don’t mind immersing themselves in unnerving fictional worlds that uncomfortably resemble our own, gadget-infested one will find hours of provocative entertainment here. --Carl Hays