"Annie Bot was created to be the perfect girlfriend for her human owner Doug. Designed to satisfy his emotional and physical needs, she has dinner ready for him every night, wears the pert outfits he orders for her, and adjusts her libido to suit his moods. True, she's not the greatest at keeping Doug's place spotless, but she's trying to please him. She's trying hard. She's learning, too. Doug says he loves that Annie's AI makes her seem more like...

"War machines and AI gods run amok in The Archive Undying, national bestseller Emma Mieko Candon's bold entry into the world of mecha fiction. When an AI dies, its city dies with it. When a city falls, it leaves a corpse behind. When that corpse runs off, only devotion can bring it back. When the robotic god of Khuon Mo went mad, it destroyed everything it touched. It killed its priests, its city, and all its wondrous works. But in its final death...

"This anthology, with an introduction by Robert Silverberg, offers a sweeping survey of robots as depicted throughout literature. Since the Iliad--in which we are shown golden statues built by Hephaestus "with minds and wisdoms"--humans have been fascinated by the idea of artificial life. From the Argonautica to the medieval Jewish legend of the Golem and Ambrose Bierce's tale of a chess-playing robot, the idea of what robots are--and who creates...