vN
CBC Books | CBC | Posted: March 17, 2017 4:41 PM | Last Updated: March 25, 2017
Madeline Ashby
Amy Peterson is a von Neumann machine, a self-replicating humanoid robot.
For the past five years, she has been grown slowly as part of a mixed organic/synthetic family. She knows very little about her android mother's past, so when her grandmother arrives and attacks her mother, little Amy wastes no time: she eats her alive.
Now she carries her malfunctioning granny as a partition on her memory drive, and she's learning impossible things about her clade's history — like the fact that the failsafe that stops all robots from harming humans has failed... Which means that everyone wants a piece of her — some to use her as a weapon, others to destroy her. (From Angry Robot Books)
From the book
Jack had lived through this same moment before, with human women.
Before meeting his wife (he insisted on referring to her that way, despite their lack of legal standing) at a tech show in Las Vegas, he had spent most of his dating life in what he called the Relationship Academy of the Dramatic Arts. Through a combination of patience, politeness, punctuality, and other qualities curiously absent from most of his competitors, he managed to attract the most volatile women in his available pool. They were the kind who called you in tears at 3am, two years after the breakup, when their latest "performative biopolitical modification" art project got infected. He offered these women the opportunity to calm down and sort things out. Things their moms had said. Things their dads had never said.
From vN by Madeline Ashby ©2012. Published by Angry Robot Books.