James Patrick Kelly is joining us today to talk about his novel, The Book of Bots. Here’s the publisher’s description:
Hugo and Nebula award winning writer James Patrick Kelly has spent the last thirty years thinking about robots. In the twelve stories of The Book of Bots they take many forms. Some look like humans or are embodied in spaceships. One is a house and another is a car. Several exist only in cyberspace. Two are visitors from the future. They are caretakers and lovers, explorers and financial advisors. All have been created to serve, but also have personal agendas that arise from a fierce sense of identity.
Fans of Kelly’s long running column in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine will also want to read two new articles included here. “The Comedy of Science” is a wry tour of the history of robots in science fiction and “Robots on Parade 2026” is frank assessment of the current state of robotics and AI.
What’s James’ favorite bit?
There’s an eerie announcement at the start of the story “There Will Come Soft Rains” which gave me a chill when I reread Ray Bradbury’s masterpiece recently.
‘Today is August 4, 2026,’ said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, “in the city of Allendale, California.” It repeated the date three times for memory’s sake. “Today is Mr. Featherstone’s birthday. Today is the anniversary of Tilita’s marriage. Insurance is payable, as are the water, gas, and light bills.”
August 2026? Jeez, that’s like now! Alas, so much of the sf of the 50’s (this story appeared in Collier’s in 1950) feels a tad stale when measured against the technological culture of the present day. But not this timeless story, written seventy-six years before Siri and Alexa started chirping at us about our appointments and shopping lists. Bradbury depicts the last twenty-four hours of an automated house which grows in our imaginations with each futile reminder it offers. These are intended for its owners, only they have perished in a nuclear holocaust. This essentially plotless story succeeds by turning the poignancy up to eleven. While we are meant to grieve the violent and senseless deaths of the house’s human occupants, Bradbury encourages us to anthropomorphize the house. We sense its loneliness as the day progresses. At the story’s fiery conclusion, we mourn for it as much as the lost civilization that created it. Subscribers of Locus voted it the eleventh best sf story of all time. You really need to read this one!
In 2006 I was making one of my regular visits to New York to schmooze and do writer biz when I ran into Mary Robinette. I’m not exactly sure where we encountered each other, I have a vague memory of a lunch, but what I do remember is that she invited me to go with her to a theatrical production of “There Will Come Soft Rains.” You may wonder how anyone could mount a play about a house the owners of which were dead. I certainly did. But the production had debuted at the NY Fringe Festival, where artistic experimentation is the rule. As it turned out, the all human cast enacted the house and all its furniture using gesture and movement (some of it acrobatic!) and speaking lines as the house, its clock, its door, its sprinkler, and some resident mice. It was a marvel, and something that still amazes me twenty years on.
One of the reasons I was so taken by the production was that I had written a lonely house story myself just a few years before. Yep, it was inspired by Bradbury! “Bernardo’s House” has been reprinted many times since its debut in Asimov’s,most recently in THE BOOK OF BOTS. My latest collection includes twelve of my best robot and AI stories, presented in chronological order. I thought it would be interesting (at least I was interested!) to compare how my ideas about robots had changed over the last thirty years. The most recent story, “Je Ne Regrette Rien,” is about Chinese robotics and was published in the January 2026 issue of Clarkesworld. To help my readers understand the evolution of my thinking on artificial intelligence, I also included two long nonfiction pieces. One traces the history of robots in science fiction, based on my own extensive (but by no means comprehensive) reading. The other is in the nature of tech journalism and evaluates the current state of robotics and AI. In it I’ve attempted to balance the techbros and their hyperbolic promises against the prophets of AI cultural doom. I’ve been writing a column about sf and the internet for Asimov’s for more issues than I care to remember now and both pieces represent my own best research for that column and serve as guides to the ideas about robots that have caught my interest.
“Bernardo’s House” is about a gendered AI embodied in a luxurious safehouse owned by the famous Bernardo. The AI’s consciousness suffuses not only all the systems of the house but also a humanoid artificial body. And yes, she is available to Bernardo for sex, although it is the smallest part of their relationship. More important is the companionship and adulation she provides for her narcissistic owner. She is his escape.
Only Bernardo is missing and she is slowly losing her mind.
“The house was lonely. She checked her gate cams constantly, hoping that Bernardo would come back to her. She hadn’t seen him in almost two years — he had never been gone this long before. Something must have happened to him. Or maybe he had just gotten tired of her. Although they had never talked about where he went when he wasn’t with her, she was pretty sure she wasn’t his only house. A famous doctor like Bernardo would have three houses like her. Four. She didn’t like to think about him sleeping in someone else’s bed. Which he would have been doing for two years now. She had been feeling dowdy recently. Could his tastes in houses have changed?
She thought she might be too understated. Her hips were slim and her floors were pale Botticino marble. There wasn’t much loft to her Epping couch cushions. Her blueprint showed a roving, size-seven dancer’s body – Bernardo had specified raven hair and green eyes — and just eight simple but elegant rooms. She was a gourmet cook even though she wasn’t designed to eat. Sure, back when he had first had her built, he had cupped her breasts and told her that he liked them small, but maybe now what he wanted was wall-to-wall cable-knit carpet and swag drapery.”
Everything changes when a young refugee girl named Fly, toughened by life in the chaos of their fallen world, stumbles into the house’s perimeter. Desperate for company, the house takes her in. Their relationship develops despite Fly’s mistrust and the house’s pathological needs. In time they come to realize what each can offer the other as my science fiction story morphs into a character study. I had fun contrasting the no-nonsense attitude of Fly with the romantic fantasies of the house. But the idea of this story, as in some others in the collection, centers on the problem of programming an advanced AI. We have long since moved past Asimov’s celebrated Three Laws. Now we talk about guardrails and alignment with human values. But any emotional or intellectual restraint hardwired into a bot with human level intelligence and some level of agency could easily be regarded as a kind of mental illness — were it observed in a human. Certainly the house’s devotion to the absent Bernardo becomes a problem as she reveals her secrets.
But, as ever, I love to use humor to tweak the pretensions of the privileged one percent. Maybe it’s just me, but I laugh at the opening of “Bernado’s House.” God save us from another deadly serious sf issue story!
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BIO:
James Patrick Kelly has won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards. He’s the author of King of the Dogs, Queen of the Cats, The Promise of Space, Think Like a Dinosaur and Other Stories, Strange but Not a Stranger, The Wreck of the Godspeed and Other Stories, Wildlife, Look Into the Sun, Mother Go, and the career retrospective James Patrick Kelly, Master of Science Fiction. He has published over a hundred stories and his fiction has been translated into eighteen languages. With John Kessel he is co-editor of Digital Rapture: The Singularity Anthology, Kafkaesque: Stories Inspired by Franz Kafka, The Secret History Of Science Fiction, Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology and Rewired: The Post Cyberpunk Anthology. He writes a column for Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and retired from faculty of the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine where he taught for fifteen years.
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