Robots vs. Fairies - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1481462350 ISBN 13: 9781481462358

Publisher: S&S/Saga Press, 2018

Synopsis

Featured in the Netflix series Love, Death & Robots

A unique anthology of all-new stories that challenges authors to throw down the gauntlet in an epic genre battle and demands an answer to the age-old question: Who is more awesome—robots or fairies?

Rampaging robots! Tricksy fairies! Facing off for the first time in an epic genre death match!

People love pitting two awesome things against each other. Robots vs. Fairies is an anthology that pitches genre against genre, science fiction against fantasy, through an epic battle of two icons.

On one side, robots continue to be the classic sci-fi phenomenon in literature and media, from Asimov to WALL-E, from Philip K. Dick to Terminator. On the other, fairies are the beloved icons and unquestionable rulers of fantastic fiction, from Tinkerbell to Tam Lin, from True Blood to Once Upon a Time. Both have proven to be infinitely fun, flexible, and challenging. But when you pit them against each other, which side will triumph as the greatest genre symbol of all time?

There can only be one...or can there?

Featuring an incredible line-up of authors including John Scalzi, Catherynne M. Valente, Ken Liu, Max Gladstone, Alyssa Wong, Jonathan Maberry, and many more, Robots vs. Fairies will take you on a glitterbombed journey of a techno-fantasy mash-up across genres.

About this title

From the Author

Dominik Parisien is an editor, poet, and writer. He has worked on several anthologies with Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, including The Time Traveler’s Almanac, Sisters of the Revolution, and The Bestiary. He is the editor for Clockwork Canada, an anthology of Canadian steampunk, and the coeditor of The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales and Mythic Dream, along with Navah Wolfe. Dominik is also the poetry editor for Postscripts to Darkness, and was an editorial assistant for Weird Tales. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Strange Horizons, Uncanny Magazine, Shock Totem, Imaginarium 2013: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing, and other venues.

Navah Wolfe is a Hugo Award–nominated editor at Saga Press and the coeditor of The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales and Mythic Dream, along with Dominik Parisien. She was previously an editor at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, where she worked on many bestselling books, including some that have won awards such as the Printz Honor, The Pura Belpré Award, The Pen/Faulkner Award, The Stonewall Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Schneider Family Award.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Robots vs. Fairies BUILD ME A WONDERLAND

by Seanan McGuire

One of the pixies in the Mother Tree was banging its tiny head against a branch, wings moving fast enough to create a grinding metallic whine like the buzz of a giant robot cicada. Clover hoisted herself onto the branch, tugged her chain-mail glove into position, and reached the pixie, pinning the still-vibrating wings to its back. It didn’t react to her presence. Toys never did.

Carefully Clover lifted the pixie from its branch and raised it to her face, getting a look at the damage. Scuffs marked the plastic pseudo-skin covering its once pretty face. Its eyes rolled wildly, generating a softer whine than its buzzing wings. The servos would overload soon, and permanent damage would follow. Or fire. Sometimes the eye servos caused the pixie heads to catch fire, a nasty form of mechanical failure that always seemed to occur when there were children watching. Every. Single. Time. Get a little kid with eyes full of wonder and a heart full of childish innocence into the Pixie Glen, and one of the buzzing assholes was virtually guaranteed to go up in flames.

“Clover?”

The voice spoke in her left ear, filled with static and almost as annoying as the whine from the pixie’s wildly rolling eyes. The urge to ignore it was strong. The urge not to deal with the consequences of ignoring it were stronger. “I got it,” she said, trusting the microphone to pick up her voice. “One of the G-3 pixies slipped a couple servos. Poor thing’s in full meltdown. I’m bringing it back to the shop.”

“Bring it back fast. Boss man’s coming for a surprise inspection.”

Clover swallowed a groan. It stuck in her throat, a great knot of exasperation and dismay. “How do we know he’s coming if it’s a surprise?”

“He always forgets that the deer in the Enchanted Forest have cameras in their eyes. He was checking their teeth.”

“What, again?” Clover returned her attention to the pixie. “Cover for me.”

“Clover—he’s got a stranger with him.”

Clover said a couple of words that weren’t supposed to be allowed in Pixie Glen, much less in the all-sheltering embrace of the Mother Tree. She concluded with, “I’m on my way,” and began her descent, still clutching the broken pixie in one hand.

She was almost to the bottom when the damn thing’s head burst into flame.

* * *

The nearest maintenance door was more than twenty yards from Pixie Glen, concealed in the rocks making up the back of Mermaid Grotto. The park’s original plans had an access door on the back of the Mother Tree, but Mr. Franklin had put the kibosh on that.

“Children will want to circle the tree, to gaze in awe upon its denizens!” he’d said, in his booming, all-for-the-children tone. “Make it a full-spectrum experience, accessible from all sides, with no chance of an unsightly seam to spoil the illusion!”

“Okay, that’s a great idea, we love it, but you do understand that a structure involving over two hundred miniaturized animatronic figures, some of which are attached to independent micro-drones, is going to require a lot of upkeep, right?” Adam had been the voice of reason on the engineering team back in those days, when the Fairy Dreamland expansion had still been mostly blueprints and arguments about whether or not they could have a unicorn petting zoo. “If we don’t have a maintenance door in the Tree itself, every time there’s a mechanical error, we’re going to have to shut down the whole Glen. There’s not going to be any functional way around it.”

“Then find a way to keep them from breaking,” Mr. Franklin had said, and that had been that: no maintenance door in the Glen.

Every time Clover had to walk those twenty yards with a burning pixie in her hand, she hated the man who owned her home and place of work just a little bit more.

At least the Park was closed for the night, offering respite from the usual need to scuttle along with a smile on her face, a spring in her step, and a deep loathing of humanity brewing in her heart. Clover made her way to the door, swiped her ID card, and stepped through into the dim, humid hall. She relaxed, taking a breath of good, earthy air. Humans and their weird fetish for open spaces. Air that hadn’t been boxed up for a while had no character.

Mr. Franklin didn’t like how dark the maintenance tunnels were. At least he’d accepted it after he was told, over and over, that too much light would attract the attention of park guests, killing the illusion of effortless perfection. He still hadn’t been happy about it. Clover suspected the old man would have gotten rid of maintenance entirely if he’d been able to, living ever after in his kingdom of obedient, never-breaking robots. She smirked as she walked. Wouldn’t he be surprised if he knew how impossible, yet achievable, his goal really was? It was a paradox. She loved those. They broke people in the most entertaining ways.

Her smirk died as she stepped around a curve in the hall and into the brighter lights of the maintenance lounge. What looked like two-thirds of the night crew was there, some with fantastical beasts or magical creatures spread out across their workbenches, others wiping grease off their hands and trying to look like they enjoyed the lights being up.

Clover walked briskly to her own workbench and dropped the headless pixie into a jar. It would stay there until its battery wore down and its wings stopped flapping. It wasn’t efficient, but those wings were like razor blades, and the off switch was—naturally—right between them.

“Hell of a design flaw,” she muttered sourly, and capped the jar. Letting the pixie run itself down might preserve her fingers. Clover liked her fingers. Disfigurement for the sake of her art was not something she considered particularly interesting, or particularly desirable.

Some of the older engineers thought differently, thought a missing finger or a truncated thumb was a mark of commitment to the work. They were relics of a different time, and while it might take a while for them to settle into comfortable retirement, she was willing to wait. The second the last of the old guard hung up their tool belt, the safety regulations around here were going to change.

“What’s the emergency?” she asked, turning to the nearest engineer.

Violet—the youngest bar one of the Park’s current engineering team, still bright-eyed and full of endless faith in the future—looked at her with wide, worried eyes and said, “Mr. Franklin is coming.”

“Yeah, I know that. That’s why I was called out of the Glen.”

“The man he’s bringing with him has a clipboard.”

That was more unnerving. Men with clipboards came in three flavors: lawyers, accountants, and efficiency experts. Lawyers could be convinced to back off with magic words like “safety regulations” and “adherence to legal requirements.” They didn’t understand what went on in the tunnels crisscrossing the body of the Park like veins, pumping the life and vitality that was just as essential to the survival of the whole as blood was to a living thing. Accountants were harder, requiring access to supply sheets and maintenance logs that weren’t necessarily as accurate as they should have been. Thus far, the faked-up versions created for the Park shareholders had always been good enough to keep an audit at bay. But an efficiency expert . . .

No efficiency expert could possibly understand the complexity of Mr. Franklin’s grand dream, because Mr. Franklin didn’t understand it himself. He’d put out the word that he was looking for miracle workers, and when a family with the relevant skills had answered the call, he hadn’t looked too closely at their résumés. Just the things they could do, the wonders they could cobble together at his command. He’d been asking the engineers for increasingly impossible things over the years, unicorns with eyes that glistened bright as any living thing, pixies that flew independent, unpredictable spirals around their tree. And they’d always found a way to do it, meeting his demands without hesitation or complaint, because they needed this place as badly as he did. They needed it to work. They needed it to thrive.

They needed it to do those things without attracting the attention of men who would look at their paradise of rainbows and moonbeams and see only the hidden costs of each hologram and servo. They needed the freedom to be inefficient. Inefficiency was where the magic hid.

Footsteps from the hall preceded the arrival of one of Clover’s cousins, who hissed, “They’re coming,” before jumping into position at his own workbench, grabbing for the nearest screwdriver.

By the time Mr. Franklin and his clipboard-wielding companion stepped into the maintenance room, all the engineers were hard at work. Clover’s pixie was still winding down, so she was oiling the segments of an animatronic python, its scaled exterior hanging over the edge of the table like a discarded glove. Violet was polishing a unicorn’s horn. All over the room, similar scenes of busywork played out, each orchestrated to make a visual point about how absolutely vital the engineering staff was to the Park.

“Hello, everyone!” boomed Mr. Franklin, voice overly loud and jovial. “I wanted to stop in and see how the work was going!”

Clover wasn’t the only one to wince: the man with the clipboard did so as well, trying to conceal his discomfort with a grimace. He was taller than Mr. Franklin by an easy six inches, tan, with sun-streaked brown hair. He didn’t look like an accountant.

Please be a lawyer, she thought—possibly the only time that thought had ever formed while on the grounds of an amusement park.

“We’re always happy to have you, boss,” said Adam, putting down his wrench and stepping forward. He was smiling, but his eyes were sharp as he asked, “Who’s your friend? We aren’t prepared for a tour right now—there might be some proprietary technology on display in the private work areas.”

“There always is, because most of my park is proprietary,” said Mr. Franklin, a chiding note creeping into his voice. He didn’t do any of the heavy lifting for the Park—just provided the money and the increasingly difficult design challenges that delighted him and frustrated his engineers. “Remember that, when you’re deciding what to leave out in the open.”

“Of course, Mr. Franklin,” said Adam apologetically.

He must have sounded conciliatory enough, because Mr. Franklin smiled and said, “No harm done. This is Mr. Tillman.” He indicated the man with the clipboard. “Mr. Tillman is an efficiency expert. He’s going to be with you for the next several days, making notes on what we can do to improve the overall experience of our guests. Remember, a working park is a happy park, and a happy park can’t help but be filled with happy people.”

It was a testament to Mr. Franklin’s general air of obliviousness that he didn’t notice the way the mood in the room darkened the moment he said the words “efficiency expert.”

On Clover’s workbench, the pixie caught fire again.

* * *

She supposed it was inevitable: If someone was going to be assigned to babysit the efficiency expert, why not pick on the girl with the fire consuming her workbench? She’d been a soft target, too busy beating out the flames to defend herself. By the time she’d realized what was happening, it had been too late for any of the easy excuses, and the hard ones could have resulted in Mr. Franklin realizing how nervous they all were. Not an acceptable outcome.

“This is what we call the Enchanted Garden,” said Clover, gesturing at the moss-draped trees with their glittering bark and veils of brilliantly colored butterflies. “Note that the butterflies are currently stationary. Mr. Franklin wants us to have them flying independently by the middle of next quarter. We’re working on miniaturizing the necessary servos, and we hope to be done by Christmas.” Because we’re so damned efficient, she thought fiercely. You’re not needed. Go home.

Once the servos for the butterflies were officially ready, they could “upgrade” the pixies. Mr. Franklin would be shocked by how much more freely they flew, and how much more rarely they caught fire. Most living things were substantially less subject to spontaneous combustion than their robot counterparts.

“How many people pass through the, ah, Enchanted Garden daily?”

“On a busy day, anywhere from ten to thirty thousand. We have a flow-through on the Park as a whole of between fifty and one hundred thousand people, more at the major holidays. Capacity for ticketed guests is two hundred thousand, which assumes one child below the age of ticketing for every four adult or older child guests. We’ve had to close admissions for fire safety reasons five times in the past year, due to overcrowding.”

Mr. Tillman made a note on his clipboard. Clover decided to hate the clipboard. “So what I’m hearing is that under one-third of guests will pass through the Enchanted Garden on an average day. What do you estimate the cost expenditure for these, ah, ‘independently motile’ butterflies to be?”

Clover forced herself to keep smiling. If she started scowling, she wasn’t going to be able to stop. “After we finish initial research and development, ten dollars per butterfly, plus maintenance costs.” Minus forty dollars per pixie in maintenance costs, since the pixies wouldn’t need it anymore.

“And do you genuinely feel that this will improve the experience of the average park guest so measurably that it should remain a priority?”

“Mr. Franklin wants it.”

Normally, that answer could shut down or derail any criticism: Mr. Franklin wanted it. Mr. Franklin was beloved by children and adults alike, thanks to his innovative movies, his lines of affordable and amusing toys, his breakfast cereals, for fuck’s sake, and, most of all, his Dreamland. His glorious park that elevated the mundane into the magical, allowing people with the cash and the vacation time to spare to escape their everyday lives for something extraordinary. Mr. Franklin was a jerk and a bigot who didn’t understand that he couldn’t always get his own way, but no one questioned what he’d built, and no one really wanted to argue with him.

Mr. Tillman was apparently no one. He made another note on his clipboard. “I see. What are these flowers?”

Crap. Clover hurried to put herself between the efficiency expert and the trumpet flowers he was gesturing at. “Specially treated plastic. They look real, they never wilt, and they put off a soothing aroma that keeps children calmer. It’s reduced shoving incidents in the Mermaid Grotto and Unicorn Meadows by seventy percent.” Which was important. Unicorns were essentially sharp, vindictive horses that didn’t care whether the person pulling their tails was a paying guest or not. Preventing goring incidents was key.

“What about guests with allergies?” asked Mr. Tillman, suddenly scowling. “Have you considered that these flowers might be leading to health issues?”

“Uh . . .” Clover froze, finally squeaking, “No?” Because they weren’t plastic, and no one human had ever been allergic to a Dryad-cultivated flower. But there was no way to say that.

“This is environmentally very unsound. I’ll be discussing this with Mr. Franklin. Now, take me to”—he glanced at his notes—“the Mermaid Grotto.”

About this edition

• Publisher: S&S/Saga Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1481462350
• ISBN 13: 9781481462358
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384
• Editor: Parisien Dominik, Wolfe Navah