I'm mildly obsessed with androids, largely because of Data, but also because they are such a fruitful metaphor for the postmodern experience - humankind as commodity, or construction, or algorithm.

The robot is a SF concept with a long, long history and a lot of literature under its belt, but here Clarke presents a collection of stories that feel fresh and are enjoyable to read alongside one another. My very favorite story was Catherynne M. Valente's "Silently and Very Fast," whose protagonist inhabits a mythic dream world and generates fairy tales about their own existence. The story subtly incorporates real-life computer science concepts to draw connections between machine learning, memory, and imagination. I love hard science embedded in my squishy psychological speculative fiction!

My runner-up was Rachel Swirsky's "Grand Jeté (The Great Leap)," a devastating story about a father, a young daughter, her robot double, and their experiences of love and death. It's one of those intense reading experiences that keeps you up at night, but Swirsky writes with control, and this story earns the emotional response it provokes and never feels manipulative.

I also adored Ken Liu's "The Caretaker," which subverts the trope, and Sandra McDonald's silly yet poignant "Seven Sexy Cowboy Robots," which is a perfect swan dive of a story and absolutely lives up to its glorious title.

Of course even this hefty anthology cannot explore every possible android story. I skipped a few stories due to lack of time, but among those I read, I wanted more stories about capitalism and bondage, and stories in which androids define their own relationships and identities instead of serving as foils to humans. I can also make the blanket statement that an android story in which an android is the point-of-view character is almost always going to be stronger than a story narrated by a human.

All in all, a delightful and timely anthology. ( )