Petals dropped by the same flower

Robots & Artificial Intelligence Short Stories

(I bought this 100% because of the pretty hardcover with the shiny foil. The picture doesn't do it justice.)

It took almost three years for me to finish this 💀 In my defense, I kept putting down and ignoring this for long stretches of time whenever I was in the middle of a story that I didn't vibe with. I'm not gonna rate the collection as a whole because I think it makes more sense to rate per story ... but I'm also too lazy to rate per story.

I'll settle for listing my favorites in no particular order:

• "Demeter's Regard" by Deborah L. Davitt
• "Owen" by Bruce Golden
• "The Dancing Partner" by Jerome K. Jerome
• "The Greatest One-Star Restaurant in the Whole Quadrant" by Rachael K. Jones
• "Dispo and the Crow" by Rich Larson
• "I, Coffeepot" by David Sklar

Problem that I didn't anticipate with this book: How absolutely unengaging I would find some of the older stories. Those were usually the ones I needed to drag myself through because the completionist in me wasn't bored enough to skip anything. I don't know if it's because the style of prose just doesn't jive with what I'm used to or if it's something else. The worst ones (in terms of keeping my attention) were "The Steam Man of the Prairies" by Edward S. Ellis, and "Frank Reade Jr. & His New Steam Man" and "Frank Reade Jr. & His New Steam Horse" by Luis Philip Senarens.

(It also didn't help that they were very racist towards the characters of color. I thought it was weird that they had a foreword and a publisher's note for the collection but neither one included any warnings about it, like the Warner Bros. one for their old cartoons.)

I have a couple more collection type books in my to-read pile to go through, but I think after those I'm done with collections.