Lexie Conyngham's Blog: writing, history and gardening.

Tuesday, 2 May 2017

Eating Robots - book review

 



The future is bright…or is it?


Step into a high-tech vision of the future with the author of Quantum Confessions and Fluence, Stephen Oram.

Featuring health-monitoring mirrors, tele-empathic romances and limb-repossessing bailiffs, Eating Robots explores the collision of utopian dreams and twisted realities in a world where humanity and technology are becoming ever more intertwined.

Sometimes funny, often unsettling, and always with a word of warning, these thirty sci-fi shorts will stay with you long after you’ve turned the final page.

 


 

A universal booklinker link that detects which country you're in and links to Eating Robots myBook.to/EatingRobots



Stephen Oram writes thought provoking stories that mix science fiction with social comment, mainly in a recognisable near-future. He is the Author in Residence at Virtual Futures', once described as the 'Glastonbury of cyberculture'. He has collaborated with scientists and future-tech people to write short stories that create debate about potential futures, most recently with the Human Brain Project and Bristol Robotics Laboratory as part of the Bristol Literature Festival.

As a teenager he was heavily influenced by the ethos of punk. In his early twenties he embraced the squatter scene and was part of a religious cult, briefly. He did some computer stuff in what became London's silicon roundabout and is now a civil servant with a gentle attraction to anarchism.

He has two published novels - Quantum Confessions and Fluence - and several shorter pieces.

 


Find Stephen Oram on:




Goodreads

My review:



A collection of sharp little short stories, or episodes, set in the near and pretty horrible future. It’s not absolutely clear if it is one future vision or several related ones, but it’s certainly fairly dystopian in a way that makes it all too clear how we got there from here. These stories will make you think, shudder, and perhaps even modify some of your behaviour, just in case … Included at the end are several responses to the questions asked by some of the stories, submitted by academics, which makes an interesting if unexpected counterpoint to the stories themselves. Well-written and disturbingly imagined, these stories will live with me for a while. Definitely worth reading.
 
 

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