Posted by Kelly Ann Jacobson’s anthology of epistolary science fiction called the Dear Robot Anthology is out! She is organizing a blog tour, and today my post is a part of that.
The collection contains my story The Wrath of Sephilemea, which is written in the form of psychiatric case notes by a resident shrink-in-training who is brought in to help treat a robot that has unfortunately been afflicted with sarcasm.
The trigger for the story came to me as I stood in a long queue at the payment counter of a shopping mall. I remember my train of thoughts, which strayed to how boring the process of billing for your purchases was, especially considering that the activity prior to this, i.e. the actual shopping, was extremely pleasurable. I was thinking about how in the future we could all hire individual robots who would stand in queue for us and do our billing so that we didn’t have to do this tedious monotonous job that held no discernible reward other than getting to lug home our purchases. But then I thought, this delegation of work to the robot would work only provided the robot really did not have any semblance of emotions. If it did, it too might lose patience and throw in the towel well before the items were purchased and return home to its owner empty-handed.
On the strength of this I built my story around this pivotal incident, which is only the starting point. Though I have penned science fiction and fantasy stories, I had never written about robots before this, let alone writing about a sarcastic robot that has cut all ties to the three laws that bind it.
I had a great time writing this story, mainly because of the humor quotient in it. I am grateful to Kelly for working with me on it and taking me through the necessary editorial changes. It was a great learning experience and now I feel better prepared to tackle many more such science fiction stories swirling in my mind.
Do check out the other posts on the blog tour:
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Gargi Mehra (That’s me!)
Thursday
Friday
Giveaway: Five commenters will be selected from all of those who comment on any of the blogs during the five days of the week, including Kelly’s post about the blog hop, and they will win a free copy of the book (Only US Addresses please). This runs from 9:00 A.M. Monday morning to Friday at midnight. Please include your email address as, for example, name (at) gmail dot com, in your comment.
The book’s hashtag is #DearRobot.
Additionally, there is also a Goodreads giveaway and you can win additional books there!
Do check out the book and leave a comment for a chance to win!
Gargi's World 
I love the backstory of your story – I, too, really hate waiting in line to buy things (though I actually don’t mind as much since I found the Boggle app for my iPhone! 🙂 ). I’m looking forward to reading all of the stories in the collection!
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Thanks Terri! I too look forward to reading all the stories!
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