The best science fiction books where we expect AI to behave as our tool/slave/servant/inferior, but...

Who doesn’t like bad boys? None are worse than the SecUnit with a violent past who calls himself Murderbot. He is addicted to consuming digital entertainment, including Space Operas he knows from experience are bogus and he is our sly commentator on human foibles and absurdities. When he gets himself into a “Protection Racket” job for a science group on one of the Company’s colonies, he grasps what is going down faster and more realistically than all of them and goes into action. An almost indestructible conjoining of human and machine, he exhibits the worst attributes of each—to this reader’s utter delight. Wells followed up this short novel with four more, all starring Murderbot.  

There’s no other author who I’ve been compared to more than Asimov, and my readers have been astonished when I’ve confessed to them that I’ve never read any Asimov…that is until I was putting this list together and delved into I, Robot, Asimov’s collection of short stories in which his famous “Three Laws of Robotics,” first appears.

And after reading it, to all my readers, I get it. 

I wish I’d read him earlier!  

The concepts are gigantic, both technologically, but also philosophically. I love the way he uses paradoxes to demonstrate that answers are not as simple as they may appear at first glance. And what other writer would dare have his omniscient narrator say: “it was as simple as a syllogism” absent irony? 

Asimov is the G.O.A.T.    

I love this novel. I read it well after my own came out, but the strong, badass, stoic female main character reminded me a lot of Delia from What Branches Grow (despite Brittle being a robot). The often dark and gritty scenes interspersed with moments of emotion and laugh-out-loud absurd humour turned a story that could have been depressing into one that was a helluva lot of fun. The raiders in this novel also fit the trope in the same homage to Mad Max/Fallout that mine do in What Branches Grow, albeit in a way I didn’t expect. The novel is also a quest through the wasteland with a ragtag group that culminates in a final battle, which is a similar trajectory to my novel (and a plotfline in this genre I very much enjoy).