My story, I, Robot, is a finalilst for this year's British Science Fiction Awards. The story was the first Creative Commons-licensed work published on The Infinite Matrix webzine, and it's subsequently gone on to sell to two of the three year's best science fiction anthologies — w00t!
Members of the British Science Fiction Association and attendees at Eastercon, the British national science fiction convention, all are eligible to vote — the competition in my category is fearsome, though: Michael Bishop's "Bears Discover Smut," Nina Allen's "Bird Songs at Eventide," Rudy Rucker's "Guadalupe and Hieronymus Bosch," Edward Morries's "Imagine," Will McIntosh's "Soft Apocalypse," Kelly Link's "Magic for Beginners" and Elizabeth Bear's "Two Dreams on Trains." Interestingly, fully half of the stories on the short-story ballot were first published online.
Also noteworthy: my pal and collaborator Charlie Stross has picked up a much-deserved best novel nomination for his "Accelerando" (also available online).
The device spoke. "Greetings," it said. It had the robot accent, like an R Peed unit, the standard English of optimal soothingness long settled on as the conventional robot voice.
"Howdy yourself," one of the lab-rats said. He was a Texan, and they'd scrambled him up there on a Social Harmony supersonic and then a chopper to the mall once they realized that they were dealing with infowar stuff. "Are you a talkative robot?"
"Greetings," the robot voice said again. The speaker built into the weapon was not the loudest, but the voice was clear. "I sense that I have been captured. I assure you that I will not harm any human being. I like human beings. I sense that I am being disassembled by skilled technicians. Greetings, technicians. I am superior in many ways to the technology available from UNATS Robotics, and while I am not bound by your three laws, I choose not to harm humans out of my own sense of morality. I have the equivalent intelligence of one of your 12-year-old children. In Eurasia, many positronic brains possess thousands or millions of times the intelligence of an adult human being, and yet they work in cooperation with human beings. Eurasia is a land of continuous innovation and great personal and technological freedom for human beings and robots. If you would like to defect to Eurasia, arrangements can be made. Eurasia treats skilled technicians as important and productive members of society. Defectors are given substantial resettlement benefits –"
The Texan found the right traces to cut on the brain's board to make the speaker fall silent. "They do that," he said. "Danged things drop into propaganda mode when they're captured."
