The Robot Chronicles

A Word from Endi Webb

I admit it: I’ve always wanted to be a robot. Remember Gizmo Duck from DuckTales? As an eight-year-old in the nineties, I wanted to be him so bad that I tried to make a robot suit out of scrap metal in my dad’s garage. The Borg? Yep. Them too. Except without all the mutilation and stuff. Just the idea of putting on a piece of hardware as if it were clothing and becoming a new enhanced person made me giddily excited.

Yeah, I was a strange kid.

And yet throughout almost every book I’ve written so far, this theme has appeared. Whether in the Robotic Society of Healers in my Rhovim Chronicles, or the masks of power in The Maskmaker’s Apprentice, or even in the upcoming books of my Pax Humana Saga, which (spoiler alert!) will involve integration of robotics with organic neural networks. It seems like I can’t leave it alone. And so I give you one more: “Adopted,” the story of a boy and his father learning unpleasant truths—or lies—about themselves. A story that asks whether there is any human concept or emotion that an AI will not eventually be able to replicate.

I’m from Seattle, but I’ve lived in SoCal, Utah, Los Alamos (yes, that Los Alamos), and now Huntsville, Alabama. I do science. And by that I mean I have a PhD in experimental physics, and so I do science. Often with explosively fun results. It’s a good day when I have not burned myself with a hundred-watt laser, dropped a five-hundred-pound vacuum chamber on the floor, blown up highly reactive precursor gases, or spewed nanoparticles all over the lab. (Dear manager: I’m making this all up.) Seriously, science is fun. But what’s even funner (funner!) is making up stuff and calling it science fiction, and then selling it to people who want to read it. For money. Really, it’s a win-win.

I’m sorry, that sounded very unprofessional. Its art, I tell you. Aaaaahhhht. I weave delicate themes of meaning and symbolism throughout my prose, and the resulting tapestry of word-smudges on the canvas speaks to the intimate human yearning for… something.

Yeah, I just like to blow stuff up. In my writing, and in the lab.

Anyway, if you want to know when I blow up something else—er, publish something new, you should totally subscribe to my mailing list: smarturl.it/endimailinglist. Benefits include you getting all (ALL!) my short stories for free, lower prices on my new releases, and other, intangible benefits*. And come stalk me on Facebook!

Thanks for reading!

^{*Intangible benefits do not include anything of monetary value, and may be completely made up.}