Awkward Robots Anthology: The Blue Volume

The students from Clarion 2012 (a.k.a. “The Awkward Robots”) have pulled up a collection of stories and poems from the blue depths of imagination. A Nepalese witch tempts her daughter to black magic, sinister (but cute) robots hound a homeless squatter, one man fights reconciliation to the end of the world and another reaches reconciliation with The Thing, a medieval barber bleeds female patients to feed his monstrous creation, and a princess emerges scarred from the test of the pea.

In the years since they left San Diego, the Awkward Robots have amassed publications in Lightspeed, Asimov’s, The New Yorker, Strange Horizons, Granta, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Nightmare, and Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy.

In 2018 Lara Donnelly (represented in the Blue Volume with “Criteria for a Gancanagh”) brought us the second book in her vintage glam spy thriller trilogy, Armistice, and Sam Miller brought us Blackfish City. The final book in Donnelly’s trilogy, Amnesty, comes out in spring of 2019, followed by AwkBot Carmen Maria Machado’s anticipated memoir (In the Dream House) in the fall, after Carmen participates as faculty in the 2019 Clarion workshop.

Three Times a Sweeper Woke Me Up in LA River Park, 
 by Luke R. Pebler

Public Awareness, by Dan McMinn

The Carrying Beam, by S.M. Mack

In the End, by Pierre Liebenberg

Two Views on The Thing, by Chris Kammerud

The True Trial of the Princess and the Pea, 
by R.K. Kalaw

Thing in the Bucket, by Eric Esser

Criteria for a Gancanagh, by Lara Elena Donnelly