FROM THE PUBLISHER

This collection of award winning science fiction includes a story that was a finalist for the Hugo Awards and one that was voted one of the 10 greatest science fiction stories to appear during the 1990s. In the title piece, geologist Andrew Mutton has obtained an intelligent mining robot and downloaded the memories of his deceased mentor into the robot's electronic brain. Together, man and robot undertake a project to bore through the crust and mantle to the very core of the planet Earth. Their work is complicated by conflict with a mysterious intelligence deep within the Earth and by the robot's own emergent humanity. The remaining stories comprise a variety of tales including a story about mountain climbing in the Chilean Andes in which the protagonist is haunted by a ghost, and a tale about a battle-weary veteran who returns from a high-tech future only to face his greatest and most sinister challenge right at home.

SYNOPSIS

A hero returns home from the end of time, and must ignore a savage band of outlaws or risk everything for which he's struggled. An expert mountaineer is haunted by the ghost of a former love as he tackles the Andean peak of Aconcagua. A policeman fights the bizarre cyborgs that rule a city. An architect and a poet fall in love, but are forced to decide between separation and denial of their talents. A derelict man-god holds the only hope against a tyrant whose influence reaches the molecular level of the solar system. And at the twilight of the millennium, the pressurized geology and politics of Washington state build toward eruption as a mining robot gains human understanding. In his introduction to the ElectricStory edition, Lucius Shepard states: "These stories constitute the most idiosyncratic body of short science fiction since the early days of John Varley...Tony Daniel is a supremely gifted writer whose career has just begun."

FROM THE CRITICS

John O'Neill

. . . one of the best books I read last year, and the most original short fiction collection I've stumbled across in a long time.

The Robot's Twilight Companion is a collection of nine stories and novellas, all originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine between 1992 and 1999. They include the Hugo nominee "Life on the Moon," the title story and the basis for the novel Earthling and the near-masterpiece "A Dry Quiet War," a tale of warfare and loss at the end of time.

The book opens with "Life on the Moon," the tale of Henry Colterman, a poet who loses his wife to the moon when she accepts the position of chief lunar architect. Like "Aconcagua," the story of a die-hard mountain climber who discovers more than he bargained for in a near-disastrous solo expedition, "Life on the Moon" is only peripherally science fiction, dealing more with relationships -- and the sudden end of relationships -- than with the usual trappings of SF. There's a similar theme in "Radio Praha," in which a KGB agent in Prague discovers the skilled artisans of a dying profession -- vacuum tube manufacturers -- have transcended not only their art, but quite possibly the laws of physics; and in "Black Canoes," where a woman who can traverse dimensions discovers that her role in the universe has changed dramatically.

As enjoyable as these tidbits are, for me the jewels of the collection are the longer pieces, including especially "A Dry, Quiet War," "Mystery Box," and the dense and enigmatic "Grist." While they're not all linked, most share a powerful connecting vision of a gradually transformed humanity -- an ambitious, baffling, and (how to say this delicately?) only partially comprehensible vision of a human race radically changed by nanotechnology and collective consciousness. This is what a trip to the future should feel like: packed with strange wonders, only a handful of which are easily grasped, but all of which hint at a vast, unfolding destiny for the human race.—SFsite.com
Copyright ￯﾿ﾽ 2000 by John O'Neill

Locus Online