My new book of robot poems (entitled Robot Poems, logically enough) has now been published. It's a collection of long and short poems about robots, androids, cyborgs and other assorted cybernetic beings, and it includes a mini-epic, 'The Mime of the Android Stammerer', one of my longest ever poems.
It is available in both paperback and ebook editions, and in fact the ebook edition is a free download for the next five days (in other words, until June 27th).
This is the link to the American Amazon but you can find the ebook on any Amazon outlet.
All in all, I think it's my best poetry collection to date. Some of the poems concern themselves with competent robots, our future overlords, but most are about robots that have been wired wrongly or who aren't sapient at all. A few are even powered by clockwork.
I have been interested in Artificial Intelligence since I was young and many of my favourite works in the science-fiction genre are about robots (rather than spaceships, aliens and distant galaxies). I am especially thinking of Stanisław Lem's Cyberiad and Mortal Engines, and John Sladek's Tik-Tok and Roderick. The first Brian Aldiss story I truly enjoyed and which turned me into a lifelong fan was about robots ('Who Can Replace a Man?'). Robots can be very amusing as well as instructive. They can be terrifying too.
My own robots tend to be comical, absurdist, whimsical creations, but not always. The earliest poems in this book (from the early 1990s) tend to be more serious; the later ones tend to be more humorous. I now hope to have a rest from writing poetry about robots...
I have finished writing my one-thousandth story. I regard the entire set of stories as
one story-cycle. The linkages between the stories are sometimes direct but more often subtle, tangential, symbolic. The last part of the last story is a prequel to the very first story, so the whole thing goes around in a big loop.
Total wordage? About four million words, though I will have to do a proper wordcount soon. That will involve putting all the stories into one document. It is going to be a big document for sure. The overall name of the story-cycle is Pandora's Bluff. Pandora opened the box of troubles and after the final trouble had emerged, the figure of Hope appeared. But Hope is often false, a trick, a jest. This is the harshly ironic point I want to make with the title of my story-cycle.
I have a lot to say about this project and doubtless in the coming weeks and months I will say much of it. In the meantime I will confine myself to the statement that this is surely the largest fiction project ever attempted by a Welsh writer. Begun in August 1989 and finished in June 2022. Thirty-three years.
When I began writing it, I had no idea that all the stories were going to be connected and form a single story-cycle. I must have written 100 or so stories before the idea came to me. Almost every story in the cycle can be read as a standalone. That is important. But the wholeness of the entire scheme is vital to my vision.
The photo above captures me moments after I typed the last word of the last story. Not a particularly special photo in objective terms, but one that will doubtless have significance for me in the future. A complete list of all the titles in the cycle can be found here. Titles on their own reveal little, but I am pleased with the euphony of the best of them, which are almost one-line poems.
