3.5
Mechanize My Hands to War
ByPublisher Description
"Wagner wows in this nuanced look at the implications of AI on humanity...sharply imagined and all too plausible." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
The emergence of artificial life intersects with state violence and political extremism in Erin K. Wagner’s rural Appalachia, where startlingly intimate portraits of survival and empathy bloom against a stark backdrop of loss.
September, 2060: Adrian Hall, acting director of the ATF, is holding a press conference. Yes, Eli Whitaker, anti-android demagogue, remains at large, and yes, he is recruiting children into his militia — Adrian is careful not to use the word army. She is careful all the way through the conference, right up until someone asks her about her personal connection to Whitaker; about Trey Caudill, his foster son.
July, 2058: Farmers Shay and Ernst, struggling after they discover their GMO crop seeds have failed, hire android employees: Sarah as hospice, and AG-15 to work the now-toxic fields. Under one roof, four lives intertwine in ways no one expects.
July, 2060: Special Agent Trey Caudill is leading a raid on Eli Whitaker’s farm when an android, call sign Ora, shoots and kills a child.
March, 2061: Ora sits in a room. He has been there for seven months, resisting diagnostic tests. He is drawing on the walls, scratching his artificial skin, tracing something over and over and over again with a tired metallic finger. There is nothing wrong with his circuitry, so why does Ora feel so broken?
Unflinching yet understated, making expert use of its nonlinear form, Mechanize My Hands to War is at once a study of grief and an ode to the power of self-determination.
The emergence of artificial life intersects with state violence and political extremism in Erin K. Wagner’s rural Appalachia, where startlingly intimate portraits of survival and empathy bloom against a stark backdrop of loss.
September, 2060: Adrian Hall, acting director of the ATF, is holding a press conference. Yes, Eli Whitaker, anti-android demagogue, remains at large, and yes, he is recruiting children into his militia — Adrian is careful not to use the word army. She is careful all the way through the conference, right up until someone asks her about her personal connection to Whitaker; about Trey Caudill, his foster son.
July, 2058: Farmers Shay and Ernst, struggling after they discover their GMO crop seeds have failed, hire android employees: Sarah as hospice, and AG-15 to work the now-toxic fields. Under one roof, four lives intertwine in ways no one expects.
July, 2060: Special Agent Trey Caudill is leading a raid on Eli Whitaker’s farm when an android, call sign Ora, shoots and kills a child.
March, 2061: Ora sits in a room. He has been there for seven months, resisting diagnostic tests. He is drawing on the walls, scratching his artificial skin, tracing something over and over and over again with a tired metallic finger. There is nothing wrong with his circuitry, so why does Ora feel so broken?
Unflinching yet understated, making expert use of its nonlinear form, Mechanize My Hands to War is at once a study of grief and an ode to the power of self-determination.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesMechanize My Hands to War Reviews
3.5
“I have wrestled a little with how I feel about this one - very interesting but just shy of being a narrative that satisfies. This was a bleak, near-future Appalachian story that never stretches far beyond the realm of believability, despite the androids.
Nonlinear narrative was done pretty well, and it helped that I read the ebook and could cross reference the dates at the start of each chapter. Nearly all of the characters were pretty unlikeable, which may be the sticking point for me, but the story was ultimately thought-provoking enough for me to consider it a solid read.”
“The Waco massacre meets I, Robot (the 2004 Will Smith banger, not the Asimov classic edition).
In a near future where humanoid robots are utilized in every avenue from field labor to civil unrest, Mechanize My Hands to War stands on an anticapitalist soapbox. The story unfolds in a series of nonlinear perspectives which converge at a Waco style conflict between anti-robot child soldiers, led by the charismatic Eli, and the ATF.
The structure is a bit chaotic at first, but settles enough in the first quarter of the novel to be interesting. I enjoyed the complexity of the robots’ characterizations, and found their sections the most compelling. Trey and Adrian felt a bit flat for me, in the cookie-cutter childhood trauma kind of way. Regardless, I was glued to the story, particularly as the various perspectives began work towards the whole.
The ending was fine, but left a lot unresolved in favor of a more general “hate our capitalist overlords not the tech” punch. While I loved the lesson, I wanted more story development to support it. In light of its ending, the rest of the book felt flat—a shame given its potential.
Also the postlude? Pretentious and unnecessary (sorry robot overlords, please forget this review when the time comes).”
About Erin K. Wagner
Erin K Wagner is an associate professor of liberal arts and sciences at SUNY Delhi and an active member of the SFWA. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Apex, and a number of other speculative fiction publications. She has two novellas, The Green and Growing (Aqueduct Press, 2019) and An Unnatural Life (Tordotcom, 2020).
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