Review: ‘Chronicles of Some Made’ by Felix Tannenbaum
Chronicles of Some Made
By Felix Tannenbaum
Passenger Pigeon Publishing, October 2008, $10.25
Tannenbaum received a 2008 Xeric Award for the two stories collected here – in fact, the way of the Xeric, these two stories are collected because they won the award. The Xeric is specifically and entirely to help self-publishers get their work out; to help get more new, different, interesting comics projects to see the light of day and get into readers’ hands. Because of that aid, [[[Chronicles of Some Made]]] is now available via Amazon, and it will be in comics shops in the spring.
There are two stories here: “[[[The Dent]]],” about seventy pages long in four chapters, and the shorter (just under twenty pages) earlier story “[[[Why Doesn’t My Robot Love Me?: A Cautionary Fable.]]]” Both are stories of robots, but Tannenbaum’s robots are very un-Asimovian: they are deeply emotional and as impetuous and driven by desire as any human. (They’re very much, to use Charles Stross’s term, emotional machines.)
“The Dent” is the story of three robots at war. The story begins as they travel together towards a point where battle rages. They know where they’re going, but not why – though they do know that they’re not supposed to question their orders. Seeing the devastation for several hills away, they’re all silently sure that following their programming will lead to their destruction. And yet, when two of them try to break all three of them free from that programming, the results are not good.