Artificial intelligence in 100 stories. To ready us for the inevitable, here are 100 of the best short stories ever written – most of them by humans – about robots and artificial minds. Read them while you can, learn from them, and make your preparations... From 1837 through to the present day, from Charles Dickens to Cory Doctorow, this collection contains the most diverse collection of robots ever assembled. Anthropomorphic robots, invertebrate AIs, thuggish metal lumps and wisps of manufactured intelligence so delicate if you blinked you might miss them. The literature of robots and artificial intelligence is so wildly diverse, in both tone and intent, that our stories form six thematic collections. It's Alive! is about inventors and their creations. Following the Money drops robots into the day-to-day business of living. Owners and Servants considers the human potentials and pitfalls of owning and maintaining robots. Changing Places looks at what happens at the blurred interface between human and machine minds. All Hail the New Flesh waves goodbye to the physical boundaries that once separated machines from their human creators. Succession considers the future of human and machine consciousnesses – in so far as we might have one. With 100 stories spanning an order of magnitude more pages, Simon Ings's We, Robots is the new overlord of all robot literary compendiums. Welcome it.

Ajay must steal some rare technology from a long-dead wetware expert, a new Frankenstein called Snow, a man now alive in an AI. A man who wants a new toy for his manufactured daughter...

On July 21, 1969 two astronauts set foot on the moon; far below, in ravaged Mozambique, a young revolutionary - hailed as the saviour of his country - is murdered by a package bomb. From these two unconnected events, Simon Ings weaves a great and glittering web that entangles four lives: Anthony Burden, a mathematical genius destroyed by the beauty of numbers; Saul Cogan, transformed from prankster idealist to trafficker in the poor and dispossessed; and Stacey Chavez, ex-teenage celebrity and mediocre performance artist, hungry for fame and starved of love. All are haunted by Nick Jinks, a man who sows disaster wherever he treads. As the twentieth century unravels, Burden, Cogan, Chavez and Jinks are powerless to escape the connections that bind them. This is not fate, but its opposite: the weight of numbers.

An epic story of courage, genius and terrible folly, this is the first history of how the Soviet Union's scientists became both the glory and the laughing stock of the intellectual world.Simon Ings weaves together what happened when a handful of impoverished and underemployed graduates, professors and entrepreneurs, collectors and charlatans, bound themselves to a failing government to create a world superpower. And he shows how Stalin's obsessions derailed a great experiment in 'rational government'.

Simon Ings' The Smoke is about love, loss and loneliness in an incomprehensible world. Humanity has been split into three different species. Mutual incomprehension has fractured the globe. As humans race to be the first of their kind to reach the stars, another Great War looms.For you, that means returning to Yorkshire and the town of your birth, where factories churn out the parts for gigantic spaceships. You're done with the pretensions of the capital and its unfathomable architecture. You're done with the people of the Bund, their easy superiority and unstoppable spread throughout the city of London and beyond. You're done with Georgy Chernoy and his questionable defeat of death. You're done with his daughter, Fel, and losing all the time. You're done with love.But soon enough you will find yourself in the Smoke again, drawn back to the life you thought you'd left behind. You're done with love. But love's not done with you.

The new novel from Simon Ings is a story that balances on the knife blade of a new technology. Augmented Reality uses computing power to overlay a digital imagined reality over the real world. Whether it be adverts or imagined buildings and imagined people, with Augmented Reality the world is no longer as it appears to you, it is as it is imagined by someone else. Two friends are working at the cutting edge of this technology and when they are offered backing to take the idea and make it into the next global entertainment they realise that wolves hunt in this imagined world. And the wolves might be them.A story about technology becomes a personal quest into a changed world and the pursuit of a secret from the past. A secret about a missing mother, a secret that could hide a murder. This is no dry analysis of how a technology might change us, it is a terrifying thriller, a picture of a dark tomorrow that is just around the corner. Ings takes the satire and mordant satirical view of J.G. Ballard and propels it into the 21st century.Review"Ings' return to full-throttle SF is a cause for celebration. His gift for edgy slipstream fiction makes comparisons with both JG Ballard and William Gibson apposite. Bleak, brutal and uncompromising . If there's any justice in the world it'll win awards."4.5 star review -- Jonathan Wright SFX a moving take of the movers and shakers of technology. Overall grade: A -- Patrick Hayes Sci-fi Pulse.net Simon pulls it off to a higher degree, if not quite fully-turning reality into alternative reality through Augmented Reality! -- Mark Watkins Blast 1386 one of the key books of next year...a serious, ambitious and discomforting novel Christopher Priest a murder mystery, with elements of horror, thriller and exploration woven through...Ings creates an incredibly vivid world which leaps out from teh page with shock...I loved this book Fantasy Book Review One of the best books I've read this year...Ings is the sort of stylist who makes other writers touch the peaks of their caps in respect for his technical skill Sibilant Fricative I confidently expect this book to feature on a few best of the year lists this time next year (I certainly expect it to feature on my list) -- Paul Kincaid BullSpec.com Simon Ings' book is worthy of anybody's shelf especially if your humour level is of a wicked variety Flickering Myth About the AuthorSimon Ings is a science fiction and literary author whose previous books include Dead Water and A Natural History of Seeing. He also edits Arc, a fiction magazine from the makers of New Scientist, and reviews fiction and popular science for the Guardian and the Telegraph.