Friday 56 & #BookBeginnings: Sad Robot Stories

 

 For Book Beginnings:

The general consensus was that the apocalypse had made everything considerably quieter. Robot disagreed.

- p. 5

For Friday 56:
Occasionally, dead sounds floated to his hearing apparatuses, mimicking guttural coughs and laughs. They were sad laughs, like the cracks of a tree being split down the middle by lightning. He saw things too. Shadows. They’d take shape before Robot’s eyes, tempting him to reach out and feel them. They looked like aerial acrobats: at first there was only one on a tightrope, and then there was a family of them swinging and flying through the air, all there to entertain Robot as they loved each other through somersaults. 
 Robot hated them.
- p. 57 (p. 56 is blank)

Synopsis of Sad Robot Stories by Mason Johnson: Robot is one of millions of androids on an Earth that recently saw the extinction of human life. While Robot's mechanical brothers and sisters seem happy, Robot finds himself lost and missing the only friend he had, a human named Mike whose family accepted Robot as a piece of their personal puzzle. Without both the mistakes and the capacity for miracles that define human civilization, is civilization even worth having? Explore this question in the hilarious yet heartbreaking full-length debut of popular Chicago performer Mason Johnson. A Kurt Vonnegut for the 21st century, his answers are simultaneously droll, surprising and touching, and will make you rethink the limits of what a storyteller can accomplish within science fiction.