Review: Robots vs. Fairies

Robots vs. Fairies by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I received a Digital Review Copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The premise of this anthology is declared in its title. Packed full of work by authors I love, we have short stories and novelette length works by Seanan McGuire, Catherynne Valente, Max Gladstone, Mary Robinette Kowal and many others. Anyone who follows my reviews knows why this anthology, edited by the Hugo, Locus, and Nebula-lauded team of Navah Wolff and Dominik Parisien (The Starlit Wood) caught my eye. Some of the authors in this anthology took the title seriously, albeit in a humorous way, giving us fairies and robots in the same tale. Others have chosen sides and clearly declared allegiance. While all of the stories in the book are well written, the three that have lingered with me are not by authors whose works I have read in the past: Ken Liu, Sarah Gailey and Lavie Tidhar. In that sense, this book is doubly a gift, because now I'm determined to search out more of their works. Ken Liu's Quality Time, with its wonderful interweaving of Tamarian language, was a quiet delight on the side of robots. Sarah Gailey's Bread and Milk and Salt gives us a human more monstrous than the fairy who is obsessed with him. Lavie Tidhar's The Buried Giant is a memorable evocative piece.


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