The 91av Book Club had quite a change of science-fictional pace in May, moving from the wilds of space in our April read, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, to a much closer-to-home future in Silvia Park’s Luminous.

Like another of our reads this year, Sierra Greer’s Annie Bot, this imagines a world where robots are integrated into society – and explores how we might deal with this on many different levels: emotionally, spiritually, practically, sexually. Set in a reunified Korea, it’s a compelling blend of three storylines: a police procedural, in which detective Jun is out to discover what might have become of a robot girl who has gone missing; a ragtag bunch of kids on an adventure, in which Ruijie and her schoolmates find an abandoned robot boy in a scrapyard; and a tale of a dysfunctional family. Jun and his younger sister Morgan grew up with a third sibling, a robot who disappeared when they were young, fracturing their family. They’re still estranged today.

Author Silvia Park: ‘No one is your enemy, not even death’

Silvia Park, author of the May read for the 91av Book Club, 'Luminous' on emotional artificial intelligence, our inevitable love for robots and coping with grief.

I found Luminous refreshing and thought-provoking. The various strands combine to create a sensitive exploration of what it means to love somebody and what it means to lose somebody. Park, who wrote us a great essay about how the novel started out as a children’s book but became something much darker, is a confident and elegant writer, and I can’t wait to read what they write next (they told me in our video chat – which covered everything from robot consciousness to Peter Pan – that it’s about man-eating mermaids, so that’s a definite yes from me!).

Our book club members found different things to enjoy about Luminous. For TheGosia, it was Park’s writing about disability. “I’m loving it! Really good characters and I’m immediately gripped. What jumped out at me so far was bionic modification of humans portrayed in a positive way,” TheGosia wrote on our . “Super interesting as given the opportunity I would happily abandon most of my very broken meat suit for a more functional, bionic one. But often it’s written through the lens of what you’d lose.”

Exoi was also a fan. “I find it densely packed with so many thought-provoking ideas and stances on robotics and what it means to be a valued entity on our planet. There seem to be more ideas and themes in this book than some authors use in a lifetime, making it intelligent and nuanced. I’m loving it so far.”

So was Karen Warren. “Of course this is only one version of the future, but I could see the seeds of this scenario in our current society. And it got me thinking about how humans have always anthropomorphised inanimate objects (we give names to our cars, and children play games with teddy bears) – it shows how desperate we are for connection,” she wrote. “I found this quote from the author: ‘How do we define what is real? So many of us spend most of our hours either asleep – unconscious or dreaming – or locked in a world that exists on a tiny screen. How can we say, then, that we live in reality’, which I think sums up much of the book.”

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Read an extract from Luminous by Silvia Park

In this extract from Luminous, the May read for the 91av Book Club, we meet a mysterious robot discovered in a salvage yard in Seoul, in a future reunified Korea

Alan_P was less taken with this latest read. “Just finished Luminous – and possibly I didn’t pay enough attention, but when enough people have read it so it’s not a spoiler, someone is going to have to explain to me what was going on,” he pleaded on . “It’s beautifully realised, but as I mentioned I’ve got no idea what the ending was all about. And why were the kids so keen to hand around that damaged robot? … Why did years of therapy not help either brother or sister with their father issues?”

Matthew was also a little lukewarm. “I found it slow going and really only finished it because I was two thirds of the way through waiting for something happen. Things happen sure, but they seem to be disconnected events rather than plot. Any plot twists and turns are signalled well beforehand.” Interestingly, Matthew did find the robot identities in Luminous “better realised than in Annie Bot, where Annie was too human” – but said that Iain M. Banks’s Culture universe has “the best robots”. Well, you can’t compete with a Mind. Having read Banks’s 1988 novel The Player of Games with the book club back in December, I’m certainly finding it fascinating to compare his ideas with our current anxiety about artificial intelligence and how it is being reflected in our fiction, from Annie Bot to Luminous.

The robot army that saves the world won’t be anything like what you imagine. Nope, they aren’t little humanoids who can do synchronised martial arts like the ones who dazzled audiences during . And they won’t help you find a can of Coke with embarrassing slowness like from Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc. Instead, they will be microscopic, and mostly made of algae, bacteria and other single-celled organisms. Engineers call them biohybrid microrobots.

If you’ve read about people swallowing pills full of tiny robots to deliver medicine – or you watched the classic 80s flick Innerspace – you’ve already experienced the dream of a microrobot future. For many years, medical researchers have imagined using little machines to get medicine into the hard-to-reach parts of our bodies such as the minuscule capillaries in our lungs. Even better, these machines could actually drive around in our organs, perhaps to seek and destroy cancer cells one by one. The problem is that we can’t actually build motorised devices small enough to do it.

That’s where biomedical engineer Joseph Wang’s work comes in. Like many in the growing field of microrobotics, Wang has dramatically expanded the definition of what most of us think of as “robots”. Any mechanism that can be controlled and move around semi-autonomously is a robot, much like the squishy, pneumatically powered turtle bot I described in a previous column. And some robots contain living tissues – or entire living creatures.

There are many things technology simply can’t do as well as biology – and one of them is motor around inside minuscule environments. Tiny synthetic engines tend to dissolve after a few minutes, Wang says, but “algae just swims and swims”. That’s why he and his colleagues power their robots with the green microalga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii.

At the University of California, San Diego, Wang’s lab worked closely with chemical engineer Liangfang Zhang’s research group to create . They began with C. reinhardtii, which can swim with its powerful flagellum, or tail. It also happens to love blue light, so it is relatively simple to guide this single-celled critter by shining a blue light on its target region. Wang and Zhang can even get massive swarms of the algae into formation: by shining the blue light through a screen with a shape cut out of it, they herded thousands of algae cells into forming a circle, square and even more complex designs.

To disperse the swarm, the researchers used a red light. In a video demonstration, they show a swarm under the microscope moulding itself into the shape of the African continent and then scattering again. Essentially, Wang and Zhang created a microrobot army, “programmed” to move in particular ways by blue and red lights.

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To turn this swarm into a microscopic medical team, they expose the algae to nanoparticles that stick to their outer membranes via electrostatic force. The result is half-algae, half-synthetic, all bot. Researchers can guide the fully loaded microbot swarm towards a wound using blue light. One day, doctors might use the masking technique to create custom-shaped algae bandages with many kinds of therapeutic payloads.

Other parts of the body call for a different kind of algae motor. For stomach exploration, Wang says, he and his team had to use where it had become used to acidic environments. That’s right – toxic mining sites produced algae that might one day swim to the rescue with drugs to treat your stomach cancer.

Light is just one way to program the bots. Scientists can also – organisms that navigate via Earth’s magnetic field – then guide them around inside an animal’s body using electromagnets. Regardless of whether the payload rides on algae or bacteria, it’s referred to as “active” medicine. Traditional drugs are called “passive” because they can’t be programmed to target specific regions or cell types. The hope with much of this research is that more medicine can become active, leading to more effective therapies, fewer side effects and less invasive treatments.

Medicine isn’t the only possible application for biohybrid microrobot swarms, either. Wang’s lab is also in rivers and oceans. Instead of loading the bots up with medicine, researchers cover them in chemicals that can neutralise or absorb toxins. The algae wriggle around in the water, often for days, collecting toxins opportunistically until everything is cleaned up. Meanwhile, some research groups are testing fully synthetic in the ocean.

The fantasy of a robot army doesn’t have to mean humanoid soldiers conquering enemies. Another future is always possible. Tiny algae-cyborg swarms could one day live inside your body – briefly – or travel in packs through the environment, decontaminating the messes that humanity made.

Ace, an autonomous robot powered by AI, cutting-edge sensors and an extremely dexterous arm with eight joints, has played competition-rule table tennis and beaten elite human competitors. The robot is the first machine to excel at the sport.

It was the cerebral game of chess that was first disrupted by computers, but Ace’s success suggests physical sports may be about to have their “Deep Blue” moment – the day, in 1997, that a machine of that name beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov.

“Games have long served as benchmarks for AI, including chess for Deep Blue, but also other games in more recent breakthroughs, like [the Go-playing AI] AlphaGo,” says at Sony AI, Zurich Switzerland, who led the team that built Ace.

But he says those earlier AI milestones were played out online. Ace represents an important advance because it has taken on real-world, professional table tennis champions and held its own.

“Ace offers something that has simply never been captured before: a robot and a human in genuine athletic competition,” says Dürr.

Ace boasts three main advancements in autonomous robotics, he says. Firstly, it uses “event-based sensors”, which means that the robot focuses on certain regions of the images its cameras capture – those indicating changes in motion or brightness, which are critical to tracking the path of the table tennis ball.

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Next, the robot’s table tennis skills are built using “model-free reinforcement learning”, which means, says Dürr, the robot “learns through experience in simulation rather than adopting a model of how table tennis should be played”. This process was similar to having the robot play a table tennis computer game, and the robot notched up several thousand hours of training during the process.

And finally, the team has deployed high-speed robot hardware that allows Ace to play with “human-like agility”, says Dürr. In some ways, it is even more agile than a human, because athletes require around 230 milliseconds to react, he says, whereas the total latency of Ace is only around 20 milliseconds.

Currently, the robot looks like a robot from a factory floor, and relies on a network of cameras and sensors surrounding the table tennis arena. But as the technology advances, the researchers expect Ace will eventually be embodied in a humanoid form.

For the matches played as part of a study published today, Japanese professional table tennis league rules applied as Ace competed against five elite but non-professional players, each of whom had competed for at least a decade and trained 20 hours per week. The robot also took on two professionals.

Ace lost only two of its five matches against elite players, but both of its matches against professional players. It did, however, achieve a win in one game within one of the professional matches.

Another advantage that Ace has over humans is that it does not give away any tells of its next move. On the other hand, it lacks the capacity to read any signs of the body language of humans.

“Some of the athletes involved in our experiments commented that they are usually watching their opponent’s face – which Ace does not have,” says Dürr.

Others were surprised by Ace’s ability to read the spin of their serves, despite their attempts to hide it with different motions. The robot also confounded its inventors – especially when it was able to hit balls that bounced off the net, which was not a skill it had trained for. This was a skill that just “emerged”, says Dürr.

Over the past year, since the study was completed, the team has continued to improve Ace’s abilities.

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In December 2025, Ace beat a professional player for the first time, and in March 2026, Ace won matches against three more professional players: a female professional, , who is ranked in the top 25 in the World Table Tennis ranking, as well as two male professionals, and .

“With further improvements, it should be possible to outperform even the world champion,” says Dürr.

And improvements go both ways, he says.

“Former Olympian noted that before watching Ace, he thought a certain shot was impossible, but having seen it, he believes human athletes could replicate this technique.”

The 91av Book Club moved on from reading a classic piece science fiction in December – Iain M. Banks’s The Player of Games – to an award-winning sci-fi novel in January: Sierra Greer’s Annie Bot, which won the Arthur C. Clarke prize in 2025.

I must admit, I was nervous to announce this one to my fellow readers. Annie Bot is the story of a sex robot, owned by a controlling and abusive man. It gets very dark in places, it has a number of sex scenes, and I wanted to make sure you all knew what you were getting into before getting started. That cupboard scene, some way into the book, was super disturbing, for example.

Sierra Greer discusses her award-winning sex robot novel ‘Annie Bot’

Award-winning author Sierra Greer talks about Annie Bot, her science fiction novel about a robot designed to please her owner, Doug

It turns out my wariness was warranted. A handful of you noted on our group that you put the book aside after starting it, or decided to give this one a miss – the subject matter was just too difficult. Many of you persisted, though – and I think this might have been one of the books to spark the most discussion (and disagreement!) among members.

First, let’s hear from the positive end of the spectrum – which definitely includes me. I read this book very much not wanting it to devolve into so-called “roboporn”, and felt Greer walked this line well. It was something I quizzed her about in our interview, and she was clear she didn’t want her story to be viewed as erotica. For me, she was successful in this – I found the sex scenes all made very uncomfortable reading. What I really liked about the book was the way it made me consider what it means to be human, and to be free. Is Annie more or less human than the less capable bots she meets, like Delta? What future lies ahead for her? I’m still pondering this book, which is the mark of a good read from me.

Laura Akers also “liked it very much, especially the perspective of hearing people talk about Annie in front of her, as though she would have no feelings about what they would say”. She saw it as a great metaphor for “pre-feminist exploitation of women”, she writes on Facebook, and added that she “also appreciated that the main act that Annie perceived as sexual abuse was something that a human could not experience, which lets us think about it more reflectively”.

Annie Bot review: A sharp take on a sex robot that becomes human

In a smart, compassionate novel, Sierra Greer spins the tired trope of a robot challenging its fate into sci-fi gold

Annie Arnott was a bit iffy when she first started the novel – and had similar qualms to me around how Greer would write the sex in the book. “It was touch and go for me at first,” she writes. “What I’m left with is a real respect. We now have an important work – probably on a par with – in the body of women’s work. Without blinking, she gives us the girlfriend experience familiar to most of us. That ongoing calculation of her man’s level of anger. Perfect. That ending – piercingly hopeful and sad.”

Before we get on to discussion about the ending – which, again, divided opinion – let’s hear from regular reader Alan Perrett, who found Annie Bot hard to finish. “Annie’s experiences are so awful that I didn’t want to continue although I’m glad I pushed through to the end”, he writes.

Like many, Alan points out that this is a portrait of an abusive relationship, but he makes a thought-provoking addition in his criticisms of her owner Doug, a man who is “capable of incredible and sustained cruelty”, as Alan puts it. “It’s interesting that Doug is never questioned about his own humanity – and yet he’s clearly not really a full human being in terms of his character at least. Whereas Annie is never admitted to be human but she shows more humanity – or at least no cruelty – than Doug ever does,” he writes. “So are we saying that humanity is just the possession of a heart, lungs, limbs in the right configuration and so on?”

For Alan, there are “some technical plot holes” in this story – “Why does Annie need to cycle on the stationary bike to keep fit, when she seems to be powered by a battery?” he ponders – but overall, he was left (like me) with lots of big questions to think about. “I’m glad I pushed through and finished and well done to the NS book club for suggesting something that so many people would find uncomfortable.”

Others were less impressed. Jennifer Bertrand didn’t fall for Annie as a character: “the author never let us forget she was not human, so I didn’t empathize with her as much as I might have. A few times I thought, at least Doug isn’t treating another actual human being like this.”

Niall Leighton was also not a big fan. In terms of the abusive relationship depicted in the novel, he felt Greer was “successful in her character study, bringing us into the mind of the controlled sex slave, taking us into some extremely dark places and almost out again. As with the worst excesses of some of Iain M. Banks’s characters, nothing is done to Annie that has no direct parallel to the experiences of people in the real world.” But he was less impressed with her take on the autonomy of artificial intelligence, which he felt has “been addressed elsewhere, and with greater nuance”.

“I found myself wanting more. I wanted an analysis of why people (again, mostly men, because it’s still a patriarchy) behave like this,” he writes. “Sierra Greer has something to say, but beyond the character study little is new. In that it’s not the landmark feminist science fiction I hoped for. It’s a disturbing book, but it’s not one I would recommend.”

Fictional female robots have a long history, and it’s often quite dark

Sierra Greer's novel about a female robot, Annie Bot, just won a prestigious sci-fi prize, the Arthur C Clarke award. But she is hardly the first of her kind, says Sophie Bushwick

Jacqueline Farrand felt there wasn’t enough on the tech aspect of Annie Bot. “It was written well and kept pace but it lacked sci fi for me,” she writes – a point Phil Gurski also brings up: “I did not find anything ‘scifi’ in it at all and it was a disturbing read of what amounted to rape and domestic abuse.”

Now, onto Annie’s happy ending. This was something I really enjoyed – I was rooting so hard for Annie all the way through and would have hated it if she ended up trapped with Doug. The book club was split on this point, with some of you feeling the ending was too simplistic and others also approving of Annie’s emancipation.

“I was so relieved at how it ended!” writes Pauline Moncrieff. Karen Seers, though, was “initially a little disappointed with the ending because it felt a bit ‘is that it’ and there were loose ends”. Ken Lynch was also critical. “I didn’t like that she gained her freedom through Doug setting her free, it felt like ultimately Annie had no agency of her own,” Ken writes. “All that said, it did try to tackle some difficult topics and I applaud the author for not shying away from that. It was definitely thought-provoking.”

One name did keep coming up over the course of the discussion about Annie Bot: Octavia Butler, with quite a few of you feeling that Butler handled similar topics to Greer, with more nuance.

“I read all of Octavia E. Butler’s books last year and so I think I’m spoiled as she was a masterful sci-fi writer who wrote about sexual (and other) slavery in many of her books and made me care about the characters a lot more than this book did,” writes Jennifer.

Members on our Facebook group also dug into everything from how Greer writes about Annie’s race – she is described as a whiter version of Doug’s Black ex-wife – to Doug’s attitude to Monica, a therapist who specialises in “human-bot intersections”. And they had a few other recommendations for books on similar topics. Laura suggests Sarah Gailey’s The Echo Wife, “for a different type of created ‘companion’ also designed to be a more compliant version of a man’s ex-wife”. Niall tips The Core of the Sun by Johanna Sinisalo “for a withering comment on the patriarchy (also involving some deeply upsetting themes of domestic abuse and eugenics)”, while Jennifer picks out the first two books of the Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers and Steve Swan says he preferred Klara and the Sun.

Great tips all – but maybe save them for after our February read, which is a truly monumental novel, one I think will (and should) be talked about for years to come. Next up for the 91av Book Club is Tim Winton’s , set generations from now in Australia and opening as a man and a child cross a devastated, blasted landscape. How did they get there? What has happened to our world? Our sci-fi reviewer Emily H. Wilson was blown away by this book when it was published in hardback in 2024 (it’s out in paperback now). Tim has written us a fierce and coruscating essay about why it isn’t a dystopia. And we’ve a short extract from the novel’s opening here. Check them out, sign up for the Book Club and for our Facebook group , if you haven’t already, and come and read along with us.

For free 24/7 advice, call the UK National Domestic Abuse Helpline on 0808 2000 247 . Click for hotlines in 46 countries

The 91av Book Club is reading Sierra Greer’s novel Annie Bot this month. The Arthur C. Clarke award-winning writer joined us to reveal how she got into the mindset of her protagonist, a sex robot, and what it was like writing about the unpleasant and controlling man who owns her. Greer also spoke about how strange it was to have written her novel about a robotic companion well before the advent of AI companions in the real-world – and if she’s planning a sequel.

Read more: The challenges of writing from the perspective of a sex robot

Not being a sex robot myself, I had to take an imaginative leap to write from the perspective of Annie in my novel Annie Bot. Because the book is written in the third person, not the first, Annie isn’t a narrator in the true sense of the word, but I stick so closely to her limited point of view that readers gain a clear sense of her observations and thought processes. We are privy, also, to her blind spots. In short, I needed to be immersed in Annie’s mind in order to write her story, and her head space was, at times, an acutely uncomfortable place to be.

In a near-distant future, sex robot Annie is custom-designed to serve her human boyfriend Doug, a man who is recently divorced, ashamed of his failures and lonely. By the opening of the novel, he has set Annie to an autodidactic mode in the hope that she will become more human-like. At heart, he wants a hot girlfriend who will anticipate his desires, obey his every whim and devote herself to him.

Annie wants to be that girl. At her core, she is literally programmed to please Doug. This is true for any emotional or practical aspect of his life, but it’s especially true in the bedroom because she has the powerful satisfaction of fulfilling her “cuddle bunny” purpose when she pleases him sexually. On the other hand, Annie feels Doug’s displeasure as pain, so she is constantly studying him to determine his moods. She rates his displeasure on a scale from 0 to 10. If he is annoyed or dismissive, it hurts, and when he is angry, the pain is intolerable to her. Annie’s watchfulness, her need to be on guard, creates perpetual tension through the novel. Though she feels desirable and appreciated at times, she is essentially powerless. And in danger.

Annie Bot review: A sharp take on a sex robot that becomes human

In a smart, compassionate novel, Sierra Greer spins the tired trope of a robot challenging its fate into sci-fi gold

Creating Annie’s character was fascinating to me, and also incredibly challenging. I decided early on that I needed a versatile, fictitious version of biotechnology for her body so that she would appear essentially human. Similarly, I was interested in how Annie’s mind worked holistically for her personality, so I provided only enough technical details to make her service check-ups seem authentic. By contrast, pitching Annie’s voice right and getting her mind to evolve gradually over the course of the novel took considerable care. These two crafting aspects were closely intertwined.

I write in an organic way, without an outline, so for my first draft, I followed Annie into the novel and discovered her personality through her interactions with Doug, scene by scene. I was immediately struck by Annie’s voice. In clear, unpretentious language, she initially has a perceptive, innocent outlook that seems at odds with her sexual sophistication. Aware that I was treading close to a trope, I also gave Annie a gentle curiosity and a nascent moral compass to guide her questioning. I revised to develop Annie’s interiority so that her robotic, literal observations were gradually overlaid with more metaphorical and philosophical thoughts. For instance, she has an eye that catalogues every grain of spilled salt on a dirty counter, yet she doesn’t have a childhood or a family. Over time, she reflects on her past mistakes, glimpses the significance of what she lacks and winds up contemplating, among other things, how unhappiness isn’t simply the opposite of happiness. Along with this, of course, there is the matter of her being a sex robot.

Sex in a novel isn’t merely a descriptive interlude. It needs to deepen characterisation or advance the plot, meaning it should create or resolve conflict. It also feels very personal, so the stakes are high. When figuring out what sex would feel like to Annie, I decided to give her libido settings from 0 to 10 and a version of an orgasm that could be interpreted as human-like. Giving control of Annie’s libido to Doug seemed cruel to me, but it was both fitting for Annie’s purpose and important for the power dynamic between them. When Doug sets Annie to self-regulate her libido, for instance, it is a sign of his respect for her development. It is also a more subtle, subversive version of his domination, because she is still programmed to please him. In effect, she has to internalise his desire and his control.

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Fictional female robots have a long history, and it’s often quite dark

Sierra Greer's novel about a female robot, Annie Bot, just won a prestigious sci-fi prize, the Arthur C Clarke award. But she is hardly the first of her kind, says Sophie Bushwick

I made a point of using the sex in Annie Bot to mirror Doug and Annie’s emotional intimacy. Early in the novel, frequent sex reflects Doug’s selfishness, loneliness and sense of entitlement. At the same time, it highlights Annie’s confidence in bed and her awareness of her desirability. As their relationship develops, sex is used for discipline, celebration, revenge, sparking jealousy and new forms of loneliness. At one point, a lack of physical intimacy underscores an emotional separation, but it also allows Annie and Doug to see each other in new, complex ways.

As you might expect, Annie becomes a far more complicated person than Doug ever anticipates. By the time she realises, ironically, that her most human-like qualities displease him, it’s too late for her to go back. Deceit, longing, mirth and chagrin make her existence richer, even while she is still captive to this one man.

The chance to leap into someone else’s consciousness is one of the deepest pleasures of reading fiction. I discovered early on in life, with Buck in The Call of the Wild, that an entity doesn’t need to be human to excite my sympathy. In fact, we can sometimes see humanity more clearly from another point of view, and I found this to be the case as I created Annie. I grew to care for her deeply, flaws and all. She’s part of me, I suppose, and I’m all right with that.

Sierra Greer is the author of the Arthur C. Clarke award-winning novel (The Borough Press), the January read for the 91av Book Club. Sign up to read along with us here.

“Come to bed, Mouse. I know how to cheer you up,” he says.

“I’m not brooding,” Annie says.

“You sure?”

“Fairly sure.”

She is fresh from her shower, rubbing lotion into her legs. Her dark hair hangs in wet clumps along one side of her neck, and she has deliberately left the belt of her robe undone, knowing he can take a peek from the bedroom via the mirror.

“This is still about your tune- up, isn’t it?” he says. “Forget about it.”

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“The whole thing’s degrading,” she says, and sees it’s the right angle.

He enjoys a degree of humiliation.

“Did you see your normal tech?” he asks.

“Yes. Jacobson.”

She taps off the bathroom light and steps out of the humidity into the cooler air of the bedroom. Pretending to inhale deeply, she takes a quick assessment of how far along he is. She has memorized Doug’s features from many angles: his brown eyes, the V- hairline of his dark locks, his tall, pale forehead and the contours of his face. His mouth, in repose, settles into a decisive line, but this does not convey discontent.

The opposite, in fact, is more likely. With his shoes off but otherwise fully clothed, he is stretched out on his back on top of the covers. He has set aside his phone. His hands are tucked behind his head, putting his elbows in the open butterfly position, which further indicates he is relaxed, ready for verbal foreplay.

She sets her temp to warm up to 98.6 from 75.

“Did he mention anything I should know?” he asks.

“I’m good for another three months or three thousand miles, whichever comes first,” she says.

She crawls across the bed and sits nudged against his hip, facing away. She rubs the last of her lotion into her hands and studies her cuticles. They did the whole job today, the waxing, the nails, the memory tetris. She feels sharper, less sluggish. If she could just forget about that sad Stella in Pea Brain’s cubicle, she’d be fine.

Doug rubs the back of his hand along her arm. “What is it, then? Talk to me.”

“I met a strange Stella at my tune- up today,” Annie says. “She was in line in front of me. Her name was actually Stella, like her owners had zero imagination. But she was sentient like me.”

“How could you tell?”

“It was obvious. I said hello, and she looked surprised. A normal Stella wouldn’t look surprised. She’d just answer evenly, hello.” She mimics a monotone robot.

“You never sounded like that.”

“I’m sure I did, thank you. I have no delusions about where I come from.” Annie turns her damp hair over her other shoulder.

Annie Bot review: A sharp take on a sex robot that becomes human

In a smart, compassionate novel, Sierra Greer spins the tired trope of a robot challenging its fate into sci-fi gold

“The lights,” he says.

She sends an airtap signal to the fixtures and lowers the light to a hundred lumens, where he likes it, enough to see, but softer, closer to candlelight. Then she intertwines her fingers in his, noting her skin is slightly darker, with warmer undertones. He draws her hand against his lips, sniffing her lotion. She can’t smell it, but she’s aware that he likes the lemony aroma.

“Am I warm enough?” she asks.

“Getting there,” he says, and shifts slightly.

Taking the cue, she slips a couple fingers under his belt, in his waist-band, feeling the warmth there. His hands return behind his head. He is still not in a hurry.

“Tell me more,” he says. “Did this strange Stella have a neck seam?”

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“So she’s a basic. Was she pretty?”

“I suppose so. Pretty enough. She was a white girl with blond hair and big brown eyes. She didn’t smile much, which also seemed odd.”

“How was her body?”

“Compared to mine?”

“Just answer the question.”

Annoyance, a 2 out of 10. She must be careful.

This is an extract from Sierra Greer’s Arthur C. Clarke award-winning novel (The Borough Press), the January read for the 91av Book Club. Sign up to read along with us here.