
I’m not sure, but I think it has to do with the fact that I’m from Oklahoma, which used to be Indian territory and all of Oklahoma history is really about the clash of civilizations. I am fascinated by the clash of civilizations and technology’s role in that. What is your relationship to history like? What kind of research did you have to do for this book? You have an impressive background in the study of robotics and artificial intelligence, but this is also a historical fiction. It’s not as hard sci-fi as stuff I’ve written before. So, yeah, this is 10 years out from my Phd, and it shows. But, you know, when I was 25, maybe that wouldn’t have been the same story. I’m so glad I did this.’ And they’re giving me a lot of purpose. I’m at the age where I’m looking at my children and I’m like, ‘Oh my god. Different things give you different purpose at different times in your life. What happens is, as they live through the different ages of civilization, they find that their purpose changes based on the human beings that are around them and the context that they’re in.Īnd so, to me, it’s kind of like how we as human beings find purpose.

So, yeah, I changed it.Īnd so what does it mean to fulfill your purpose? And they have a word, so it should be so simple.

The avtomat are these robots - that’s the Russian word for ‘automatic’ or ‘robot’ - it was originally the title of the book until I realized nobody can pronounce it. As you start reading, you realize, this guy actually likes robots.īut what I did here was I really wanted to use the robotic characters as a scalpel to dissect human behavior… the meaning of being a person. Then I wrote Robopocalypse, which was kind of on-the-nose in terms of the killer robot theme, though I try to support it. I did my Masters in Artificial Intelligence, so I spent a lot of time studying the real world machine-learning, the algorithms in programming computers and all that. There are a lot of artificial intelligence stories out there right now. And, at the very end, when I was done with it, I saw the cover and realized it was steampunk.

It’s a world-spanning adventures all through different ages of history. She stumbles upon evidence of these creatures and she… they happen to be running out of power after all these years and so she teams up with one of these machines to find out who made them and how to save their race. And that’s the past story.Īnd, in the present story, there’s an anthropologist. Wilson: The Clockwork Dynasty is a story that imagines there’s this ancient race of human-like robots that have been serving the great empires of antiquity and living hidden among human beings for centuries.
