THE ANDY SERIES

A series of novellas focuses on an android fighting for his survival in a world of humans.

Andy, the eponymous central character in this collection of novellas by Walvoord, is a good-looking and well-designed android who also happens to be the CEO of Robotics International. He is therefore in charge of a large corporation that’s in the business of manufacturing and marketing androids. In such a position, he can no more avoid poisonous office politics and employees than a flesh-and-blood human boss, including an ambitious subordinate named Pamela Steinman, who stews against Andy’s position and mutters to herself in the mirror: “It should have been me.” “Oh,” she thinks dismissively, “it can dress itself up and smile and shake hands and it knows everybody’s name, but inside it’s going one-zero, zero-zero-one, one-one-zero-zero.” Andy is both compliant and easygoing, in alignment with the narrative’s frequent allusions to both the helpful androids of the Star Trek series and to Isaac Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics, which compel robots to be loyal and subservient to their human masters. Through a series of eight interconnected novellas constructed as prose plays with acts, the author smartly advances and complicates an inquiry into the nature of individuality and sexual morality. Not only is this highlighted in the tale of the sexbot Adrienne, but it also figures prominently in the storyline devoted to Pamela, head of marketing for Robotics International, and her own home servitor, Dick. She routinely keeps him in a closet until an expansion of his programming leads him to notice her sexual needs, albeit cluelessly (“If the purpose of her striptease has nothing to do with my arousal,” he contemplates at one point, “then it is only logical that she is doing it to enhance her own arousal”). The author’s depiction of androids is intensely familiar; SF readers will find no new concepts in these pages. But he tackles the novellas’ ethical questions with energy and a very readable prose style.

A fun and titillating series about androids navigating the human world.