Mother of Invention will feature diverse, challenging stories about gender as it relates to the creation of artificial intelligence and robotics. This ambitious anthology from award-winning Australian publishing house Twelfth Planet Press will be edited by Tansy Rayner Roberts and Rivqa Rafael.
From Pygmalion and Galatea to Frankenstein, Ex Machina and Person of Interest, the fictional landscape so often frames cisgender men as the creators of artificial life, leading to the same kinds of stories being told over and over. We want to bring some genuine revolution to the way that artificial intelligence stories are told, and how they intersect with gender identity, parenthood, sexuality, war, and the future of our species. How can we interrogate the gendered assumptions around the making of robots compared with the making of babies? Can computers learn to speak in a code beyond the (gender) binary?
If necessity is the mother of invention, what exciting AI might come to exist in the hands of a more diverse range of innovators?
Our Kickstarter went live today! 12 hours in of Day 1 and we’d already raised over $4000, that’s 20% of our target, thanks to 93 backers. That is so far beyond our expectations for the very first day, it’s humbling to see so many people running at us to pledge for a book that doesn’t even exist yet.
But it WILL exist, and we still need a lot more backers to make this happen. Don’t feel bad if the more extravagant tiers are beyond your reach — we’re going to need a whole lot of people picking up the basic $10 for the ebook level along the way as we build towards our goal, and we’d love you to be one of them.
If you can’t support the project financially, then tell your friends about it! Signal-boosting is just as important as money at this stage, to get the word out to as many people as possible. ESPECIALLY people who are into feminism, smart science fiction, and robots.
Phew. That’s enough hustle for today. Time to sleep. (I hope to wake up to 100+ backers…)
