Mechanical Animals by Selena Chambers

Mechanical Animals by Selena Chambers

A speculative fiction safari that riffs on the traditional ideals of automata to explore our strange and competitive relationship with the natural world. Biomimicry is no stranger to literature, with canonical authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hans Christian Anderson, and Jules Verne setting the tone for a trope that has expounded and expanded upon what exactly separates humans from the animal kingdom as well as the boundary between machines and living beings. Featuring 15 original stories by today's top science fiction and fantasy authors and contextual mecha-fauna essays by artist and Insect Lab Studio maker, Mike Libby, and SF encyclopedist and author Jess Nevins, Mechanical Animals presents a biomimicry menagerie of animalistic machines that will blur the lines between what is and isn't nature's design.

Edited by Selena Chambers and Jason Heller

Featuring:
Mike Libby
Jess Nevins
Tessa Kum
Delia Sherman
Maurice Broaddus
Sarah Hans
Lauren Beukes
Jesse Bullington
An Owomoyela
Stephen Graham Jones
Hans Christian Andersen
Molly Tanzer
Aliette de Bodard
Nick Mamatas
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Kat Howard
Michael Cisco
Adrian Van Young
Robert T. Toombs
Joseph S. Pulver, Jr.
Alistair Rennie
Jules Verne
Caroline Yoachim
Carrie Vaughn

Lauren Beukes is a novelist, comic book creator, and screenwriter. She's the author of the critically praised international bestseller Broken Monsters, the time-traveling serial killer thriller The Shining Girls, the phantasmagorical Johannesburg noir Zoo City, which won the 2011 Arthur C Clarke Award, and the neo-political thriller Moxyland. She worked as a journalist and show runner on one of South Africa's most popular animated TV shows, directed an award-winning documentary, and wrote Fairest: The Hidden Kingdom, a New York Times bestselling graphic novel. She resides in the South African city of Cape Town.