[REVIEW] Sad Robot Stories by Mason Johnson

Review by Corey Pentoney

The world has been torn asunder by some untold event, and the entire human race has gone extinct. All that stands on the face of the Earth are ruins and robots. Robots of all shapes and sizes, makes and models, colors and consistencies wander the streets—or just sit around—as they have lost their purpose: to build things for humans, to take care of humans, to do what they were programmed. Except for Robot, who finds the world too quiet now, the robots seem happier without humans. Robot misses them, their noises, their smells; and not only humans but the plant and animal life that once lived on planet Earth. “Robot missed the toilet sound that was the human race,” we are told. This is where Sad Robot Stories drops the reader, and it is Robot’s adventure that we follow.

This is Mason Johnson’s first full-length publication, and before I really dive into the writing and the story, I want to talk about how stunned I was by the quality of the book itself. In our modern era of everything digital, it’s surprising to me—and of course, it must be partially because of the digital age—to find an author and/or publisher who really, genuinely cares about the quality of the printing and care that is taken in the physical process of making a book. Sad Robot Stories is hand bound in a limited quantity, and each volume is signed and numbered by the author. I must have spent a good five minutes ogling the binding and the end paper and imagining who it was, exactly, that glued this book together, aligned all the pages, and created a work of art in the binding of a book.

Like the book, Robot is a character that has been created carefully and by a skilled hand, one line of code at a time, and at the beginning of the story, I too easily took for granted his simplicity, and the book’s simplicity. Johnson’s writing is often plain and unadorned, rarely flowery, edging on robotic, but the voices that he gives to Robot and the narrator—the two people who speak to us the most, and whom we live with the longest—are honest and true because of it.

I often found Robot’s memories of the humans he had befriended before the apocalypse to be a little out of place. Johnson made the choice to put all of the memories into one long memory in the first half of the book, and Robot is almost forgotten in his—both Johnson’s and Robot’s—attentiveness to them. Personally, I enjoy back-story more when it is integrated into the main body of the book, as it keeps the reader in tune with the main character and his plight. And Robot’s plight is considerable—he constantly struggles with his own humanity in a world of robots. He has feelings and emotions and, whether they’re real or just a result of faulty programming, they are feelings that we, as humans, can easily identify with. The miracle of this novella is that Johnson manages to create a character that allows us—through Robot’s own attempts to come to terms with what it means to be human—to reflect on our own humanity without being heavy handed about it. Sad Robot Stories earns its title in reality and in allegory, and if you don’t end up sympathizing with Robot and his trials and tribulations, you may need to get your circuits checked, because we all have a little Robot in us.

***

Corey Pentoney teaches composition at Jefferson Community College. He thinks the Waffle Taco is an atrocity to the name of Waffle, and plans to write them a Strongly Worded Letter.