I don’t often get to say this about a new release of short fiction, but Jared M. Bentley’s Robots, Please! turned out to be a rare bird: a genuinely comic, topical, and insightful commentary on not only the world we live in, but the one we might just be creating for ourselves in the future. Throughout, Bentley’s collection of darkly comic and absurd short stories draws parallels between our world and his eerily similar fictive cosmos, posing tough questions about personal dignity, exploited labor, human and machine agency, and the results that come from outsourcing our creativity and hard work and putting it in the hands of a technology created by flawed humans, who end up treating machines just as badly as they treat each other. I must say that I found much of Bentley’s commentary and reflections to be spot-on. As I said, it’s rare for a book to deliver on the comedic front and still have something important to say, but Robots, Please! does just that. As Rivera Waters remarks in a moment of unbridled optimism, “What a time to be alive!”

A highly recommended and truly enjoyable read that will make you laugh while getting you to consider the more difficult questions posed to those of us alive in the 21st century.

--Paul Knobloch for Reader Views