Dennstedt’s SF novel features an unlikely friendship between a mercenary robot and an orphaned young girl.

The story opens on a robot soldier awakening to a world of complete destruction, the landscape quite literally aflame. One Shot—so named for his one working weaponized arm—thinks he may be the last sentient being left on the planet. As he scours his surroundings for resources, he comes across a young girl amidst the rubble, a vision so startling he barely avoids shooting her dead at first sight. Obeying Asimov’s three laws of robotics (cheekily referenced in the title), One Shot quickly makes caring for the girl, Amy, his priority, even renaming her “the Boss” to suit their new relationship. As they traverse a barren landscape struggling to survive, they pick up a “pet,” a maintenance drone One Shot reconfigures and which Amy simply calls “Cat.” Tension mounts when the crew makes its way through a bombed-out city and Amy starts shivering and shaking. One Shot thinks she’s cold, but Amy soon admits she’s scared, and not just because she’s all alone with only a robot for a friend—she’s seen shadows at the edges of her vision, and whenever she throws her head back over her shoulder, she’s convinced they’re being followed. Her fears seem unfounded, but when the pair come across a dying robot soldier and he relays news of the horrific battle that brought this world to its knees, readers realize One Shot and Amy may not be alone, after all. Dennstedt’s premise is both classic and promising, best described by One Shot himself: “We must have looked a sight—a young girl, a robot soldier, and a submissive maintenance Cat walking down a long empty road to nowhere, the last survivors of a broken world.” While this concept is well-worn, the blossoming friendship between One Shot and Amy is affecting enough to separate this tale from others in its genre. The narrative isn’t overloaded with tech-talk, but fans of SF are bound to enjoy the ethical quandaries of robotics explored here.

An exciting adventure exploring notions of friendship between humans and machines.

In Dennstedt’s SF novel, an extraterrestrial robot is tasked with monitoring humanity’s painful ascent back to civilization after a devastating global war.

A worldwide war reduces humankind to stone-age savages ignorant of their high-tech glorious past. A concerned alien civilization, unable to directly intervene due to environmental issues, dispatches the narrator to the benighted planet; he’s a durable humanoid robot capable of self-repair and camouflage to blend with Homo sapiens. His mission is to spend millennia gently guiding the human race back to enlightenment and responsible function. The robot has a hummingbird-shaped scout drone called Billy who flits in out of the storyline, sometimes fatefully. The robot is a Wandering Jew-meets-Candide type figure who acquires assorted nicknames over the centuries but ultimately settles on “Scoots,” shortened to “Scot.” With new exploratory information periodically uploaded from Billy, Scot befriends a series of people, from children to a fairly enlightened monarch to a sailing-ship’s crew to a leper colony’s matriarch to a slum lord. Scot innocently strives to set sensible and ethical examples, but human aggression and perfidy often subvert the guileless hero’s motives. His mass-produced toys inspire the coinage of money and commensurate greed; marketplace pressures turn his repair shop into a gun factory; and his superspeed with firearms gets him conscripted into strongman/enforcer duties. Even after humanity evolves to build idyllic cities, will the Earthlings just blow everything up again? Dennstedt supplements his novel I, Robot Soldier (2024) with this robo-yarn, which is only tenuously connected and can be read as a standalone. The episodic narrative owes debts, acknowledged up front, to SF grandmasters Isaac Asimov (whose Three Laws of Robotics come into play) and Robert Heinlein (Scot is the proverbial and eternal stranger in a strange land). The parable-like storytelling eschews hard science and works in a moderate amount of sardonic humor (“You know, Scot, if you plan on encouraging the human race, you probably should work on your people skills a little more”) as Scot violates a few prime directives to realize his goal. Illustrations by the author are generated via AI.

A loosely plotted, seriocomic pageant of humanity’s failures and foibles from a sympathetic robot POV.