AustLit

'An ambitious anthology from award-winning Australian publishing house Twelfth Planet Press, Mother of Invention will feature diverse, challenging stories about gender as it relates to the creation of artificial intelligence and robotics.

'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?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

When a drone catches sight of a kangaroo, siblings Lexi and Jeff set out to hunt it while their mother stays behind with little Jackie. Lexi's leg is shortened after a bad fracture, slowing her down on the shifting sand dunes; she squabbles with the younger Jeff, frustrated at times by his autism.

They find the kangaroo, but when Lexi startles Jeff into an outburst, they lose it. After Lexi comforts Jeff through a panic attack, she reveals that she broke her leg trying to save Jeff from a bad fall. The siblings reconcile.

The next morning, the first rain in a decade falls, and they find fish in the creek bed where Lexi broke her leg.