“As a boy, I wanted to be a train. I didn’t realize this was unusual—that other kids played with trains, not as them. They liked to build tracks and have trains not fall off them. Watch them go through tunnels. I didn’t understand that. What I liked was pretending my body was two hundred tons of unstoppable steel. Imagining I was pistons and valves and hydraulic compressors.

“‘You mean robots,’ said my best friend, Jeremy. ‘You want to play robots.’ I had never thought of it like that. Robots had square eyes and jerky limbs and usually wanted to destroy the Earth. Instead of doing one thing right, they did everything badly. They were general purpose. I was not a fan of robots. They were bad machines.”

–From Max Barry’s Machine Man, about an engineer in pursuit of physical perfection at the expense of life and (literal) limb. Read more on science fiction in the Longreads Archive, including a list of the Best Robot Fiction.

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