Tor.com Publishing is delighted to announce the publication of An Unnatural Life by Erin K. Wagner.
Set on the moon of Europa, Aiya Ritsehrer struggles to obtain an appeal and new trial for her latest client, a robotnik identified as 812-3, who is convicted of murdering a human worker but claims that he did not do it. However, robotnici have only recently been awarded legal rights on Earth, and the military complex on Europa is resistant to the implementation of those same rights on the Jovian moon. Aiya battles against both her own prejudices and those of her adopted home to try to find the right path for her client and for society.
From editor Lee Harris:
I really love this story. I’m always a fan of good A.I. tales, and this one is reminiscent of our own Murderbot books and also the classic Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, “Measure of a Man.” This story came to us through our open door slush period, and I can’t wait for you to read it.
From Erin K. Wagner:
This novella started with just the seed of an idea—a prisoner on a planet other than Earth. It quickly grew into something more, integrating the elements of science-fiction that I am most excited to read myself (AI, aliens, and bewildered humans) into a legal drama. I’m so happy to see it find a home with Tor.com alongside their library of genre-breaking work.
An Unnatural Life will be published in paperback and ebook in the summer of 2020.
Erin K. Wagner is a speculative fiction writer, interested in examining how the human responds to the non-human. She grew up in southeast Ohio, on the border of Appalachia, but now lives in central New York, where she hikes in the Catskills and listens for ghostly games of nine-pins. She holds her Ph.D. in medieval literature and teaches literature and writing in the SUNY system. She splits her time between investigating how medieval English writers navigated their identities and, in her creative writing, how we understand our own. Her short stories have appeared in a variety of publications, from Apex to Clarkesworld, and her first novella The Green and Growing is available from Aqueduct Press. You can visit her website at https://erinkwagner.com/.
