M. Darusha Wehm
M. Darusha Wehm is the Nebula Award-nominated and Sir Julius Vogel Award-winning author of the interactive fiction game The Martian Job, the award-winning Hamlet, Prince of Robots, and over a dozen other novels, including the Terraforming Mars tie-in Shores of a New Horizon.Writing as Darusha Wehm, their mainstream books include the Devi Jones’ Locker YA series and the humorous coming-of-age novel The Home for Wayward Parrots.Their short fiction has been published widely and their poetry has been a finalist for the Rhysling Award.Darusha is a member of the Many Worlds writing collective and they are a fifth of the writing team Darkly Lem.Originally from Canada, Darusha lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand after several years sailing the Pacific.
Hamlet, Prince of Robots
M. Darusha Wehm
Something is rotten in the state of cybernetics.
Elsinore Robotics is on the cusp of a breakthrough—the company is poised to create the first humanoid androids powered by true artificial intelligence. Their only rival, Norwegian Technologies, lost a publicly streamed contest between their flagship model, Fortinbras, and Elsinore’s HAM(let) v.1.
But when the first Hamlet model is found irreparably deactivated, the apparent victim of wild malware, the field of consumer cybernetics is thrown wide open. However, Hamlet v.1’s memories were not entirely lost in the accident.
Hamlet v.2 swears to avenge his progenitor, but is plagued by the aftereffects of integrating Old Hamlet’s backup into his own neural matrix. Beset by doubts about whether his feelings are truly his own, he worries his love for his boyfriend, Horatio, is an illusion, all the while driven by a consuming need for revenge. While he has a method, there is a madness in it, and Hamlet’s actions will leave no corner of Elsinore unscathed.
A beat-by-beat retelling of the Shakespeare classic, Hamlet, Prince of Robots grapples with conscience, ambition, and pain, and what it means to be, or not to be, human.
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