World of the Drone

In 1955, Robert Abernathy wrote something radical: a science fiction story from the inside of an insectoid mind, not the human one. Dworn awakens in his armored shell deep in a brutal desert, member of a beetle-like species that has evolved alongside mechanical beings. He's young, he's alone, and he's running out of time. His journey toward reunion with his horde becomes a desperate race when he discovers the devastating aftermath of an attack by the Drones, those mysterious mechanical forces that threaten his people's existence. Forced into an uneasy alliance with a spider-machine named Qanya, Dworn must navigate a landscape of predators both organic and mechanical, driven by vengeance and the slender hope that his species might survive. This is early mecha fiction at its most alien and assured, a story that asks what it means to be conscious, to be foreign, to grow up in a universe that doesn't care if you live or die. For readers who want science fiction that feels genuinely strange.