The result is that robots, in this story at least, become a way to consider how framing the “universal subject” of revolutionary consciousness as “workers” struggles to accommodate race and ecology. An unexpected outcome, and I didn’t expect antisemitism to become an important theme within it!
In general robots are a grab-bag of projections and anxieties that are hard to tie together, especially without thinking how labor and automation interact. My story presumes that those projections continue even as robots come to form their own distinct, inhuman forms of sentience.
I never receive word from publishers on my poetry submissions the instant I check my email, Moksha, Duosuma, or Submittable. I only receive a response when I’m doing something else. The answer is clear: I need to stop doing something else so I can move frequently check my submission status.