EAGER

The Jetsons in a lightweight dystopia. In siblings Fleur and Gavin’s world, where robots do all of the manual labor, there’s no starvation or homelessness. Still, something is wrong in their class-stratified society. Like all professional families, theirs has a sentient house and a robot butler. They don’t have the latest technology reserved for the wealthy technocrats who work for LifeCorp, but at least they don’t live in the city with all those made unemployable by robot labor. Their parents decide to replace the faithful but flaky robot butler Grumps, so maybe Fleur and Gavin won’t be so embarrassed in front of their technocrat friends who have fancy new BDC-4 robots. Grumps’s replacement is the experimental prototype Eager—a robot who has been programmed to think instead of following orders. While contemplating the definition of life, Eager, Gavin, and Fleur discover something frightening about the BDC-4 robots and about LifeCorp in general. While Eager’s adventure isn’t thrilling, his discoveries about life, formed through amusing conversations with virtual reality Socrates, are thought-provoking. (Science fiction. 9-13)