I adored Wilson’s Robopocalypse and this novel did not disappoint! Sometimes readers need a break from novels and trilogies and this collection of stories hit the spot! I was fully impressed with the main characters of each story and really felt for them, which I think is hard to do considering Wilson didn’t have a whole novel to reel you in with. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone looking for a good sci-fi novel!

The best stories in Guardian Angels are quite brilliant, and there are a few that I could have done without. Overall, the writing is always very good and Wilson finds a way to concentrate on the emotional thread in most of the stories, even at their most fantastical.
The best are thoughtful and exciting - the less successful, such as BLOOD MEMORY, can be quite depressing, and to no effect.

Guardian Angels and Other Monsters
by Daniel H. Wilson
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
This was one the books I thought I wouldn't be able to review because I didn't start it in tie. Much gratif=tude ti #netgalery for allowing authors and readers to interact with their kind sharing of prepubs to be reviewed as many of these gems I wouldn't have searched out on my own This book is a stellar collection of short griping stories set in the future we have allowed to possibly created through stupidity. The first story alone Miss Gloria would be worth 5 stars for the whole collection. I probably won't get through all the stories in the next 10 hours but I have read enough to want to promote this to everyone as it is worth it both for emotions, intent and food for thought. I feel anyone with some intelligence should have been forced to read this like 2 years ago if we could have made a tie machine thought there are others on that jantra that have been out for decades along the same vein [which also weren't taken too seriously] I was happy to see I still could open this last night when I was trying to clean my table of books as it would have been a regrettable feast I wouldn't have had the chance to savor and tter a little than nothing. All I can add is we still have time don't let some of these stories be examples of our future r the future of generations to come

As with most collections, there are hits and misses. I had read his first novel and found it interesting enough to attempt his second, hoping he’d smooth out some of the rough spots. It didn’t happen for me so I moved on but kept him in mind anyway. When I saw this collection I thought maybe his stories would be more appealing than his novels. A couple decent ideas here and there but overall it didn’t work for me. If you like his novels and are ok with his writing style, you’ll probably like this collection.

This is a compilation of 14 short science-fiction stories. I found this collection to make for enjoyable reading, though some stories I enjoyed more than others. This collection deals mostly with the human/emotional side, rather than the science side, of whatever subject the author was writing about at the time. Some stories were thought provoking, others rather creepy. The writing was beautiful.

I hadn't ready any work by Daniel H Wilson before this collection, but I'll keep my eyes out for his writing in the future. Dark and delightful!

"Guardian Angels & Other Monsters" represents my first foray into Daniel H. Wilson's work, and after having gone through Jo Walton's "Starlings" I'm beginning to see a pattern: I spot books I might like to read but don't quite have the time to at present, and instead I end up reading short stories by the same author since I can polish them off between essay submissions and group projects and work and bed. Having not yet found time for "Robopocalypse," and yet knowing it's likely now to be booted (finally) out of Hollywood's/Steven Spielberg's development hell (by none other than *explosions everywhere* Michael Bay), I have at last succumbed to the subtle self-pressure to catch up on what might be the next hot thing in science fictional adaptations. Whatever you think about Spielberg's decision to pawn this project off on Bay, one has to admit there's something almost tantalizingly noisy about the whole prospect.

This is probably not the best book to read in bed, however.

Unlike "Starlings," Wilson's collection feels less like an afterthought to a well-developed career than it does a serious project with a consistent tone. It's so serious, in fact, that pretty much every single short story deals with extreme violence, often in the context of war. I'm sure readers of the "Robopocalypse" books will be excited to know that the series rates a standalone short story ("Parasite: A Robopocalypse Story") which carries some weight of its own; I have the feeling, of course, that I'm missing a lot of the context. Or rather, all of the context, seeing as how I've not read any of the series yet. "Miss Gloria," Wilson's opening act, follows an artificial intelligence as it reboots time after time in its quest to save the life of a little girl under its care; the reboot process makes for an interesting, and thoroughly cinematic, trick to move the story along. "The Blue Afternoon That Lasted Forever" and "The Executor" are perhaps the most competent of the stories in this collection, lofting both fascinating premises and some serious (if compressed) character development at the reader. Several of the other stories in this collection deal with similar parent/protector-child relationships, always framed within a larger context of loss or violence. "Helmet" shifts the burden of protection onto an older brother and "The Nostalgist" shifts it to a grandfather figure, but otherwise these stories uphold the trend. Each one contains elements of horror, horror within families falling apart, which is why I don't recommend this as a bedtime read.

There's a lot to enjoy here, a lot of flash-bang and a lot of uncanny valley and a lot of familiar faces turning twisted in the dark. But there are also some missteps, and one in particular which still grates: In "Blood Memory," Wilson ties a child-turned-psychopath to an autism diagnosis in the second paragraph, and seeds the horror story which follows with lines about "wrongness" and "deformity" which are bound to get my hackles up. I'm sorry, but when you start a story with a diagnosis, you don't get to pretend it's not important to how those of us who are on the spectrum will read your story. It's telling that one of Wilson's favorite adjectives in this story is "empty," another word familiar in all the wrong ways to those of us who are part of the ASD community. I won't due Wilson the disservice of claiming all of the stories are like this one, but it certainly casts the series in a new light when I look at it in retrospect, as a whole. Does Wilson equate autism with emptiness? And what does framing that story between "Helmet" (in which a kid is trapped in his own body and denied agency, another trope familiar to the medical/science fictional nexus) and "Foul Weather" (in which a man is trapped in a plane with an active horror) and any number of stories about robotic technology gone astray say about the way Wilson views the human body in relation to the human mind? Minds and bodies, in "Guardian Angels & Other Monsters," are usually malevolent, or impotent, or otherwise doomed to fail those we love.

Framed in a medical context, that's a troubling conclusion indeed.

A great read! I liked the different stories and how they all had different things to say.

A great way to read if you do not have a lot of time as each story is quite short. Would definitely recommend to others.

Amazing writing -- recommending for March LibraryReads newsletter

Who better to write about the potential advancement of artificial intelligence than someone especially instilled with supporting knowledge? That would be author, Daniel Wilson. He'd come well-prepared to the otherworldly gunfights with a PhD in robotics. Armed to the teeth.

I was held entranced with an impressive display of his genius that danced through the pages. A well-written narrative of swashbuckling short stories covered the soaring gamut of the author's imagination.

An eclectic array of artificially, gifted robots paraded through the storylines. Each conveying its own unique purpose and source of energy and power. Given a front row seat, I was transported to another world. Another planet. Another solar system. Or did I ever leave planet Earth? There was no way to really know. I suppose, in the end, it didn't really matter. The curtain rose. The show began. And I fell into lockstep with the guardian angels and other monsters. An entertaining read.

I am grateful to NetGalley and Vintage Books/Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group for this ARC in exchange for an unbiased review.

Absolutely adored these short stories. I don't typically like short stories but Daniel Wilson gives enough depth to his characters that they beg to be read.

I'm not generally a fan of short fiction, as I want more meat to my stories. This however was a wonderful read, and gave me some great new authors to look for and forward to! Give it a try, I think you'll be very pleased!

I have to say, Daniel H. Wilson is probably one of my favourite science fiction writers ever. And definitely my favourite author of those kind of futuristic robot apocalypse kind of stories. Ever since I read Robopocalypse and Amped, I've struggled to find someone who matches up to him.

All the stories in this anthology are based around that kind of futuristic view. A few don't contain robots as such, but instead a vision of possible technology. And all bar one (All Kinds of Proof) gave me some seriously sinister vibes. None are apocalyptic as such, but they felt like they foreshadowed some form of apocalypse. And given that scientists have just unveiled that artificial intelligence Sophia, everything is lent an even creepier aspect (have they not read about what happens when you create artificial intelligence????).

I enjoyed all the stories in this anthology. They all worked as proper standalone short stories as well, which I find sometimes can be a problem in anthologies. Often the scope of the story can be too large for the length of it, but that was not the case here.

The only problem now is that I really desperately want to reread Robopocalypse.

A solid collection of sci-fi/fantasy stories. I'll definitely recommend it to others!