The Wildcraft Drones - by T K Rex (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Can machines rewild us?

An AI breakthrough connects a team of scientists with a wild dolphin, but progress is neck-and-neck with climate breakdown. Class differences are only the first challenge when romance blooms between college girls at a soil remediation site. A forlorn drone seeks reassignment after his human companion dies--but a reckless band of rebels has other plans.

T. K. Rex's debut collection explores a turbulent timeline where the role of intelligent machines changes alongside nature and humanity, in fourteen tales from the climate crisis and beyond. This is the world of The Wildcraft Drones.

Welcome to the Grungle.

Review Quotes

​​"Gorgeous, hopeful, and strange, The Wildcraft Drones is a history of the next four millennia that will make you cry -- in mourning, and for joy. This is the future that cyborg oak trees and pirate drones want. I do too." - Annalee Newitz, bestselling author of Automatic Noodle and The Terraformers

"A much-needed vision of how things could turn out well, despite the many dangers we are facing." - Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Ministry for the Future

"The Wildcraft Drones weaves the many realities of a world where the soil, technology, wild creatures, and wild people collaborate on communicating through and past the bounds of language. When evolution is the only constant, these stories insist on centering the protection of those on the margins of power concentration. A reminder that if we do not see ourselves as part of the collective, we lose the tools to save ourselves." - Shingai Njeri Kagunda, Ignyte award-winning author of & This Is How To Stay Alive

"T. K. Rex reimagines the world, transforming our dystopian monocrop wastelands into sustainable food forests rich with the entanglements of life. These stories are affirmations that however knotted the problems we face are, the keys to a better world lie not in technological oversolutions which separate us from nature, but in our full engagement with the biosphere's complexity, and in our willingness to finally admit we are a part of it." - Ray Nayler, Hugo and Locus award-winning author of The Tusks of Extinction and Palaces of the Crow

"These tales take us from the first successful inter-species communication forward into a future where life and machine have become so entwined it is no longer possible to know when one ends and the other begins. The world of Rex's stories is intricate, complex, deeply imagined and utterly transporting. Impressive work." - Karen Joy Fowler, multiple award-winning author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

"T.K Rex's radically hopeful and unflinchingly anticapitalist solarpunk collection, The Wildcraft Drones, places Rex along side contemporary speculative environmentalist authors such as Ray Nayler, Becky Chambers, and Annalee Newitz. Filled with dry wit, melancholic beauty, and a love for animals, people, and California's forests, The Wildcraft Drones charts what it means to maintain empathy in the wake of devastating cruelty." - M. M. Olivas, author of Sundown in San Ojuela

"Love stories that make my heart hurt. Worldbuilding and technology that make my mind melt. Stories that surprise, make me laugh, make me hope. Hope above all. Whatever you want out of fiction, it's in this book." - Sam J. Miller, Nebula award-winning author of Blackfish City and Red Star Hustle

"The Wildcraft Drones presents a fascinating future: hopeful, flawed, and ever-changing as characters continually fight for something better. Rare as morel mushrooms, sweet as acorn bread, and unexpected as BBQ-flavored crickets, it will provoke you to imagine new possibilities and find their seeds in roadside blackberries." - Ruthanna Emrys, author of A Half-Built Garden

"T. K. Rex's tales of climate refugees, sentient drones, and multispecies networks pull no punches about the hardships to come, yet leave me feeling hopeful and inspired all the same. Essential reading for the Anthropocene." - Sarena Ulibarri, author of Another Life and Steel Tree

About the Author

T. K. Rex (they/she) is a science fiction and fantasy author from the western states, whose short fiction can be read in Roses & Wildflowers, The Fabulist, Reckoning Magazine, and many other places. They're an alumni of the Clarion writers workshop, a twenty-year denizen of San Francisco, and a friendly acquaintance of spiders. T. K.'s full bibliography, socials, and newsletter can be found at tkrex.wtf.