You can read my short story, “The Ballad of Joan Henry” for free. It’s featured at Fiction on the Web, along with a great accompanying image. First, though, I’ll give you some background.
John Henry
Before Joan, there was John. The legend of John Henry depicts him as a former slave, now a free man, working at steel driving. That job involved hammering a steel chisel into rock to create holes for dynamite. They used explosives to build railway tunnels through mountains. No man could outdo John Henry in this task. He accepted a challenge to see if he could work faster than a steam-powered drilling machine. In the end, he won the race, only to die from exhaustion.
Joan Henry
My story, set in the near future, involves Joan Henry, a female CEO of an auto parts manufacturing company in West Virginia. To keep her firm profitable, she’s fired most of the human workers and replaced them with robots. Now, the board of directors is considering a robotic CEO. They set up a challenge where she must compete with this robot for her own job. After that, the story deviates from its John Henry roots.
Setting
“The Ballad of Joan Henry” takes place in a future a few years from now, when robots perform most of the work and all humans receive Universal Basic Income. People respond to this in various ways, and many resent the takeover of jobs.
Comments
The story has already garnered two favorable comments and I thank those two readers for their kind words.
Fantasy or Prophesy?
Today, corporations are replacing human workers with robots and AI. Will things get as bad as I portray in my story? Or will things settle to a new equilibrium state, one acceptable to humans? If my story proves prophetic, well, you heard it first from—
Poseidon’s Scribe