Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  The leady led them toward the ship. “It is the goal of history, unifying the world. From family to tribe to city-state to nation to hemisphere, the direction has been toward unification. Now the hemispheres will be joined and—”

  Taylor stopped listening and glanced back at the location of the Tube. Mary was undersurface there. He hated to leave her, even though he couldn’t see her again until the Tube was unsealed. But then he shrugged and followed the others.

  If this tiny amalgam of former enemies was a good example, it wouldn’t be too long before he and Mary and the rest of humanity would be living on the surface like rational human beings instead of blindly hating moles.

  “It has taken thousands of generations to achieve,” the A-class leady concluded. “Hundreds of centuries of bloodshed and destruction. But each war was a step toward uniting mankind. And now the end is in sight: a world without war. But even that is only the beginning of a new stage of history.”

  “The conquest of space,” breathed Colonel Borodoy.

  “The meaning of life,” Moss added.

  “Eliminating hunger and poverty,” said Taylor.

  The leady opened the door of the ship. “All that and more. How much more? We cannot foresee it any more than the first men who formed a tribe could foresee this day. But it will be unimaginably great.”

  The door closed and the ship took off toward their new home.

  * * * *

  Copyright © 1953 by Galaxy Publishing Corp.

  ROBOTS, by Amardeep Singh

  Definition

  A robot is most commonly defined as an artificially animated entity composed of inorganic materials (usually metallic), with a generally humanoid form. However, robots in speculative fiction can be described along a continuum, including some entities that closely resemble human beings and have organic flesh (“androids” and “gynoids,” also sometimes referred to as “cyborgs”), to animated entities that do not have humanoid form at all.

  History and Precursors

  The term “robot” was first coined by the Czech writer Karel Capek, in a play called Rossum’s Universal Robots (1920). Capek’s “Robota” derives from the Czech word for “work,” which also shares an etymological root (rab) with the words for “slave” and “servant.” Capek’s play features robots who revolt against their human masters, and as a result it has been interpreted by some critics as partially inspired by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia that took place in 1917. Capek’s play was quickly translated into many different languages, including English (1923) and Japanese (1924). The play is not widely respected for its literary merits; it is, rather mainly remembered for Capek’s introduction of the term robot, which quickly supplanted older terms like “android” and “automaton” in speculative fiction writing as well as in everyday usage in several languages.

  The idea of humanlike animated entities goes back well before the word “robot” was coined, of course. One such precursor to modern robots might be the Pygmalion myth from ancient Greece, which will be discussed on the section on “Gender and Robots” below. Ancient and Medieval Jewish folklore also has the idea of the Golem, which is referred to in the Psalms as well as in the Talmud. In at least some usages, “Golem” is used to describe the creation of Adam, the first man, by God. In the Renaissance period, a Yiddish writer named Judah Loew ben Bezalel (also referred to as Rabbi Loew) created a myth passed down orally, and known as the “Golem of Prague.” The Golem of Prague was said to have been created by Jews using occult powers resembling the powers used by God, who created Adam from mud. In this case the Golem is deployed as an agent by its creators to defend the Jewish people from various forms of anti-Semitic attacks. In Rabbi Loew’s narrative, the Golem eventually goes out of control, and must be destroyed.

  Other early myths of animation include the Homunculus figure in Goethe’s Faust, Part 2 (1832) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Frankenstein in particular is seen as influential on subsequent speculative fiction writing, as it describes the creation of an animated entity through the processes of modern science, rather than through alchemy (as in Faust), or occult or religious practices (as in the Golem of Prague). For this reason, Frankenstein is often described as the first work of “science fiction”; the fact that the very first work in the genre is a story about artificial life (what would later be called a robot) suggests how important and central the idea of the robot is to science fiction as a genre.

  Another important and influential precursor to the twentieth-century robot might be Carlo Collodi’s Adventures of Pinocchio (1881). Though Pinocchio does not directly involve industrial design or electronics, and is instead more closely connected to the western Fairy Tale tradition, it deserves mention because its central story, involving a humanlike animated entity (in this case, resembling a puppet or marionette) that wants to be human, overlaps directly with early science fiction accounts of robots (including both Isaac Asimov’s robots and Osamu Tezuka’s “Astro-Boy”; see below). As with the more explicitly “robotic” narratives that began to emerge in the works of science fiction writers such as Asimov in the 1940s and 50s, Collodi’s Pinocchio centrally figures an individuated artificial life entity that has the capacity for distinctly human emotions (anger) and physiological needs (hunger), who struggles to understand the distinctively human idea of empathy. Later writers such as Asimov and Tezuka also test the human/robot boundary in their works, generally operating on the premise that artificial lives may be as much worthy of compassion and dignity as “real” human lives.

  Asimov and After

  The most influential writer to work with robots in western science fiction and fantasy is Isaac Asimov, who published a series of short stories and novels beginning with the short story “Robbie” (1940). Asimov’s robot stories generally features robots with “positronic brains”—that is to say, advanced artificial intelligence generally indistinguishable from human intelligence. Asimov’s early robot stories also generally invoke Asimov’s invented “Three Laws of Robotics,” which are fully introduced by the author for the first time in the story “Runaround” (1942). The Three Laws run as follows:

  “1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

  2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

  3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or the Second Law.”

  In essays, Asimov often described how the constraints of the Three Laws provided myriad situations and ambiguities to explore in subsequent short stories and novels. A representative example might be Asimov’s “Bicentennial Man” (1993), a story about a self-teaching robot who buys its own freedom (again, following the theme of servitude and mastery emphasized by the Three Rules), and who later designs technology that eventually enables it to be recognized by human society as effectively human. The Three Laws have also influenced other robot-themed writing, though many later science fiction writers have understood robots not as servants of human beings, but as potential threats to the idea of humanness itself.

  Asimov’s vision of the human interaction with robots is generally optimistically utopian, and the human motivations for constructing robots in his robot stories is usually simple and uncomplicated. However, not all robot-related science fiction, even from the Golden Age of the genre, shared this naïve optimism, and many writers emphasized the danger of robots superseding human power in a wide array of apocalyptic, dystopian scenarios. One such dystopian scenario might be seen in Fritz Lieber’s “A Bad Day For Sales,” which features a robot named “Robie” (a clear allusion to Asimov’s own “Robbie”), whose socialization circuits are far from perfect—and adds in the additional twist of a nuclear holocaust.

  Asimov himself dealt with this topic in stories like “The Evitable Conflict” (1950), which features networked robots deciding to strategically disobey human commands for what
they (the robots) deem to be the real best interests of human society. This theme is also the basis for the more recent film I, Robot (2004), loosely adapted from Asimov’s writing—but again, the recent film makes the prospect of robot decision-making into a dangerous conspiracy. Films like Terminator, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and The Matrix also stress the dangers of robot sentience and control. By contrast, Asimov’s vision of a growing human dependence upon (or even subservience to) robot judgment has a fairly benign tone, as Asimov’s character Susan Calvin suggests: “[Humankind] was always at the mercy of economic and sociological forces it did not understand—at the whims of climate, and the fortunes of war. Now the Machines understand them; and no one can stop them, since the Machines will deal with them as they are dealing with the Society” (Robot Visions 217). In short, in utopian Asimov’s vision, the turn to a transcendent robot authority might actually be an improvement considering the many avoidable disasters of history under human control.

  After Asimov, robot-related speculative fiction is so widespread that it is impossible to generate an even remotely comprehensive list. Popular science fiction narratives, comics (including manga in the Japanese tradition), television, and cinema are replete with robots beginning in the 1950s, with special mentions given to Osamu Tezuka’s “Astro-Boy,” “Hal” from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Terminator from Terminator, the comic robots of Star Wars, and Commander Data of Star Trek: the Next Generation. Through these turns, Asimov’s towering vision continues to be felt and have an impact, though the philosophical themes of robot-related speculative fiction do begin to expand in different directions, with greater emphasis on robots as companions to human beings (sometimes substitutes for deceased friends or relatives), robots as potential sexual or romantic partners, and robots (especially androids or cyborgs) as vehicles for transcending human mental and physical limitations.

  Gender and Robots

  As with most other science fiction from the “golden age” of the 1930s–50s, Asimov’s stories are highly male-centered, with little attention to questions of the sexuality or gendering of robots. Asimov does have a story from his middle career called “Feminine Intuition” (1969) that explores gender issues, but to contemporary readers the premise of the story, that a female robot might be able to solve problems through “feminine intuition,” will likely seem hackneyed and sexist. In a later essay surveying his own career, Asimov reiterates the rather naive approach to gender seen in his story: “She [the female robot, “Jane”] was still metal, but she had a narrower waistline than my usual robots and had a feminine voice, too” (Robot Visions 14). Statements like this show that, as inventive as he was, Asimov clearly did not take the issue of gender in his robot-related fiction all that seriously.

  Other writers did explore these issues in greater depth. “Helen O’Loy” (1938), by the prominent science fiction writer and editor Lester Del Ray, is a modern, robot-oriented revision of the Ancient Greek (and Roman) Pygmalion myth. In Ovid’s version of the myth (which dates from around A.D. 8), Pygmalion is a sculptor who carves a marble statue of a woman that is so beautiful he falls in love with it. Later, he prays to the Goddess Venus, asking that the statue be made into a real woman. Venus grants his wish, and the sculpture is turned into a real woman, whom Pygmalion then marries. In Del Ray’s version, the “statue” is instead a robot created by a robot mechanic Dave and his friend, Phil. “Helen O’Loy” also of course contains characters who are real women, but they are deemed to be too demanding and picky by the young men; the flawless beauty and absolute (programmed) devotion of the robot “Helen” makes her a preferable mate. While Del Ray’s robot world is more mature and worldly than Asimov’s, hinting strongly at a human-robot sexual pairing, its sexism is still quite pronounced—likely to be controversial for contemporary readers.

  For their part, the first wave of women writers in speculative fiction often did not directly focus on the robot theme so much as various speculative scenarios relating to gender and power. Ursula Le Guin, in The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and “She Unnames Them” (1985) writes with a profound interest in undoing the negative social effects of gender hierarchy, but with little interest in robots per se. Writers such as Octavia Butler and “James Tiptree, Jr.” (Alice Sheldon) also rarely wrote about robots, suggesting that robots have been a particular preoccupation of male speculative fiction writers.

  One influential story by a male writer that uses robots to make a feminist point is Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives (1972). Written at the height of the American Women’s Liberation movement, Levin imagines a progressive, open-minded couple (“Sex, yes; sexism, no”) moving to a suburban Connecticut town where the women seem unnaturally servile, and obsessed with personal hygiene and housecleaning. Gradually it becomes clear to the novel’s protagonist, Joanna, that the men are involved with a conspiracy, where their real wives are replaced by perfectly convincing robot substitutes. Where in Del Ray’s “Helen O’Loy,” the servility of “Helen” is seen as an attractive feature, here it is recast as a sinister plot by men who only appear to be in favor of women’s liberation, all the while coordinating a new social order that eliminates real women entirely from the picture.

  Another highly influential post-Asimov robot narrative that explores some robot gender issues is Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) with its accompanying film adaptation, Bladerunner. In the world of Dick’s novel, the design of androids (robots with organic flesh) has evolved to the point that the only way of distinguishing them from real human beings is through observing the androids’ incapacity for human empathy in a highly specialized psychological testing process. As the story progresses, however, it becomes clear that the issue is not so much the androids’ capacity for empathy or their survival-instinct, but rather whether and how human beings can feel forms of attachment (including sexual desire and love) for androids. (The question of the human capacity to feel for robots/androids is also at the core of Brian Aldiss’s “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” [1969], the basis for Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence [2001].) Along those lines, Dick’s novel is notable for featuring an instance of human-android sex, though Dick stops short of suggesting the possibility of sexual reproductive capacity amongst female robots.

  Interestingly, one of the most compelling accounts of how gender might signify for artificially animated beings is in Mary Shelley’s own seminal text, Frankenstein. There, the overwhelming desire of Frankenstein’s monster is for his maker to create a female companion—the only possible creature who might accept him. The idea of a male created alone and desiring female companionship has Biblical overtones (i.e., Adam and Eve), but it also hints at the possibility of sexual reproduction amongst the “monsters.”

  Robots in the Japanese Tradition

  In Inside the Robot Kingdom, scholar Fredrik Schodt has described how “robots” entered the Japanese science fiction tradition, beginning with the translation of Capek’s play into Japanese. Just as precursors can be found for robots in the West in the form of clockwork automatons, in the Japanese tradition an important precursor to modern robots can be seen in the automated Karakuri Ningyo (Karakuri Dolls) from the Edo period in Japan (1600–1850). As Kirsty Boyle puts it:

  Japan’s love of robots lies in the history of the ‘Karakuri Ningyo’.…The word ‘Karakuri’ means a mechanical device to tease, trick, or take a person by surprise. It implies hidden magic, or an element of mystery. In Japanese ‘Ningyo’ is written as two separate characters, meaning person and shape. It loosely translates as puppet, but can also be seen in the context of doll or even effigy. The Japanese Karakuri puppets utilize subtle, abstract movements to invoke feeing and emotion. (Source: Karakuri.info)

  Beginning in the 1850s, Japanese culture came into contact with Western technology, as well as Western ideas and storytelling traditions (including, at the beginning of the twentieth century, western science fiction). Among the first Japanese writers to use robots in speculative fiction
is Juza Unno (1897–1949), who is said to have been influenced by the robot-themed Fritz Lang film Metropolis (1927). Unno’s stories from the 1930s inspired the manga artist Osamu Tezuka, who created the popular Manga “Astro Boy” (or in a more literal translation from Japanese, “Mighty Atom”). Tezuka’s Astro-Boy is a robot born of the nuclear age, and is in some ways a reverse Pinocchio, who does not necessarily aspire to become human so much as to be granted rights as a robot Tezuka inspired a quite a number of other comic and animated robot narratives, including, from 1956, Tetsujin 28-go (Iron Man 28; marketed as Gigantor in its American version), the pet robot cat known as Doraemon (1969), and various kinds of robot girls, including Arare-Chan (in the Dr. Slump manga series, from 1980) and the “cyberdolls” from the anime series Hand-Maid May (2000). While earlier series such as Tetsujin 28-go used robots that operated without reference to the laws of physics, Schodt describes how more recent series, such as Yoshiyuki Tomino’s Mobile Suit Gundam (1979), inaugurated the “real robot” genre in Japanese anime, with robots constrained to operate with existing power sources and conventional weapons, under the laws of physics.

  Actual Robots

  Along with the accounts of Japanese science fiction, manga, and anime, in Inside the Robot Kingdom Schodt describes the history of the advent of “actual” robots, which began with programmed industrial machines designed to replace human workers. One key figure in the history of the invention of robots is George C. Devol, Jr., who filed a patent on the first industrial robot in 1954. As Schodt puts it, ““Devol’s idea was a form of flexible automation, a transfer apparatus or manipulator that could do many things, such as pick cartons off a series of pallets and then put them on a conveyor belt to be transferred into a truck—a simple operation usually performed by hand that was, he wrote, ‘a waste of manpower that is here corrected.’