(“Fictional” is probably redundant…but I maybe should have put “children” in quotes.)
For a little while now, I’ve had my eye on a somewhat rare…“plot point,” I suppose, in different works of Sci-Fi. That is; robots (or androids, or what-have-you—basically anything with a computer for a brain) that end up with children—biological, oft human, children.
At the risk of SPOILERS, I can think of the following examples:
•Scarlet Witch and Vision, from Marvel comics, who—OK, this one’s kind of a grey area, involving magic, retcons, and convoluted backstory. But the woman did have two kids with the android. Kinda. Maybe.
•Naomi Armitage, from the anime Armitage III. She was a cyborg, who conceived “naturally”—but she has an artificial brain, so she’s in.
•An episode of Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, “The Slayer,” which featured a young girl named Savy SL2—she’d been adopted by a nice robot couple.
•The bittersweet, lesser known anime series Kurogane Communication—among other examples, one character’s “mother” turned out to be an android, much to their surprise.
I figure, with all the fiction ever produced throughout human history, there’s got to be at least…two, three more examples that I don’t know about. Can anyone point them out, to me?
Superman’s nenesis, Brainiac, is an android created by the Computer Tyrants of Colu. To give the illusion that Brainiac was “alive,” he was given a son, a young Coluan boy named Vril Dox, who was also called Brainiac 2. Vril Dox was the ancestor of Querl Dox, the Legion of Superheroes member who was also known as Brainiac 5. So Brainiac qualifies as an android with a biological line of descendants.
What are your standards for “adoption”? Does there need to be an official adoption certificate, or is it enough if the 'bot raises the kid unofficially? Because if the latter, I expect there will be a ton.
Obligatory Asimov references: In Foundation’s Edge, the protagonists meet a Solarian child who, according to Solarian custom, has had no personal contact with any other being than robots since the early zygote stage of development, and has a filial bond to one particular “nanny” robot. And in the short story “First Law”, we’re told of an MA-series robot who, through circumstances not fully explained, somehow ends up with an offspring, whose safety is actually prioritized above that of humans.
He did, up until Crisis, when he was made a biological himself (and Vril (actually Vril II) was his son by blood - although it’s not clear if he was a clone, or concieved in the ordinary way), in any case.
I have a feeling Asimov has done this in a couple of other instances too (in addition to those mentioned by Chronos. I don’t recall the title, but there was a short story in which a child was emotionally bonded to a robot that performed a sort of hybrid pet/bodyguard function.
I read a lot of SF short stories and I recall another (not Asimov this time, I think) wherein the protagonist has some kind of robot tutor/nanny that develops (by design) its own distinctive personality, but is unceremoniously disposed of by his/her parents and the story relates his/her attempts to retrieve it, but he/she is successful in finding the unit, which has been placed with another family, but it has undergone a factory-reset and does not remember anything about its last assignment, furthermore, the parents of the protagonist turned down the (inexpensive) option of creating a backup tape of the machine’s personality
All the original human interstellar colonists in Voyage from Yesteryear by James P Hogan were grown in artificial wombs and raised by robots; not even sentient ones.
I recall a short story about a sentient ship sent from Earth; I don’t recall the ship’s name, something starting with an I. She was sent to another star, as the sun suddenly brightened behind her and Earth went silent. She landed on a lifebearing world, and activated a device that would produce something “in nine months”.
IIRC in the old scifi novel Lest Earth be Conquered, the child protagonist discovers his parents are alien androids.
The protagonist of Mute by Piers Anthony was raised by machines. He had a telepathic aura that made everyone forget about him, including his mother, so the robots took over.
In The City who Fought by S.M. Stirling and Anne McCaffrey, Simeon is a Brainship–actually Brainspacestation. Simeon was born human but so handicapped he couldn’t have survived on his own, and but they put the body in a shell, and use the brain as a Brain to run ships, or cities or whatever. (Kind of like the computer on Star Trek). I hope that makes sense. So Simeon isn’t really a robot, but he is kind of a cyborg-thing.
He makes friends with Joat–short for Jack of All Trades, whom he thinks is a boy, aged about eleven (IIRC).
Then with the help of his new Brawn, he adopts Joat–finding out along the way that Joat is in fact a girl.
What I’m really looking for is the parent-child relationship/dynamic deal. Exact legal status isn’t as important…though I’m not sure what Demon Seed’s Proteus qualifies as. I wouldn’t call him a “parent,” though I suppose he’d technically qualify—same deal with an AI consciousness being later transferred into an organic body.* Honorable mentions, at best.
*(I can think of one, single, example of the latter.)
Pat de Graw’s short story “Inside Mother” tells about a group of children raised by a sentient spaceship after their parents die. However, there were flaws in the programming. . . .
I thought that in The Naked Sun the Solarian children were raised in a group, supervised mostly by robot nannies, and only gradually taught to live in isolation when they were older.
I remember that a few human Solarians were required to help raise the kids because there were things the nannies didn’t handle well, like discipline. One of them describes the difficulty in getting a robot nanny to spank a child, because of the First Law.
There was a short story or novella that I’ll never be able to remember the title or author (sorry) about a man who was the last human in existence. However, he had an android mistress complete with artificial womb and miniaturized cloning lab built into her, and she was able to give him cloned sons.
Bender once adopted a bunch of orphans for the tax deduction, but was busted for child abuse after authorities discovered his cost-cutting support methods.
Hmmm…there was a sequel to the novel Logan’s Run, about the society that sprang up in the ruins of the domed cities. One small child was being raised by a robotic teddy bear.
Oh, yeah, I remember that one! I don’t recall the title, either, but I can say that it was in a collection edited by Asimov called Machines that Think.
Yes, in The Naked Sun. Foundation’s Edge takes place many millenia after that, though, when Solarian society has evolved to its logical extreme. There are only about a hundred “humans” (if so they can be called) left on the planet, all of whom are genetically-engineered to be hermaphrodites, with apparently magical abilities. A Solarian can, at will, produce a self-fertilized zygote which is then expelled and grown in an artificial womb, and then raised entirely by robots.
And when their daughter (Traya) was mind-controlled by the Hugga-Tugga Thuggees (a children’s show created by a crazy Kali cult), and put her mother into a coma, Tornado had to go to court to fight for custody (which he almost lost until Secret revived his wife, which I thought was a bit of a copout - not that I want her gone, but it would have been better to have Tornado’s rights as a sentient affirmed, or Traya taken away from him, IMO).