# What are the most imporant modern robot stories and books? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [October 16, 2017, 10:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-most-imporant-modern-robot-stories-and-books/799088 "2017-10-16T22:39:17Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2017, 1:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-most-imporant-modern-robot-stories-and-books/799088/41 "2017-10-19T13:16:57Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > I can’t remember if the titular character, Rei Toei, in Gibson’s _Idoru_ was supposed to be embodied at the end of it or not, but that story should count as somewhat significant, dealing as it does with a man/AI marriage. Yeah, but OP says “Please try to limit works to those which feature humanoid artificial robots or androids. I’m drawing the line at electronic brains, sentient computers, cyborgs and brain-machine hookups, virtual brains, and all the other variants.” Also, Rei isn’t embodied in _Idoru_, but at the end of the sequel _All Tomorrow’s Parties_, gets not only _a_ body, but one printed up in the nanotech replicator thingy in every location of the global convenience store chain Lucky Dragon. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2017, 1:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-most-imporant-modern-robot-stories-and-books/799088/42 "2017-10-19T13:39:52Z")
> [@Andy\_L](#): > > That’s a Greg Egan story (possibly “Learning to Be Me” - but actually, he wrote several stories with those crystals as important story elements, so it could be another one). See here [Axiomatic (book) - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiomatic_(story_collection)) ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2017, 2:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-most-imporant-modern-robot-stories-and-books/799088/43 "2017-10-19T14:12:35Z")
Ooh, thought of another one: _Feet of Clay_, by Terry Pratchett. The “robots” (golems) are magical, not mechanical, but they still fit all of the same tropes as sci-fi robots, especially since most sci-fi writers don’t really understand the underlying technology anyway. ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2017, 2:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-most-imporant-modern-robot-stories-and-books/799088/44 "2017-10-19T14:50:39Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Ooh, thought of another one: _Feet of Clay_, by Terry Pratchett. The “robots” (golems) are magical, not mechanical, but they still fit all of the same tropes as sci-fi robots, especially since most sci-fi writers don’t really understand the underlying technology anyway. If we make that allowance, you can toss in [_Kiln People_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiln_People). ---
**Author:** ![Gyrate](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gyrate/32/3588_2.png) [@Gyrate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gyrate)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2017, 3:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-most-imporant-modern-robot-stories-and-books/799088/45 "2017-10-19T15:08:36Z")
I was going to mention Alfred Bester’s excellent short story “Fondly Fahrenheit” but I guess that falls into the “classic” group rather than “modern”. On a modern note, Alan Moore’s **Top Ten** comics feature a world in which superheroes, mutants etc co-exist including an entire robot sub-culture (and a main character, Joe Pi, who comes from an alternate universe run by robots). Anti-robot prejudice is a subtheme, and AI “substance abuse” is covered later. Also, the “Forty-Niners” graphic novel addresses the early days of robots in that society and the development of the first truly sentient robot. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2017, 3:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-most-imporant-modern-robot-stories-and-books/799088/46 "2017-10-19T15:45:31Z")
Another slight tangent: in Dungeons and Dragons, about ten years ago a race of playable robots called [Warforged](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Eberron#Warforged) was added. They’re definitely magical, not science-fictiony, but otherwise have all the traits you’d want in robots, including the unanswered question of whether they have souls. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2017, 4:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-most-imporant-modern-robot-stories-and-books/799088/47 "2017-10-19T16:02:16Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > Last note: [Storming the Reality Studio](https://www.dukeupress.edu/storming-the-reality-studio) has a wonderful essay somewhere in it on the cultural difference between an android and a robot (IIRC, it basically says that androids through their differences with humans illuminate what it means to be human, whereas robots are real and are idealized versions of the human worker, showing us capitalism’s view of our failures as a tool). May be worth reading. Do you mean Baudrillard’s essay? He distinguishes between the automaton and the robot, though. > [@](#): > > The automaton plays the part of courtier and good company … The robot … is a worker, the theater is over and done with. It’s an astute observation, and encompasses a distinction made in the late 19th and early part of the 20th centuries. I need to read _Simulations_, which it’s excepted from, but my thesis is that after the computer took over its role, the humanoid robot became camp and thus returned to the stage he calls the automaton. That’s a reason I’m both starting a new section of the book for the post-60s era and limiting the scope to humanoid representations in the Frankenstein/Sandman/Galatea classic tradition of humans creating their lookalike children/companions/love interests/replacements/inferiors. AIs and disembodied brains are harder to deal with. Some of them - HAL in \*2001 \*- fall right into the robot role but even Asimov in “The Evitable Conflict,” the last story in _I, Robot_, has his world controlled by electronic brains he calls robots but don’t act that way at all. Fortunately, I’m not Baudrillard and don’t have to turn all this into philosophy. Much is it is reporting forgotten cultural detritus, playing with symbols. Maybe that ties into his belief that signs only refer to themselves today. This [commentary](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/simulations)makes him look very prescient. > [@](#): > > Few people at the time realized that Baudrillard’s simulacrum itself wasn’t a thing, but a “deterrence machine,” just like Disneyland, meant to reveal the fact that the real is no longer real and illusion no longer possible. But the more impossible the illusion of reality becomes, the more impossible it is to separate true from false and the real from its artificial resurrection, the more panic-stricken the production of the real is. Or maybe not. The return of the machine as a job-destroying self-respect-crusher is real enough today, a reprise of it’s being a major theme in the 1950s and 1900s. That’s robot as robot, not automaton camp. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2017, 4:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-most-imporant-modern-robot-stories-and-books/799088/48 "2017-10-19T16:12:42Z")
You might have some fun with Egan’s “Diaspora” - in the far-future, there are humans (though almost all of them are highly modified), “citizens” (unembodied computer intelligences living in “polises”), and “Gleisner robots” (just plain robots, basically). The humans are generally proud of being embodied, physical beings, and disdain the others. The some of the citizens are entirely devoted to arts and mathematics, but some of them are devoted to learning about physical sciences and think that the arts- and maths-devoted ones are a bit too abstract, while the robots and humans are taking that whole “back to nature” thing too far (while the robots think all the citizens are effete, and the humans are insanely primitive). ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2017, 4:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-most-imporant-modern-robot-stories-and-books/799088/49 "2017-10-19T16:30:22Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > The return of the machine as a job-destroying self-respect-crusher is real enough today, a reprise of it’s being a major theme in the 1950s and 1900s. That’s robot as robot, not automaton camp. I’m assuming you’ve read “With Folded Hands …” by Jack Williamson. (I hadn’t been aware until just now that Williamson wrote sequels to this story.) ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2017, 4:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-most-imporant-modern-robot-stories-and-books/799088/50 "2017-10-19T16:31:47Z")
> [@](#): > > Quoth **Left Hand of Dorkness** : > > Another slight tangent: in Dungeons and Dragons, about ten years ago a race of playable robots called Warforged was added. They’re definitely magical, not science-fictiony, but otherwise have all the traits you’d want in robots, including the unanswered question of whether they have souls. Eh, in a D&D world, that’s not really an unanswered question. They can be raised from the dead, turned into soul-based undead, or possessed, and a warforged who’s a high-level wizard can even possess others through use of the appropriate spell. It’s also possible (albeit difficult) for a human or other biological creature to become a warforged. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2017, 4:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-most-imporant-modern-robot-stories-and-books/799088/51 "2017-10-19T16:33:31Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > Do you mean Baudrillard’s essay? He distinguishes between the automaton and the robot, though. That’s almost certainly the one; it’s been twenty years since I read it. I was thinking it was Derrida, and that’s why I couldn’t track it down. Glad you read it–not that you need to follow it mechanically, but I figured it might have some interesting ideas you could steal. ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2017, 4:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-most-imporant-modern-robot-stories-and-books/799088/52 "2017-10-19T16:50:44Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > …AIs and disembodied brains are harder to deal with. Some of them - HAL in \*2001 \*- fall right into the robot role but even Asimov in “The Evitable Conflict,” the last story in _I, Robot_, has his world controlled by electronic brains he calls robots but don’t act that way at all… Yeah. I noticed that quite a few of the great-robot-book lists that come up in a Google search mention Clarke’s _2001: A Space Odyssey_, for instance. To me, though, a robot has to be mobile; HAL 9000 is an AI or supercomputer and not a robot IMHO (notwithstanding that he’s installed on a spaceship). Which reminds me of Keith Laumer’s very good Bolo stories, which are about AI tanks. A different military-sf take on the robot genre. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2017, 8:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-most-imporant-modern-robot-stories-and-books/799088/53 "2017-10-19T20:09:08Z")
Yeah, I’m thinking for me a robot needs to be an artificial intelligence that in embodied in and controls a body with limbs. Thus, the original battleship in Ancillary Justice isn’t a robot IMO, since the intelligence is embodied within the spaceship; but once the ship is destroyed, the ancillary embodies the intelligence and becomes robotic. If the girl in Windup Girl is modified, but her intelligence develops naturally through childhood, I wouldn’t consider her a robot. If her intelligence is programmed and uploaded to her brain, I’d count her as a robot. This is how I’d define it for literature, not necessarily for technological purposes :). ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2017, 10:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-most-imporant-modern-robot-stories-and-books/799088/54 "2017-10-19T22:21:52Z")
Another recent book (I’m gonna throw 'em out and leave it to you to decide if they’re important): [Our Lady of the Ice](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22907961-our-lady-of-the-ice). It’s set in Antarctica, in dome habitats, with android slaves. Fairly recent, fairly interesting. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-most-imporant-modern-robot-stories-and-books/799088.md?page=2)