Also, every time I think of robot books, it brings to mind a short, self-published ebook called His Robot Girlfriend that I ended up with from somewhere or another and read that sticks my mind for its total depthless blandness. I googled just now to see if it had been noticed at all by anyone else, and it surprisingly has not only several hundred Goodread reviews but also several sequels. (Here is an especially good review.) So it is not good, but it is short, and it is cheap, and it certainly gives you a glimpse into how at least one person looks at robotics.
I did some Googling on great robot books and was surprised to see how few are out there that I’ve read and actually liked.
Asimov’s short-story collection I, Robot is still a must-read. Harlan Ellison’s unproduced screenplay of the book, available in an illustrated edition, is also excellent. Asimov’s The Robots of Dawn is, I think, the best of his robot novels.
Peter David’s* Imzadi* is one of the best Star Trek books I’ve ever read, and does some very interesting things with the USS Enterprise’s resident android, Data.
The first book had a great premise but was boringly written, I thought. Several times I almost quit. Haven’t read the second one.
Yes.
I’ve read over 200 stories so far from the classic era and no more than a handful even rise to good. I have hopes for newer books just because they’ll have to be better written.
My favorite sf authors other than Asimov - Clarke, Heinlein, Bradbury, Vance, Haldeman and Scalzi - have done very little with robots, and what they have, isn’t their best.
I know you said this. But you’re not going to be able to write a history of robots in popular culture is you just focus on literature. You need to watch Age of Ultron, AI, Almost Human, Ex Machina, Humans, WALL-E, and Westworld.
I know. But finding comprehensive lists of movies with robots is trivial on the Internet. Finding lists of robot prose is much harder. At best you get something like 23 Best Robot Science Fiction Books half of which don’t quality as robot books by my definition.
And I never said I was focusing on literature. I’m doing chapters on robots in comic strips, in comic books, on the stage, as promotional devices, at World’s Fairs, and in movies and television. When I say comprehensive I mean it.
Neat. Keep us updated as the ms. slogs through the interminable publishing process. I’ll buy a copy of dat sucker. At the retail price.
Rudy Rucker’s “Ware Tetralogy”. Might be what you’re looking for, might not, or might be way more than you’re looking for. Robots, robots housing human consciousness, robots cannibalizing other robots for parts, robots warring against other robots, robots trying to impregnate a woman with a human/robot embryo, other artificial (not robot) life forms… This guy is all over the map.
Are webcomics on the table? Because many of the main characters of Schlock Mercenary are AIs, some of whom reside in humaniform bodies, or make use of humaniform avatars. And a lot of the strip is devoted to exploring just what existence is like for such beings, and how they’re similar to and different from us. The two characters in the current strips are both AIs: The koala is using a meatware avatar body (he’s got a bunch of those), while the goddess is using a body of polymers and alloys, while the cores of their beings are installed, respectively, in the Galactic core and in a space station so large it contains hurricanes.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? came out in 1968. Does that count?
Don’t forget the short-ish film “A Grand Day Out”, featuring Wallace, Gromit, and a Moon-Robot.
Not in this thread, please. I’ll certainly be asking about them, but it’s easier on me to keep the threads separate and approach them one at a time.
I remember reading an interesting story but I can’t recall the author or title. I feel I read it around five or ten years ago.
The premise of the story was a new process had been developed that would record an organic brain into an artificial crystal. The artificial crystal didn’t wear out and was essentially indestructible. So people would voluntarily have their brains recorded and replaced with crystals (the recording and transfer destroyed the original brain and the crystal would be placed inside the skull after the brain was removed). The consensus was this was a major leap forward; people no longer had to worry about senility or Alzheimer’s disease or traumatic head injuries.
But some people opposed the operation. They said that the people with crystals were not the same as they had been when they had brains. They felt that the people with crystals were less creative and emotional and “human”. They said that the people who went in for the operation were actually committing suicide and being replaced by a robotic duplicate.
The people with the crystals arguing otherwise. They said that they were the same people as they had been before. Any apparent changes were just being imagined by people who were biased against the operation. At most, any changes were due to being more relaxed because they no longer had to worry about mortality. The crystals were practically indestructible and any other health problems could also be repaired. A person with a crystal and adequate medical care could expect to live for hundreds of years. They argued that the people who were committing suicide were the ones who stayed with the brains, which would inevitably wear out in a few decades.
Can anyone identify this story?
Another story about an all-robot society: “Exhalation” by Ted Chiang.
http://www.nightshadebooks.com/Downloads/Exhalation%20-%20Ted%20Chiang.html
There’s always the 1968 children’s novel The Iron Giant by Ted Hughes.
The Prey of Gods is a new South African sf novel by Nicky Drayden in which everyone has their own personal AI/robot. Good read, and the robots play important roles.
Or the recent Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill. I’ve enjoyed his previous fantasy work and I’m looking forward to reading this one although I haven’t started it yet.
As Darren said, Ancillary Justice may fit. I don’t know if your technical definition applies, but absolutely we’re looking at an entity created in a human image, and it’s the protagonist, and the societal/personal aspects are crucial to the story. If you’ve not read it, I definitely recommend it.
A less good but still interesting novel is The Mechanical, about clockwork robots (“Clakkers”) built by the Dutch in the late nineteenth/early twenties century.
Too Like the Lightning is weird as hell. One significant, though not protagonist, character is an androgynous celebrity who markets life-sized mechanical doll versions of themself. At some point in the book it becomes clear that they can control these dolls and act through them; they’re essentially robot versions of the original.
The Windup Girl features an artificial human, but I can’t remember whether she’s mechanical or not. The book won the Hugo.
And if you are willing to branch out into a side note, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter features robot dragons.
Last note: 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.
Genetically modified human.
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.
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).
I can recommend the series of fembot short stories by the author with the pseudonym DB_Story which explore the robot / human condition. They used to be on various websites for free, but no longer.