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.
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.
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.
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.
Do you mean Baudrillard’s essay? He distinguishes between the automaton and the robot, though.
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 commentarymakes him look very prescient.
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.
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).
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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 :).
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. It’s set in Antarctica, in dome habitats, with android slaves. Fairly recent, fairly interesting.