Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (228 page)

“Come on,” Franks said.

He turned toward the lip of the Tube. A row of D-class leadys was standing in front of it, immobile and silent. Franks stopped, moving back. He looked around. An A-class leady was coming toward him.

“Tell them to get out of the way,” Franks said. He touched his gun. “You had better move them.”

Time passed, an endless moment, without measure. The men stood, nervous and alert, watching the row of leadys in front of them.

“As you wish,” the A-class leady said.

It signaled and the D-class leadys moved into life. They stepped slowly aside.

Moss breathed a sigh of relief.

“I’m glad that’s over,” he said to Franks. “Look at them all. Why don’t they try to stop us? They must know what we’re going to do.”

Franks laughed. “Stop us? You saw what happened when they tried to stop us before. They can’t; they’re only machines. We built them so they can’t lay hands on us, and they know that.”

His voice trailed off.

The men stared at the Tube entrance. Around them the leadys watched, silent and impassive, their metal faces expressionless.

For a long time the men stood without moving. At last Taylor turned away.

“Good God,” he said. He was numb, without feeling of any kind.

The Tube was gone. It was sealed shut, fused over. Only a dull surface of cooling metal greeted them.

The Tube had been closed.

Franks turned, his face pale and vacant.

The A-class leady shifted. “As you can see, the Tube has been shut. We were prepared for this. As soon as all of you were on the surface, the order was given. If you had gone back when we asked you, you would now be safely down below. We had to work quickly because it was such an immense operation.”

“But why?” Moss demanded angrily.

“Because it is unthinkable that you should be allowed to resume the war. With all the Tubes sealed, it will be many months before forces from below can reach the surface, let alone organize a military program. By that time the cycle will have entered its last stages. You will not be so perturbed to find your world intact.

“We had hoped that you would be undersurface when the sealing occurred. Your presence here is a nuisance. When the Soviets broke through, we were able to accomplish their sealing without—”

“The Soviets? They broke through?”

“Several months ago, they came up unexpectedly to see why the war had not been won. We were forced to act with speed. At this moment they are desperately attempting to cut new Tubes to the surface, to resume the war. We have, however, been able to seal each new one as it appears.”

The leady regarded the three men calmly.

“We’re cut off,” Moss said, trembling. “We can’t get back. What’ll we do?”

“How did you manage to seal the Tube so quickly?” Franks asked the leady. “We’ve been up here only two hours.”

“Bombs are placed just above the first stage of each Tube for such emergencies. They are heat bombs. They fuse lead and rock.”

Gripping the handle of his gun, Franks turned to Moss and Taylor.

“What do you say? We can’t go back, but we can do a lot of damage, the fifteen of us. We have Bender guns. How about it?”

He looked around. The soldiers had wandered away again, back toward the exit of the building. They were standing outside, looking at the valley and the sky. A few of them were carefully climbing down the slope.

“Would you care to turn over your suits and guns?” the A-class leady asked politely. “The suits are uncomfortable and you’ll have no need for weapons. The Russians have given up theirs, as you can see.”

Fingers tensed on triggers. Four men in Russian uniforms were coming toward them from an aircraft that they suddenly realized had landed silently some distance away.

“Let them have it!” Franks shouted.

“They are unarmed,” said the leady. “We brought them here so you could begin peace talks.”

“We have no authority to speak for our country,” Moss said stiffly.

“We do not mean diplomatic discussions,” the leady explained. “There will be no more. The working out of daily problems of existence will teach you how to get along in the same world. It will not be easy, but it will be done.”

* * * *

The Russians halted and they faced each other with raw hostility.

“I am Colonel Borodoy and I regret giving up our guns,” the senior Russian said. “You could have been the first Americans to be killed in almost eight years.”

“Or the first Americans to kill,” Franks corrected.

“No one would know of it except yourselves,” the leady pointed out. “It would be useless heroism. Your real concern should be surviving on the surface. We have no food for you, you know.”

Taylor put his gun in its holster. “They’ve done a neat job of neutralizing us, damn them. I propose we move into a city, start raising crops with the help of some leadys, and generally make ourselves comfortable.” Drawing his lips tight over his teeth, he glared at the A-class leady. “Until our families can come up from undersurface, it’s going to be pretty lonesome, but we’ll have to manage.”

“If I may make a suggestion,” said another Russian uneasily. “We tried living in a city. It is too empty. It is also too hard to maintain for so few people. We finally settled in the most modern village we could find.”

“Here in this country,” a third Russian blurted. “We have much to learn from you.”

The Americans abruptly found themselves laughing.

“You probably have a thing or two to teach us yourselves,” said Taylor generously, “though I can’t imagine what.”

The Russian colonel grinned. “Would you join us in our village? It would make our work easier and give us company.”

“Your village?” snapped Franks. “It’s American, isn’t it? It’s ours!”

The leady stepped between them. “When our plans are completed, the term will be interchangeable. ‘Ours’ will eventually mean mankind’s.” It pointed at the aircraft, which was warming up. “The ship is waiting. Will you join each other in making a new home?”

The Russians waited while the Americans made up their minds.

“I see what the leadys mean about diplomacy becoming outmoded,” Franks said at last. “People who work together don’t need diplomats. They solve their problems on the operational level instead of at a conference table.”

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.

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.