The campaign for this little guy is over, but I still want one.
I have a Kickstarter campaign running right now for my book’s cover art. So throughout the month of March, while that’s running, I’m going to point out other Kickstarter projects that are cool.
To start off with, did you know that Kickstarter has special pages dedicated to projects about Cthulhu and robots?
Since I spent last week complaining about how steampunk art can go so wrong, it seems only fair this week I should point out a group that gets it totally right.
Steam Powered Giraffe calls itself a band, but it’s really a mix of music, comedy, and storytelling. Not to mention that each of their three front performers goes through the entire set while miming “the robot.” That’s right, mimes who sing. The band plays as three robots who were built in 1896 to be musicians. Each robot gets an extensive backstory that the band adds to all the time. There’s even a webcomic.
This band has a remarkable range. Not only has it built up a fantastic story about three robots who cope with the horrors of the twentieth century through music, but they can play rock, rap, and pop. They’re not trying very hard to be steampunk. They’re trying to be entertaining, and if the show happens to have an 1890’s vibe, then fine.
This is something that us folks in the steampunk community ought to remember. It’s not supposed to be about corsets and gears, it’s supposed to be about breaking out of the mold of medieval Europe to tell the best damn fantasy story you can.
Check out the awesomeness:
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Image courtesy of themarysue.com
You know how school boards sometimes get up in arms about the use of the n-word in Huckleberry Finn? Here’s a modest proposal.
Last week’s blog post about cyborgs got me to thinking about Isaac Asimov. I got to thinking about Asimov because Leilane Nishime says in her article that most cyborgs in fiction fall into one of two groups: they’re either dangerous machines that want to kill us all, or they’re tragic figures that try desperately to stay in touch with their human side. Very few cyborgs in fiction embrace their cyborginess and do something different with it.
Well, over two decades before Nishime’s article was published, Isaac Asimov had almost the exact same thing to say about robots. The following is an excerpt from The Complete Robot, an anthology of his robot stories that was published in 1982:
Image courtesy of Wikipedia
The things you read about in academia…
As part of my job, I have access to the University of Minnesota library system and all its digital subscriptions to academic research journals. Mainly I use this library to keep up with what’s latest in the field of plant cell biology, but it does let you stumble across stuff in other fields sometimes.
In 2005, LeiLane Nishime of Sonoma State University published an article in Cinema Journal called “The Mulatto Cyborg: Imagining a Multiracial Future.” I wish I could share this article with you, but I’m going to have to go over the gist of it instead. Nishime makes the argument that we use science fiction to tell stories about social issues in our own real life. Since it’s at one step remove (we’re talking about space aliens, not humans), writers can be more daring than if the story was set in the real world. So far, so good. Anybody who’s seen that infamous Star Trek episode where the people are black on one side and white on the other side … yep. We sure use science fiction to explore our own issues.
The second part of Nishime’s argument is this: if robots are our science-fictiony slaves in the future, then cyborgs are mulattoes.
Okay. Let’s just never mind that a union between Data and Tasha Yar is not where cyborgs come from, and examine her argument a little more closely. She says that movies deal with these mulatto cyborgs in one of three ways: they’re bad, good, or truly cyborgean. Bad cyborgs are more roboty and want to destroy all humans (like the Terminator). Good cyborgs have a stronger human side and want to become human. And the truly cyborgean cyborgs come to terms with their half-and-half nature and are not really either.
I’m curious what Nishime would have to say about Inspector Gadget.
There’s just one other problem with this paper. Robots with high-quality silicone skin aren’t cyborgs. Nishime argues that Bishop from Aliens and that little kid from A.I. are good cyborgs who are trying to become more human. But they’re robots. Whatever these characters are made out of, the other characters treat them like 100% robot, and there’s nothing borderline or half-and-half about them. That little kid is a robot trying to be a human.
And that’s my nerd rant for the day.
If you want to try to get your hands on “The Mulatto Cyborg: Imagining a Multiracial Future,” here is a link to Cinema Journal’s website.
No explanation is needed.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XLgpReEkLc&w=480&h=390]
I would never have thought about this fact about electronics, though it seems obvious after the fact. How many sci-fi writers have made this blunder about their robot characters?
Though technically Helix doesn’t need air to survive, he just needs it to function. I’m sure he’s got some sort of thing that makes him shut down if his chips overheat. Then they’d cool (albeit a lot more slowly than normal) via radiant energy.
From the webcomic Freefall.