Robots: Neither Menace nor Pathos

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:

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The Mulatto Cyborg

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.

Gunnerkrigg Court by Tom Siddell

Image courtesy of gunnerkrigg.com

Yes, Gunnerkrigg Court is about the lives of some students at a special boarding school tucked away in the hinterlands of the U.K.  But no, it’s not just a remix of Harry Potter.

Gunnerkrigg Court is a three-times-a-week webcomic by Tom Siddell that’s been running since 2005.  Our heroine is Antimony Carver, who has been sent to the Court on her mother’s dying wish.  As soon as she arrives, strange things start to happen.  There is magic, yes, but this Court isn’t a place where cute little kids learn how to become witches and wizards.  Quite the opposite: Antimony’s at a tech school.  The magical creatures in the forest that surround Gunnerkrigg Court resent the school’s presence, and the two have been in a state of cold war for centuries.

When Antimony tries to interfere with the strange happenings at the Court or in the forest, she often makes things worse.

Start reading the strip from the beginning and play close attention.  Siddell is a master at setting plot elements up far in advance, maintaining them through years’ worth of strips, and then bringing them together for a payoff that was the last thing you expected.  That shadow and that robot from the very first chapter?  They’re important.

The best thing about this strip is its complexity.  Sure, it’s funny.  It’s about a bunch of teenagers and their awkward love lives.  But it can get pretty damn scary sometimes and deep at other times.  There are no characters here who are wholly good or evil, and there’s probably more to all of them than you think.

The Search for WondLa by Tony DiTerlizzi

The Search for Wondla (by Tony DiTerlizzi of Spiderwick Chronicles fame) originally drew my eye because of the lush, art-noveau-inspired illustrations throughout the book.  All the pictures of wacky aliens remind one of the first editions of the Wizard of Oz series from the early 20th century.  There’s a good reason for that, but I won’t spoil it for you.

The plot itself is decent enough.  Our heroine is Eva Nine, an 11-year-old girl who’s been raised by a caretaker robot in an underground bunker all her life.  The story gets off to a slow start because Muthr, the robot, is as dull as plain toast.  Things get much better around pg. 68, after Eva has left her bunker and met her first cool-looking alien, Rovender Kitt.

Eva, Rovender, and Muthr set out on a quest to find more members of the human race.  On the way they find all sorts of strange creatures that are definitely not human.  It turns out there’s good reason Muthr’s so stodgy at the beginning.  She has a lot of character development to do over the book.  Rovender, too, has his depths.  I don’t think DiTerlizzi fully captured Eva’s 11-year-old mind, though.  There’s nothing exactly wrong, but Eva ain’t no Lyra Silvertongue.

The Search for WondLa isn’t going to change the face of YA lit as we know it, but it was an enjoyable read.

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill

I guess scary books just don’t scare me.

The Woman in Black tells the tale of Arthur Kipps, a young solicitor who has been sent to the north of England to tidy up the affairs of old Mrs. Drablow.  Despite warnings from all the townsfolk that Mrs. Drablow’s house is haunted, the fool decides to spend the night.  Terrible things ensue.  The book inspired a movie starring Daniel Radcliffe that is a scary, scary movie that I never want to see.

The book, however … reminds me of the limitations of the print medium.  Books don’t do jump scares very well.  Sure, the apparition of the woman with the wasted face would have been pants-soilingly scary to Arthur Kipps, but for me the reader the filter of words has taken away most of the terror.  It read more like a delicious neo-Victorian novel.  I luxuriated in the descriptions of social class, the autumn winds over the British moors, and above all the long sentences with multiple dependent clauses.

To me, scary movies are way scarier than scary books.  The Turn of the Screw?  Eh.  Rosemary’s Baby?  Beloved?  Didn’t faze me.  But if I ever see a weeping angel in a dark alley oh god oh god oh god…

Smashwords announces new Library Direct feature

You can read the original blog post here: http://blog.smashwords.com/2012/08/new-smashwords-direct-enables-libraries.html

The upshot of this news is that Smashwords (a website that hosts and distributes self-published e-books) has just greatly expanded its ability to distribute its books with public libraries.  As a Smashwords author, I think this is great news.  Smashwords authors get to have their work in libraries, so one of the disadvantages of self-publishing (that you don’t get to be in libraries) is gone.  Libraries get to vastly expand their lists of titles.  And Smashwords, of course, gets to do more business 🙂 .

Plum Upside-Down Cake

It’s midsummer and plums are cheap right now, so I decided to do a baking experiment.

This is plum upside-down cake, which is pretty much pineapple upside-down cake but with plums.  The principle seemed like it would be the same: lay some fruit in the bottom of the pan, pour cake batter on top, cook then flip, so I decided to take James Beard’s general recipe for upside-down cake and play around with it.  Oh, yes, the experiment was a success.  This cake didn’t last very long in my apartment.

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Plum Upside-Down Cake (Adapted from James Beard)

Fruit part:

  • Four medium-sized plums
  • 2 tablespoons butter
  • 1/8 cup brown sugar

Cake batter:

  • 1/4 cup butter
  • 1/2 cup brown sugar
  • 1 egg
  • 1 cup flour (JB calls for cake flour, but mine turned out fine with all purpose)
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon allspice and 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves (or use cinnamon or ginger or whatever spices you like)
  • 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
  • just over 1/3 cup of milk

Preheat the oven to 350º.  Wash the plums and slice into wedges.  Remove pits.  Put the 2 tablespoons of butter in the bottom of a 9-inch round baking pan, then put the pan in the oven just long enough for the butter to melt.  Take the pan back out, then sprinkle the brown sugar over the bottom.  Lay the plum wedges in the bottom of the pan (you can do it decoratively if you want).

Cream together butter and sugar until fluffy, then beat in the egg, then mix in vanilla.  In another bowl, mix flour, baking powder, salt, spices.  Add part of the flour mixture to the butter-sugar mixture and mix, then the milk, then the rest of the flour mixture.  Mix only just enough so that everything is combined.

Pour the cake batter into the pan, over the plum wedges.  Gently press the batter into the edges of the pan so it’s well-distributed.  Bake for 30 minutes or when cake in the center of the pan is springy and not wet.  Take the cake out of the over and let it cool before you try to flip it out of the pan!

Once the cake is quite cool, put a dinner plate on top of the pan and hold the edges of pan and plate together firmly.  Flip.  Once it’s upside-down, if the cake’s not coming out of the pan, you can whack it against a countertop.  If all goes well, you will have a cake with lovely wedges of plum laid into the top.  Enjoy!