robots – One Thousand And One Parsecs

D is for Droids

Some of the best-loved characters in science fiction don’t even have a heartbeat. Why? They’re robots, that’s why!

Unlike the mechanical “slaves” (the original meaning of the Czech root robota) that built your car or enable your GPS devices, these robots are a lot more human. In fact, the word “droid” is short for “android,” which comes from the Greek root for “man” (andr-) and means “manlike.”

In other words, the thing that defines these robots is that they blur the line between machine and man. And ever since they made their first appearance in some of the earliest works of science fiction (Frankenstein by Mary Shelley was arguably the first), that’s exactly what they’ve been doing.

Star Trek loves to play with this trope, from Data in The Next Generation to the doctor in Voyager. But where the droids in Star Trek tend to be angsty and existential, the ones who populate Star Wars already know their place and don’t have any qualms filling it.

My first exposure to droids was when I saw the original Star Wars trilogy as a little boy. An image of C3PO with his golden humanoid body wandering across the dune wastes of Tatooine will probably be stamped on my subconscious forever. That, and the little traveling flea market the Jawas ran from their sand crawler.

One of the neat things about droids is that you can go either direction with them. If you want to get all existential about the nature of humanity and whatnot, you can use them to explore those questions since they’re almost human but not quite. On the other hand, if you just want an exciting space romp with some unique and interesting characters, you can bring them out as regular characters.

An advantage that droids have over humans is that they’re harder to kill and easier to bring back to life. Star Wars leaned on this a lot, especially in episodes IV and V. When R2D2 got shot in the battle of Yavin IV, right before Luke blew up the Death Star, I just about died. And yet, they brought him back easily enough for the throne room scene because he’s a robot–all they had to say was “we’ll fix him up” and you knew that everything would be better.

So yeah, droids. I haven’t done much with droids yet in my own writing, mostly because I’m a bit conflicted in my thoughts about the upper limits of AI (which I explored somewhat in Genesis Earth). Most of my robots are actually cyborgs, and that’s something completely different. Still, I can see myself playing with this trope at some point in the future, probably when/if I introduce some aliens or start a new series.

Story Notebook #5 (part 2)

For those of you who don’t know (or can’t remember, since it’s been so long), I’ve been doing this ongoing thing where I go through my old story notebooks. Last time, we covered my last semester of classes at BYU; this time, we’ll cover my time in Washington DC, when I was trapped in an internship from hell.

Now, you may be wondering: “why is this guy just giving away his ideas for free?” Well, last week at dinner group, the conversation turned to story ideas, so I pulled out my current story notebook and started going down the list. This quickly turned into a game of “name that tune,” where we managed to show that EVERY SINGLE IDEA had already been done.

And you know what? That’s perfectly okay! There are no original ideas anymore, just new ways of executing them, and maybe a handful of combinations that haven’t yet been tried. The purpose of keeping a story notebook with you at all times isn’t to come up with something new, it’s to keep track of the stuff that really turns you on.

Enough with that. On to the notebook.

In a spacefaring culture, the custom will be for the males to leave the station and depart in search of a wife at another port, either to capture or win over in some way. The women will tend more to running off with the travelers. This preserves genetic diversity.

This is actually something I want to talk about in a longer post. The problem of inbreeding in a space-based society is something that many science fiction authors have wrestled with, from Robert Heinlein to C. J. Cherryh. Their solutions are quite inventive, but while I was in Washington DC working on To Search the Starry Sea (my escapist retreat from a hellish internship), I managed to come up with a few of my own, and used them in Star Wanderers. More on that later.

What if one of the founders was a time traveler, sent on a mission to ensure that the US constitution made it through?

Hehe…in other words: James Madison, Time Traveler. It has a certain ring to it, no?

The human mind is like a congress–so many people at extreme odds, arguing constantly but holding together somehow.

Oh boy. If that were true, the US congress today would be like a paranoid schizophrenic.

A subway haunted by patrons from the past–maybe you will become one when it goes back in time.

Who hasn’t been creeped out by the subway at some point or another? Except the New York subway system is way creepier than the Washington DC Metro–I swear, some of those rats are man-killers.

A magic system where the cost is your unborn children. If you don’t have children within a certain period of time, you die.

Sounds like some of the Arab short stories I’ve read. Families and children are much more important to them than to us in the West.

When the Developed World develops instantaneous transportation devices, it will essentially merge into one super country, while the developing world will be left out. The only sense of distance will be in the developing world, and terrorism will be an issue.

Kind of like Larry Niven meets dependency theory.

A government where the Supreme Court is a super-intelligent robot.

Hopefully this would rid the country of activist judges…or would it??

A character who believes, at his core, that there is no such thing as a genuine surprise, simply a lack of information–and that if we had perfect information, there would be no surprises.

Sounds a lot like the platonic 19th century ideal of a scientist. What with quantum physics and such, there aren’t a whole lot of those left.

There are two kinds of shame: shame from loss of honor, and shame from not following the herd. Don’t mistake the one for the other.

This one isn’t so much a story idea as an observation. I learned a lot in my hellish Washington DC internship, most of which had very little to do with my area of study and everything to do with the less-than-honorable ways in which the world works. And on that note:

____ always felt that the world around him was somehow less than real; an illusion. While staring out the window of the train, he wondered if the window wasn’t just a video screen, like the car windows of old movies–or when looking out at the view of the mountains beyond his house, with the picturesque clouds and too-blue sky, if it wasn’t just an elaborate painting on a wall at the end of the world. In moments like these, ____ longed to peel back the video screens–to break down the pretty painted wall at the end of the world–and see what lay on the other side of reality.

If my hellish internship on K street taught me anything, it taught me that I would rather be a writer than have all the connections or political influence in the world. I got out of Washington DC as fast as I could, and haven’t looked back since.

The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang

Ana was a washed-up zoologist turned programmer looking for work; Derek was an avatar designer for the Data Earth virtual reality platform. The thing that brought them together: Blue Gamma Inc., manufacturer of autonomous self-aware AI pets known as digients.

Like any pet, each digient requires constant attention as they learn and grow. Soon, Ana and Derek become as attached to their own digients as parents to their children. But when Blue Gamma goes out of business and the Data Earth platform becomes obsolete, the future for the digients looks grim–until they enter the next phase of their natural evolution.

I really, really liked this story. It’s got just about everything that makes science fiction so great: futuristic setting, well-rounded characters with believable motivations, one Big Lie with everything else held more or less at the level of our current understanding, and tons of parallels between the fantastic world and our own that makes you step back and really think about things.

The interesting thing about this story was how it played with all the old robot/AI tropes. Usually, stories of this kind will have the robots rise to transcendence, either becoming the benevolent (or largely absent) rulers of the world, or taking over and enslaving humanity in some fashion. Not so with this story; the scope was much more intimate and personal, driven by characters rather than the Fate of Mankind, and that ultimately made the story much more believable.

If I had any problem with this story at all, it was the ending. After so much build-up and development, I felt as if it cut off rather abruptly, just as things were getting more and more interesting. I suppose the author was going for something of a “Flowers for Algernon” feel, but that wasn’t what I took from it. Or perhaps he ran up against the novella word limit and decided to cut it off; I don’t know.

Regardless, I thoroughly enjoyed this story. It’s certainly worthy of the Hugo for which it’s been nominated. Highly recommended.

Story Notebook #3 (part 1)

I’m not sure whether this notebook is #3 or #2. There’s a lot of notes from English 318, which would put it in the winter, but I don’t know if it’s from ’08 or ’09.

Not that that matters; ideas are ideas. And here they are!

An empty parking garage with no exit.

Covered this already in a previous post. Strangely, it’s one of the most popular posts on this blog. I constantly get search engine traffic from people googling “empty parking garage” and other such stuff. Who googles “parking garage”? Weird.

Telepathy through instant messaging between microchips interfaced with the brain.

Also covered in the same post.

And they all lived evily ever after.

Bwahahah! I’ve got Jakeson to thank for this line–specifically, from a conversation at LTUE. Good times!

A TV show where the viewers vote between ads what should happen next.

I’m pretty sure I got this idea from an Escape Pod story–one of the Hugo short story nominations from ’06 or ’07, IIRC.

What if the human mind, which we think is so great, is ridiculously broken?

After all, isn’t it true that we only use a tiny fraction of our brain’s capacity during our lifetime? What if the true potential of the human mind far outstrips anything we could possibly imagine?

What if the human brain was manifested as some sort of library / processing building, with short term, easy access, and archival memory sections manifested as bookshelves and long rooms? And there were flies or insects or parasites of some sort that fed on the archives, causing forgetfulness? And you were trapped in there?

I’m pretty sure I was tripping out on the Brain Science podcast at this time, combined with an old Roger Allen McBride novel about time travel and terraforming. Good times.

What would it be like to be God’s intern?

FREAKING HARD.

If perfect, instantaneous communication is possible, doesn’t this blur the individual identities of those speaking, so that they become simply voices in one mind? If so, does this mean that our individuality is based on the ways we misunderstand each other?

At its core, this idea is a take on the whole perfection vs. personality debate: the question of whether our individual personalities disappear as we approach Godlike perfection. I’ve come to the conclusion that this is not the case, but that’s a discussion for my other blog (which I have not updated in a ridiculously long time, dangit).

A middle aged mom at a children’s book fair in Utah who has a tattoo partially showing from under her sleeve

I saw this in the Wilk one day, and started wondering about this woman. Who is she? Where did she get the tattoo? Why is she at a Utah Children’s Book Fair, which is about as far removed from tattoos and tattooed society as you can get?

A robot that was made to suffer, as part of an experiment.

It makes you wonder what ‘suffering’ actually is. Do inanimate objects suffer? Do the rocks and clouds and sky and stars suffer? Do they weep for us?

On that trippy note, I’ll cut this short and finish reviewing the notebook in a later post. Until then, stay awesome.