Last week, I said I was going to do something that was strange but epic. On further consideration, I decided to save that idea for a future diary. Since we spent the past few weeks in the company of an Asimovian Positronic Robot, I thought we might take a broader look at robots in science fiction.
The Encyclopaedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The Marketing Division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as 'Your plastic pal who's fun to be with'. The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines the Marketing Division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as a 'bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes' with a footnote to the effect that the editors would welcome applications for anyone interested in taking over the post of robotics correspondent.
-- Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Depending on how you define the term, robots have been around at least since the time of the Ancient Greeks. Jason and the Argonauts battled Talos, a giant made of bronze. Hephaestus is said to have created a number of artificial beings. (Of course, being a deity, creation is part of his portfolio; but Hephaestus had more of a technological bent than his fellow gods). Jewish legend tells of the Golem of Prague, a creature of clay made by a learned rabbi and animated by kabbalistic magic. And of course everyone's heard of Mary Shelly's monster.
These creatures, however, were created by magic, not technology. (Well, the Creature from Frankenstein has a little bit of scientific technobabble behind his creation, but the Mad Science invoked owes more to Alchemy and Hermetic Sorceries than it does to gears and circuits.) The 17th and 18th Centuries, however, saw advances in the clockmaker's art which made clockwork automatons capable of human-like motion. E.T.A. Hoffmann's story of the character fooled by a clockwork dancer, used in the Offenbach opera "The Tales of Hoffmann", comes from this era. So does the Turk, the celebrated mechanical chess-player that confounded some of the great savants of the time.
The children's author L. Frank Baum created the character of Tik-Tok for his Oz books; a machine man made of polished copper capable of motion, speech and thought, (possessing a separate mainspring for each function); the cumulation of the clockwork men of the previous century.
But you can make the argument that the robot genre was really born in 1920, when Czech writer Karel Čapek coined the word in his play R.U.R.: Rossum's Universal Robots. He invented the word "robot" from the Czech word robota meaning "forced labor". In the Čapek play, robots replace humans first in factories, then in armies. Finally they revolt and take over completely. This is our first taste of the Robot Rebellion. It won't be our last.
In the early 20th Century, robots tended to be scary things, (excepting of course Tik-Tok of Oz, and perhaps one or two of the helpful automatons from the Edisonaides of the previous century). Partly this comes from the Frankenstein/Golem tradition in which the artificial creature is a souless mockery of a man with no conscience; a violation of the Natural Order and a Threat to Humanity. Partly this comes from the R.U.R. subtext in which the robot symbolizes the Proletariat: the great Working Class which might rise up against its Masters.
One notable exception to this was the story "I, Robot." No, not that one; we haven't gotten to Asimov yet. I'm referring to a short story by the writing team of Eando Binder about a robot named Adam Link who is accused of murdering his creator. The Binders wrote a sequel in which Adam Link goes on trial and eventually wrote an entire series based on the robot's further adventures. The first two stories were adapted into one of the better episodes of The Outer Limits. The stories are told from Adam's point of view and portray him as thoughtful and intelligent. In the first one, he finds and reads a copy of Frankenstein and realizes that humans believe the book's moral is that a robot much always turn on its creator. Adam Link rejects that assumption.
Another exception to the rule of frightening robots was Lester del Ray's story Helen O'Loy, in which an engineer modifies a robot to have emotions and she then falls in love with him.
Isaac Asimov cited "Helen O'Loy" and "I, Robot" as inspirations for his own stories about sympathetic robots. In his stories, robots were as often the victim of humans who didn't understand them or who suffered from what he called a "Frankenstein Complex", an unreasoning prejudice against automata. Perhaps one of Asimov's most lasting contributions to science fiction was his formulation of The Three Laws of Robotics. As he recalled it:
On December 23, 1940, when I was discussing my idea for a mind-reading robot with [editor Robert] Campbell, we found ourselves discussing the rules that governed the way in which a robot behaved. It seemed to me that robots were engineering devices with built-in safeguards, and so the two of us began giving verbal form to those safeguards -- these became the "Three Laws of Robotics."
Asimov's take on robots and his Three Laws had an effect on how robots were portrayed by other writers. In Forbidden Planet, for example, there is a scene in which the film's iconic robot, Robbie, is caught between a direct command and his programmed imperative to never harm a human. Although Asimov's Laws are never specifically mentioned, they are here clearly in force. Although sinister Artificial Intelligences continued to appear in fiction and in popular culture, they shared the stage with friendly and obedient robots such as the Robot from Lost in Space, or Rosie the robot maid from The Jetsons, or R2-D2 and C-3PO from the Star Wars movies.
Robots really became a cultural force in Japan. The influential comics creator Osamu Tezuka, known as the 'god of manga', created Astro Boy, (Tetsuwan Atomu lit. "Iron Arm Atom"), a spunky little robot boy who fought for peace, understanding and robot rights. Another classic manga series was Tetsujin 28-go, ("Iron Man #28"), known in America as Gigantor; the adventures of a boy and his giant robot.
The robots, though, are still representint the Lower Classes. The "Good" robots have largely taken over a role once occupied in fiction by the Loyal Servant. Whether obedient and helpful like the Lost in Space robot, or bumbling and comical as C-3PO, or sarcastic like Rosie from the Jetsons or Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, they are still, like Tik-Tok, inferior to humans.