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Monday, January 15, 2007
I won’t tell you the surprise ending (it turns out he’s a robot)
I’m curious about the SF history of the ‘it turns out he’s a robot’ trope. My specific motivation is: I’m teaching SF film this semester. Obviously in film the robot thing starts with Metropolis. Here are some major examples - Terminator, Alien, Blade Runner, the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica. There are several memorable Twilight Zone episodes. (And remember those fembots from The Bionic Woman - with the on-off switches on their necks?) And who can forget the lyrics to Steven Malkmus’ “Jo Jo’s Jacket”: “I’m not what you think I am/ I’m the king of Siam/ I’ve got a bald head/ My name is Yul Brynner/ And I am a famous movie star/ Perhaps you saw me in Westworld/ I acted like a robotic cowboy/ It was my best role/ I can not deny I/ Felt right home deep inside/That electronic carcass”. Surprise me with cases of people who turn out to be robots who maybe I haven’t heard of. What are your favorites? Go ahead and list the obvious ones so I can be sure I’m not missing anything obvious.
Also, in literature more generally. What is the first occurence? When is the line established as a familiar trope? E.T.A. Hoffman’s Sandman, with Olympia, the dancing doll?
(Titular reference to Steve Martin’s “Letter to the New Yorker".)
Comments
Some friends and I were just talking about D.A.R.R.Y.L. and The Electric Grandmother, both of which are from the 80s and play on melancholy themes of rejection and being “owned” by a corporation.
This double bind recurs in BSG, Blade Runner, and elsewhere: the robot is simultaneously rejected by the average normal person, and manipulated or cursed her creators (thus Sharon in BSG, with the unusual twist that she’s been created by other robots).
It is in the same family as the “alien who’s gone soft on humans” plot and the renegade vampire plot (Angel in Buffy). Things are a little different in Alien because the robot is still faithful to the corporation.
Isaac Asimov, “Evidence.” PKD, “The Electric Ant.”
I expect that asking on some SF listservs or blogs would generate an immense list.
Well, if you want obvious ones, you’re going to have to go through PKD—probably half of his works touch on this in some way. Specifically, though, since you’re teaching film, Impostor (2002) was based on PKD’s short story of the same name. That’s the (spoiler, yippee) one in which the protagonist has to prove he’s not a robot with a deadly embedded bomb; eventually he realizes that he is in fact the robot, which is the trigger for the bomb to go off.
First occurrence of the word, Karel Capek. Oops, I mean Josef Capek.
Behind this, there’s a long tradition of golem lit (e.g., Meyrinck), but staying with the mechanical, you have Vaucasson’s Duck, The Turk ...
Thanks for the Capek correction, nnyhav. When I taught the module last time we actually watched “The Golem” (and now there’s the “Simpsons” version if you caught this year’s Treehouse of Horrors.) But I don’t really know anything about the golem lit tradition.
Interesting point about “Imposter”, Rich. (I haven’t seen it.) There is a minor genre of ‘It turns out I was a robot’ literature. Which is obviously related to other body-snatcher stories. John Carpenter’s “The Thing” sort of plays on that.
Oh, and what’s Vaucasson’s Duck, the Turk?
The Turk was a good one, a reputedly mechanical ‘chess computer’ from the 18th century, turned out to be a human. There’s a good wiki article on it.
Oh THAT Turk. I knew about that one. I thought he was saying there was a Turk named ‘Duck’. (Now who’s Vauccason?)
My vote for first robot in literature: Charles Sorel’s novel Gazettes et Nouvelles ordinaires de divers pays lointains (1632) which includes among its various wonders a metallic and artificially-constructed woman who possesses the knowledge of all the world’s languages.
Otherwise, the twist in the bang-bang-crash-crash movie non-version-of-Asimov I Robot is that Will Smith is half robot (oh the irony! for he hates robots!)
Vaucanson. Cf. Les fils du Vaucanson, the French hacker society from Difference Engine. I believe he also figures in Lempriere’s Dictionary, but it’s a long time since I’ve read it and I can’t remember for sure.
See also: Edison’s Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life by one Gaby Wood, although by this point I think we’re drifting some way from an SF film syllabus.
I still maintain that I, Robot was true to Asimov’s vision, except Asimov would have had the benevolent malevolent supercomputer win.
Hey Adam, I actually knew about the Sorel because I’ve been reading this history of SF by some guy named Roberts. (Not sure how much I agree with him yet overall.)
Maybe we should do some sort of roundtable discussion of the history of SF.
Yep; I get all my information from that book.
A roundtable of the history of SF (as opposed to The History of SF) would be an excellent thing, I’d say. We could lay out the five main theories—SF has always been with us; SF begins in 1600; SF begins with Shelley’s Frankenstein; SF begins with Wells and Verne; SF begins with Hugo Gernsback in 1927—and see which one gets most support.
How about Talos?
I’m splitting my chips between SF has always been with us and Shelley’s “Frankenstein”. That is, you need to acknowledge that there are certain works that are clearly SF, whose forms and contents make them simply continuous with ‘fantastic’ themes that go back all the way. So if you try to define SF, narrowly, to be some fairly recent genre, you end up absurdly excluding things that we all call SF. On the other hand, starting with “Frankenstein”, let’s say, certain new features appear. And they become so essential to much of what follows that, in some sense, you have to acknowledge that what we have is different in kind.
It used to be a regular thing in some comic books, particularly the Legion of Super-Heroes. And Superboy made heavy use of robot duplicates, as in this story grabbed more or less at random from some googling.
I see your argument, I think; though I’m not sure that Frankenstein is where the “certain new features that become essential to much of what follows” enter the tradition. Shelley’s monster owes most of itself to golems and ghouls and so on; it’s as much (or more) a Gothic novel as it is science fiction. A better example might be something like time travel, which is a genuinely new and unprecedented trope, is invented in the late 1880s, and resonates through the whole of the rest of the genre. So you’d probably be better served, by your own logic, splitting your chips between ‘always been with us’ and ‘begins with Wells and Verne’.
Wells also gave us the alien who is actually alien, rather than just a well-spoken human who happens to live on Saturn. Although, wait, no, that was Kepler who did that! In Somnium! Which (if the encounter-with-alien happens to be important to one’s definition of the genre) would mean splitting the chips with the 1600 model! Which is what I do! In my history!
Reading Rosny‘s Xipehuz--mainly because it was Alfred Jarry’s favourite novel, or something like that--it seemed much more like modern SF than its contemporaries Wells and Verne. Wells still seems too ‘political fable’, and Verne still seems too ‘adventure story’. I profess no expertise on the matter, though.
The Eleventh Voyage of Stanislaw Lem’s “Star Diaries” features an amusing inversion of the trope, which served as an inspiration for the “Fear of a Bot Planet” episode of Futurama.
I’d say time travel into the future is an entirely new trope, barring eschatological literature. As John only has a vision of the future and doesn’t travel into it, I’m inclined to think I’ve gone too far out on a limb here. Some of the origins of time travel into the past might be sought in primitivist narratives in which travelers encounter people representing the cultures of the earliest days. Doesn’t work either, though, since we’ve left out the ‘encountering yourself in the past and screwing up time’ bit. When does that first appear? Late 1880s too? Why?
I’d want to supplement the Golem stories with “he’s really a walking corpse” stories, as these seem not too distant an analog to the mechanical people stories, at least so far as the uncanny presence thing goes. There are a number of stories--see Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogue on Miracles for one--in which a monk, revealed to be only an animate corpse, is exorcised and crumbles immediately into dust.
I think that the problem with the when-did-SF-start question is that first you need a definition of SF. I don’t think that there is any simple definition that really holds together, when compared with the actual variability of what is commonly felt to be SF. In particular, the distinction between SF and fantasy is very difficult to make, and if you allow fantasy as SF, you’re left with “always has been with us”.
Going by a culturally bound limitation—in which the term SF makes no sense before people start to have a modern idea of what “science” is—I guess that Kepler works as the absolute earliest boundary. Frankenstein is generically Gothic, I’d say, and if we’re talking about genre (are we?) then it’s not a good choice for the start of SF, whatever its literary advantages.
By the way, “fantasy” as a contemporary category with its tropes, different from the faerie tale or the “travel in strange lands of the Earth” tale, probably started with William Morris, better known for the Arts and Crafts movement and as an early socialist, with The Wood Beyond the World (1894) or The Well At the World’s End (1896). That last is supposed to be the first modern fantasy set in a made-up world rather than an unknown or little known part of ours. However, George MacDonald’s Phantastes: A Faerie Romance (1858) might be the first modern fantasy if you don’t take its title seriously and say that it’s not really a faerie romance.
John, does Japanese SF have any purchase in Singapore? Because robots in anime (I don’t know about live action film) are rather different from robots in American SF. And there’s an odd and interesting linkage from Lang and Capek to Osamu Tezuka & his early manga, Metropolis and on through to the rather different anime version that was done posthumously.
Karl: “I’d say time travel into the future is an entirely new trope, barring eschatological literature. As John only has a vision of the future and doesn’t travel into it, I’m inclined to think I’ve gone too far out on a limb here.“
Visions of the future, yes; quite ancient. And fictions set in an imaginary future, yes; mostly from the 18th century onwards (books like 1733’s Memoirs of the Twentieth-century, or Original Letters of State under George VI). But actual travel to the future and or past? ... not until the 1880s. Really. Which leads to:
“ ...Why?“
I think it’s tied to the first time physicists started theorising time as ‘the fourth dimension’. Once you do that, then it difficult to avoid the implication: if it’s a dimenson like one, two and three we really ought to be able to move along it like we do with one, two and three.
My head says Wells as the beginning of SF as a genre, but my heart says Cyrano de Bergerac if only because I once saw his occupation noted as ‘duellist.’ It makes SF writers sound cool, which, as I’m sure Adam will agree, is the case.
One of my favorite bad movies from the 80’s: Slipstream (1989). C’mon Mark Hamill and Bill Paxton together?
I’ll just make one point about time-travel fiction. While Adam is right that it really only starts quite late - with Wells’ “Time-Machine”, right? - there is an important antecedent in prophecy stories because the narrative hook is the same. There is a paradox. The oracle tells someone what’s going to happen. That person tries to foil the prophecy, thereby only fulfilling it. To put the point briefly: time-travel paradox stories have been around a lot longer than time-travel stories. This is because they are a species of stories about fate and destiny. Which go back a ways. But this isn’t to say that “Oedipus” is just a draft for “The Time Machine”.
I like the “somewhere between Frankenstein and SF has always been with us” argument. How about Homer’s Cyclops, for example? Or Grendel?
I think Bakhtinians put sci-fi in the very old Menippean-satire genre.
John: “time travel starts quite late - with Wells’ “Time-Machine”, right?“ Wells’s first version of The Time Machine, uneuphoniously called The Chronic Argonauts (its hero is the even less euphoniously named Dr Nebogipfel) was published in 1888. It’s hard-to-impossible to find examples of actual time travel prior to that. There’s a French short story from, if I remember correctly (and I don’t remember the name of the author or the story itself, so I obviously don’t remember correctly) a couple of years earlier in the 1880s, in which an entire village travels in time; but it’s not clear if Wells read that.
Casey: monsters, yes; lots of those, going right back to the earliest recorded stories. We all love stories about monsters; if you did a drey-weight measurement of all the stories that have ever been told by one human to another, I’d guess two thirds have been Fantasy in the broad sense, rather than Realist. My argument is that science fiction kind-of buds off from the main trunk of Fantasy (or Romance, or Epic-Fantastical) at around 1600; before that the fantastic is magicical; after that, and although plenty of magical fantasy continues to be produced, there’s a new variety which is non-magical, material, Protestant etc.
”...a dry-weight measurement...” is what my stumbling fingers meant to type. Must press ‘Preview’ before ‘Submit’.
Perhaps an interesting subtext you could introduce in your class along with the “absolute” robots (pulled that term out of thin air, hence the quotes), are those characters “in the middle"- the human/robot hybrids. An obvious example is Data from TNG, always in the “process” of becoming human- mannerisms, skin tone (is it just me, or did Data become a lesser shade of green as the series went on?), emotional development, etc. Jeff Noon’s Vurt trilogy (Vurt, Nymphomation, Pollen)offers labeled hybrids: “Robodog,” “Robovurt,” “Roboman,” where the motto “pure is poor” is a defining quality of existence (with regards to the Robos, they get a “taste” for the plastic and metal fused onto them, much like people adding on tattoo after tattoo). Finally, the ultimate example of Darth Vader from the Star Wars movies- “more machine now than man.”
Early robots: Hephaestus’ golden assistants in the Iliad. Oh, and there’s a really nice SF story which starts out with ‘and then they discovered she’s an android’. Which is at the start of a divorce case, in which a husband finds out, two minutes after the altar, that his wife is a robot. I’ll see if I can find an exact reference. It really is a very cute story.
Thanks Uri, I would like that reference to complement my Steve Martin joke.
mo futcha now than then.
Whoops, sorry, memory playing tricks and all that. So you can’t complement the Steve Martin joke.
The actual beginning goes [extensive editing on my part here, just to show you the main drift]:
“Not a soul watched as Roderick Liffcom carried his bride across the threshold. They were just a couple of good-looking kids
...
‘There’s something’ remarked Alison casually; tracing patterns on the damask tablecloth with one slim finger, ‘ that perhaps I ought to tell you.’
Two minutes later they were fighting for the phone.
‘I want to call my lawyer,’ Roderick bellowed.
‘I want to call my lawyer,’ Alison retorted.
...
‘It was a low, mean, stinking, dirty, cattish, obscene, disgusting, filthy-minded thing to wait until...’
‘Until what?’ Alison asked with more innocence than one would have thought there was in the world.
‘Android!’ he spat viciously at her.”
Anyway, the story is called ‘Made in U.S.A.’, by J.T.McIntosh; I have it in a volume called
“Connoisseur’s S.F”, Ed. Tom Boardman.
Hope that helps.