Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (229 page)

Interestingly, one of the most compelling accounts of how gender might signify for artificially animated beings is in Mary Shelley’s own seminal text,
Frankenstein
. There, the overwhelming desire of Frankenstein’s monster is for his maker to create a female companion—the only possible creature who might accept him. The idea of a male created alone and desiring female companionship has Biblical overtones (i.e., Adam and Eve), but it also hints at the possibility of sexual reproduction amongst the “monsters.”

Robots in the Japanese Tradition

In
Inside the Robot Kingdom,
scholar Fredrik Schodt has described how “robots” entered the Japanese science fiction tradition, beginning with the translation of Capek’s play into Japanese. Just as precursors can be found for robots in the West in the form of clockwork automatons, in the Japanese tradition an important precursor to modern robots can be seen in the automated
Karakuri Ningyo
(Karakuri Dolls) from the Edo period in Japan (1600–1850). As Kirsty Boyle puts it:

Japan’s love of robots lies in the history of the ‘Karakuri Ningyo’.…The word ‘Karakuri’ means a mechanical device to tease, trick, or take a person by surprise. It implies hidden magic, or an element of mystery. In Japanese ‘Ningyo’ is written as two separate characters, meaning person and shape. It loosely translates as puppet, but can also be seen in the context of doll or even effigy. The Japanese Karakuri puppets utilize subtle, abstract movements to invoke feeing and emotion. (Source: Karakuri.info)

Beginning in the 1850s, Japanese culture came into contact with Western technology, as well as Western ideas and storytelling traditions (including, at the beginning of the twentieth century, western science fiction). Among the first Japanese writers to use robots in speculative fiction is Juza Unno (1897–1949), who is said to have been influenced by the robot-themed Fritz Lang film
Metropolis
(1927). Unno’s stories from the 1930s inspired the manga artist Osamu Tezuka, who created the popular Manga “Astro Boy” (or in a more literal translation from Japanese, “Mighty Atom”). Tezuka’s Astro-Boy is a robot born of the nuclear age, and is in some ways a reverse Pinocchio, who does not necessarily aspire to become human so much as to be granted rights as a robot Tezuka inspired a quite a number of other comic and animated robot narratives, including, from 1956,
Tetsujin 28-go
(
Iron Man 28
; marketed as
Gigantor
in its American version), the pet robot cat known as
Doraemon
(1969)
,
and various kinds of robot girls, including
Arare-Chan
(in the
Dr. Slump manga series, from 1980) and the “cyberdolls” from the anime series Hand-Maid May (2000). While earlier series such as Tetsujin 28-go used robots that operated without reference to the laws of physics, Schodt describes how more recent series, such as Yoshiyuki Tomino’s Mobile Suit Gundam (1979), inaugurated the “real robot” genre in Japanese anime, with robots constrained to operate with existing power sources and conventional weapons, under the laws of physics.

Actual Robots

Along with the accounts of Japanese science fiction, manga, and anime, in
Inside the Robot Kingdom
Schodt describes the history of the advent of “actual” robots, which began with programmed industrial machines designed to replace human workers. One key figure in the history of the invention of robots is George C. Devol, Jr., who filed a patent on the first industrial robot in 1954. As Schodt puts it, ““Devol’s idea was a form of flexible automation, a transfer apparatus or manipulator that could do many things, such as pick cartons off a series of pallets and then put them on a conveyor belt to be transferred into a truck—a simple operation usually performed by hand that was, he wrote, ‘a waste of manpower that is here corrected.’

However, in the 1950s and 60s there was some confusion amongst Devol and other inventors as to terminology involving the new industrial machines, which were generally not designed to resemble human beings so much as to replace repetitive assembly line tasks with programmable machine actions. Thus Devol described his first machines “Unimates” rather than “robots,” and only began to use the term “robots” to describe his products after it helped customers involved in industrial manufacturing understand the potential of his invention.

Schodt also points out that there have been cultural discrepancies in understanding what is and is not a “real” robot. In Japan in the 1970s and early 1980s, “robot” referred to any programmed machine, including machines with hardwired programming. Meanwhile, in American robotics, the term “robot” was generally reserved for machines programmed with software. Nevertheless, the Japanese embrace of industrial robotics, leading to much more flexible assembly lines through the 1970s, is widely credited with growing Japanese dominance of the steel and automotive industries in this period.

Alongside industrial robots, research universities as well as major corporations such as Honda have research units that have continued to develop technology in robotics. Advanced robots such as Honda’s Asimo (oriented to emulating human movement, including realistic walking and running) or MIT’s Kismet (oriented to replicating human emotions and conversation ability) use advanced technology in highly specialized ways to approximate limited human capacities. As advanced as these real robots are, however, they are quite primitive in comparison to the robots writers like Asimov imagined back in the 1940s.

Works Cited

Aldiss, Brian. “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long” [1969] . Reprinted by
Wired Magazine 5
.01, 1997. Accessed online at . Accessed February 2, 2011.

Asimov, Isaac.
Robot Visions.
New York: Roc Press, 2004.

Bloch, Chayim.
Golem: Legends of the Ghetto of Prague
. New York: Kessinger Publishing,1997

Kirsty Boyle, “Karakuri.” Web resource. Accessed onlineat . Accessed February 2, 2011.

Capek, Karl.
Rossum’s Universal Robots
[1920]. New York: Echo Library, 2010.

Collodi, Carlo.
Adventures of Pinocchio.
Trans. Geoffrey Brock. New York: New York Review of Books, 2008.

Dick, Philip K.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
[1968]. New York: Del Rey Press, 1996.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von.
Faust, Part 2.
Transl.David Constantine. New York: Penguin Books, 2009.

Le Guin, Ursula K.
The Left Hand of Darkness.
[1969]. New York: Ace Trade, Press 2000

Levin, Ira,
The Stepford Wives
[1972]. New York: Harper Paperbacks, 2002.

Ray, Lester del, “Helen O’Loy” [1953].
The Science Fiction Hall of Fame: 1929-1964.
Robert Silverberg, Ed. New York: Macmillan, 2005.

Schodt, Frederik L.
Inside the Robot Kingdom: Japan, Mechatronics, and the Coming Robotopia.
New York: Kodansha America, 1990.

Shelley, Mary [1831].
Frankenstein
. New York: Bedford/St. Martin, 2000.

* * * *

Amardeep Singh has a Ph.D. in English from Duke University; he now teaches in the English department at Lehigh University. He has published on modern British literature and postcolonial literature, with a special focus on the literature of India. Singh is also an associate editor at the Journal of Postcolonial Writing; he blogs on assorted literary topics at at http://www.electrostani.com

(1923–2001)

“Soldier, Ask Not” was one of the first Gordon Dickson stories I ever read, and it’s stuck with me ever since. It remains a haunting story, though it’s both typical and atypical of Dickson’s writing. Dickson could be a really
funny
writer, and there’s none of that undercurrent of humor here. But the strong characterizations, sense of nuance, and refusal to take the easy way out on emotional issues are pure Gordon Dickson. It’s a moody piece of military SF that doesn’t fit neatly into conventions of war stories. Its characters are violent and compelling and driven by honor, yet you’re uncomfortable at the bittersweet end of the story. It won a Hugo for Dickson, the first of three he would be awarded.

Born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, Dickson moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota as a teenager. He taught himself to read by age four, and was writing from an early age. Dickson attended the University of Minnesota between 1943 and 1948 (sandwiched around service in the U.S. Army) studying writing with Sinclair Lewis, Robert Penn Warren, and others at both the undergraduate and graduate level.

Dickson suffered from severe asthma for most of his life, sometimes to the point where he couldn’t leave his house. (Eventually he would die from complications related to that asthma.) Lying awake after an asthma attack, he conceived of the Childe Cycle, a series of thematically linked novels and stories spanning the past, present, and future and exploring the evolution of humanity. It’s also referred to as the Dorsai Cycle, since the Dorsai stories including “Soldier, Ask Not” are some of the best-known works in the series, but its conception was much broader.

Despite his asthma, Dickson was a world traveler with a nose for adventure, and a big bearish presence in fandom, especially in Minnesota. We had many mutual friends, and the number of stories about how he went out of his way to share his time and love of literature and music with others (he played guitar and was an active filker, the term for a science fiction folksinger) are astonishing. He was active in the SF writing community as well, including serving as the president of SFWA. While doing all of that, he wrote some eighty books and well over a hundred stories, with several books coming out just before his death.

First published in
Galaxy Magazine
, October 1964

Soldier, ask not—now, or ever,

Where to war your banners go…

I

As I got off the spaceliner on St. Marie, the little breeze from the higher pressure of the ship’s atmosphere at my back was like a hand from the darkness behind me, shoving me into the dark day and the rain. My Newsman’s cloak covered me. The wet chill of the day wrapped around me but did not enter me. I was like the naked claymore of my own early ancestors, wrapped and hidden in the plaid-sharpened on a stone—and carried now at last to the meeting for which it had been guarded over three years of waiting.

A meeting in the cold rain of spring. I felt it, cold as old blood on my hands and tasteless on my lips. Above, the sky was low and clouds flowing to the east. The rain fell steadily.

The sound of it was like a rolling of drums as I went down the outside landing stairs, the multitude of raindrops sounding their own end against the unyielding concrete all around. The concrete stretched far from the ship in every direction, hiding the earth, as bare and clean as the last page of an account book before the final entry. At its far edge, the spaceport terminal stood like a single gravestone. The curtains of falling water between it and me thinned and thickened like the smoke of battle, but could not hide it entirely from my sight.

It was the same rain that falls in all places and on all worlds. It had fallen like this on Athens of Old Earth, when I was only a boy, on the dark, unhappy house of the uncle who brought me up after my parent’s death, on the ruins of the Parthenon as I saw it from my bedroom window.

I listened to it now as I went down the landing stairs, drumming on the great ship behind me which had shifted me free between the stars—from Old Earth to this second smallest of the worlds, this small terra-formed planet under the Procyon suns—and drumming hollowly upon the Credentials case sliding down the conveyor belt beside me. That case now meant nothing to me—neither my papers or the Credentials of Impartiality I had carried six years and worked so long to earn. Now I thought less of these than of the name of the man I should find dispatching groundcars at the edge of the field. If, that was, he was actually the man my Earth informants had named to me. And if they had not lied…

“…Your luggage, sir?”

I woke from my thoughts and the rain. I had reached the concrete. The debarking officer smiled at me. He was older than I, though he looked younger. As he smiled some beads of moisture broke and spilled like tears from the brown visor-edge of his cap onto the tally sheet he held.

“Send it to the Friendly compound,” I said. “I’ll take the Credentials case.”

I took it up from the conveyor belt and turned to walk off. The man standing in a dispatcher’s uniform by the first groundcar in line did fit the description.

“Name, sir?” he said. “Business on St. Marie?”

If he had been described to me, I must have been described to him. But I was prepared to humor him.

“Tam Olyn,” I said. “Old Earth resident and Interworld News Network representative. I’m here to cover the Friendly-Exotic conflict.” I opened my case and gave him my papers.

“Fine, Mr. Olyn.” He handed them back to me, damp from the rain, He turned away to open the door of the car beside him and set the automatic pilot. “Follow the highway straight to Joseph’s Town. Put it on automatic at the city limits and the car’ll take you to the Friendly compound.”

“All right,” I said. “Just a minute.”

He turned back. He had a young, good-looking face with a little mustache and he looked at me with a bright blankness. “Sir?”

“Help me get in the car.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, sir.” He came quickly over to me. “I didn’t realize your leg—”

“Damp stiffens it,” I said. He adjusted the seat and I got my left leg in behind the steering column. He started to turn away.

“Wait a minute,” I said again. I was out of patience. “You’re Walter Imera, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” he said softly.

“Look at me,” I said. “You’ve got some information for me, haven’t you?”

He turned slowly back to face me. His face was still blank.

“No, sir.”

I waited a long moment, looking at him.

“All right,” I said then, reaching for the car door. “I guess you know I’ll get the information anyway. And they’ll believe you told me.”

His little mustache began to look like it was painted on.

“Wait—” he said.

“What for?”

“Look,” he said, “you’ve got to understand. Information like that’s not part of your news, is it? I’ve got a family—”

“And I haven’t,” I said. I felt nothing for him.

“But you don’t understand. They’d kill me. That’s the sort of organization the Blue Front is now, here on St. Marie. What d’you want to know about them for? I didn’t understand you meant—”

“All right,” I said. I reached for the car door.

“Wait—” He held out a hand to me in the rain. “How do I know you can make them leave me alone if I tell you?”

“They may be back in power here some day,” I said. “Not even outlawed political groups want to antagonize the Interplanetary News Network.” I started to close the door once more.

“All right—” he said quickly. “All right. You go to New San Marcos. The Wallace Street Jewelers there. It’s just beyond Joseph’s Town, where the Friendly compound is you’re going to.” He licked his lips. “You’ll tell them about me?”

“I’ll tell them.” I looked at him. Above the edge of the blue uniform collar on the right side of his neck I could see an inch or two of fine silver chain, bright against winter-pale skin. The crucifix attached to it would be down under his shirt. “The Friendly soldiers have been here two years now. How do people like them?”

He grinned a little. His color was coming back.

“Oh, like anybody,” he said. “You just have to understand them. They’ve got their own ways.”

I felt the ache in my stiff leg where the doctors on New Earth had taken the needle from the spring rifle out of it three years before.

“Yes, they have,” I said. “Shut the door.”

He shut it. I drove off.

There was a St. Christopher’s medal on the car’s instrument panel. One of the Friendly soldiers would have ripped it off and thrown it away, or refused the car. And so it gave me a particular pleasure to leave it where it was, though it meant no more to me than it would to him. It was, not just because of Dave, my brother-in-law, and the other prisoners they had shot down on New Earth. It was simply because there are some duties that have a small element of pleasure. After the illusions of childhood are gone and there is nothing left but duties, such pleasures are welcome. Fanatics, when all is said and done, are no worse than mad dogs.

But mad dogs have to be destroyed; it is a simple common sense.

And you return to common sense after a while in life, inevitably. When the wild dreams of justice and progress are all dead and buried, when the painful beatings of feeling inside you are finally stilled, then it becomes best to be still, unliving, and unyielding as—the blade of a sword sharpened on a stone. The rain through which such a blade is carried to its using does not stain it, any more than the blood in which it is bathed at last. Rain and blood are alike to sharpened iron.

I drove for half an hour past wooded hills and plowed meadows. The furrows of the fields were black in the rain. I thought it a kinder black than some other shades I had seen; and at last I reached the outskirts of Joseph’s Town.

The autopilot of the car threaded me through a small, neat, typical St. Marie City of about a hundred thousand people. We came out on the far side into a cleared area, beyond which lifted the massive, sloping concrete walls of a military compound.

A Friendly non-com stopped my car at the gate with his black spring rifle, and opened the car door at my left.

“Thee have business here?”

His voice was harsh and high in his nose. The cloth tabs of a group-man edged his collar. Above them his forty-year-old face was lean and graven with lines. Both face and hands, the only uncovered parts of him, looked unnaturally white against the black cloth and rifle.

I opened the case beside me and handed him my papers.

“My Credentials,” I said. “I’m here to see your acting Commander of Expeditionary Forces, Commandant Jamethon Black.”

“Move over, then,” he said nasally. “I must drive thee.”

I moved.

He got in and took the stick. We drove through the gate and turned down an approach alley. I could see an interior square at the alley’s far end. The close concrete walls on either side of us echoed the sound of our passage as we went. I heard drill commands growing louder as we approached the square. When we rolled out into it, soldiers were drawn up in ranks for their midday service, in the rain.

* * * *

The groupman left me and went in the entrance of what seemed to be an office inset in the wall on one side of the square. I looked over the soldiers standing in formation. They stood at present-arms, their position of worship under field conditions; and as I watched, the officer standing facing them, with his back to a wall, led them into the words of their Battle Hymn.

Soldier, ask not—now, or ever,

Where to war your banners go.

Anarch’s legions all surround us.

Strike! And do not count the blow!

I sat trying not to listen. There was no musical accompaniment, no religious furniture or symbols except the thin shape of the cross whitewashed on the gray wall behind the officer. The massed male voices rose and fell slowly in the dark, sad hymn that promised them only pain, and suffering, and sorrow. At last, the final line mourned its harsh prayer for a battle death, and they ordered arms,

A groupman dismissed the ranks as the officer walked back past my car without looking at me, and passed in through the entrance where my non-commissioned guide had disappeared. As he passed I saw the officer was young.

A moment later the guide came for me. Limping a little on my stiffened leg, I followed him to an inner room with the lights on above a single desk. The young officer rose and nodded as the door closed behind me. He wore the faded tabs of a commandant on his uniform lapels.

As I handed my credentials across the desk to him, the glare of the light over the desk came full in my eyes, blinding me. I stepped back and blinked at his blurred face. As it came back into focus I saw it for a moment as if it was older, harsher, twisted and engraved with the lines of years of fanaticism.

Then my eyes refocused completely, and I saw him as he actually was. Dark-faced, but thin with the thinness of youth rather than that of self-starvation. He was not the face burned in my memory. His features were regular to the point of being handsome, his eyes tired and shadowed; and I saw the straight, weary line of his mouth above the still, self-controlled stiffness of his body, smaller and slighter than mine.

He held the credentials without looking at them. His mouth quirked a little, dryly and wearily, at the corners. “And no doubt, Mr. Olyn,” he said, “you’ve got another pocket filled with authorities from the Exotic Worlds to interview the mercenary soldiers and officers they’ve hired from the Dorsai and a dozen other worlds to oppose God’s Chosen in War?”

I smiled. Because it was good to find him as strong as that, to add to rny pleasure of breaking him.

II

I looked across the ten feet or so of distance that separated us. The Friendly non-com who had killed the prisoners on New Earth had also spoken of God’s Chosen.

“If you’ll look under the papers directed to you,” I said, “you’ll find them. The News Network and its people are impartial. We don’t take sides.”

“Right,” said the dark young face opposing me, “take sides.”

“Yes, Commandant,” I said. “That’s right. Only sometimes it’s a matter of debate where Right is. You and your troops here now are invaders on the world of a planetary system your ancestors never colonized. And opposing you are mercenary troops hired by two worlds that not only belong under the Procyon suns but have a commitment to defend the smaller worlds of their system—of which St. Marie is one. I’m not sure right is on your side.”

He shook his head slightly and said, “We expect small understanding from those not Chosen.” He transferred his gaze from me to the papers in his hand.

“Mind if I sit down?” I said. “I’ve got a bad leg.”

“By all means.” He nodded to a chair beside his desk and, as I sat down, seated himself. I looked across the papers on the desk before him and saw, standing to one side, the solidograph of one of the windowless high-peaked churches the Friendlies build. It was a legitimate token for him to own—but there just happened to be three people, an older man and woman and a young girl of about fourteen, in the foreground of the image. All three of them bore a family resemblance to Jamethon Black. Glancing up from my credentials he saw me looking at them; and his gaze shifted momentarily to the graph and away again, as if he would protect it.

“I’m required, I see,” he said, drawing my eyes back to him, “to provide you with cooperation and facilities. We’ll find quarters for you here. Do you need a car and driver?”