Robots Read online
Table of Contents
Preface
Itsy Bitsy Spider
Robots Don't Cry
London, Paris, Banana
La Macchina
Warmth
Ancient Engines
Jimmy Guangs House of Gladmech
Droplet
Counting Cats in Zanzibar
The Birds of Isla Ntujeres
Heirs of the Perisphere
The Robots Twilight Companion
ROBOTS
EDITED BY
JACK DANN & GARDNER DOZOIS
Edited by Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois
UNICORNS!
MAGICATS!
BESTIARY!
MERMAIDS!
SORCERERS!
DEMONS!
DOGTALES!
SEASERPENTS!
DINOSAURS!
LITTLE PEOPLE!
MAGICATS II
UNICORNS
DRAGONS!
INVADERS!
HORSES!
ANGELS!
HACKERS
TIMEGATES
CLONES
IMMORTALS
NANOTECH
FUTURE WAR
GENOMETRY
SPACE SOLDIERS
FUTURE SPORTS
BEYOND FLESH
FUTURE CRIMES
A.I.S
ROBOTS
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
eISBN: 978-1-62579-151-1
Copyright © 2013 by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann
First printing: April 2005
Cover art by: Ron Miller
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
Electronic version by Baen Books
ACKNOWLEDGMENT IS MADE FOR PERMISSION TO REPRINT THE FOLLOWING MATERIAL:
"Itsy Bitsy Spider" by James Patrick Kelly. Copyright ® 1997 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, June 1997. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Robots Don't Cry" by Mike Resnick. Copyright ® 2003 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, July 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"London, Paris, Banana" by Howard Waldrop. Copyright 2000 by Wizards of the Coast, Inc. First published in Amazing Stories, Winter 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"La Macchina" by Chris Beckett. Copyright ® 1991 by Interzone. First published in Interzone, April 1991. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Warmth" by Geoff Ryman. Copyright C) 1995 by Geoff Ryman. First published in Interzone, October 1995. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agent, the Maggie Noach Literary Agency.
"Ancient Engines" by Michael Swanwick. Copyright ® 1998 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, February 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Jimmy Guang's House of Gladmech" by Alex Irvine. Copyright ® 2002 by Scifi.com. First published electronically on SCI Fiction, April 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Droplet" by Benjamin Rosenbaum. Copyright 0 2002 by Spilogale, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Counting Cats in Zanzibar" by Gene Wolfe. Copyright ® 1996 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, August 1996. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agent, The Virginia Kidd Literary Agency.
"The Birds of Isla Mujeres" by Steven Popkes. Copyright 2003 by Spilogale, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Heirs of the Perisphere" by Howard Waldrop. Copyright 1985 by Playboy Inc. First published in Playboy, July 1985. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"The Robot's Twilight Companion" by Tony Daniel. Copyright © 1996 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, August 1996. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Preface
Although the word robot was taken from Karel Capek's 1921 play R. U.R., derived from the Czech word robata, the idea of artificial men, beings created by other men, has haunted the imagination of humanity for thousands of years, going at least as far back as the legends of men of bronze and tin to be found in Greek and Roman mythology, like Talos, the giant made of bronze who was said to guard the shores of Crete by running around the island three times daily and throwing huge rocks at any enemy invaders. Tales of robots or mechanical men have a long tradition in science fiction, entering the body of science fiction proper soon after there began to recognizably be such a thing, in the nineteenth century, and persisting to the present day.
The number of robot stories appearing each year has varied from decade to decade, with writers seemingly more preoccupied with them in some years than in others, as robot stories went in and out of style; the heyday of the robot story was probably the '40s and '50s and early '60s, when Isaac Asimov was writing his famous cycle of robot stories, including the robot novels The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun; Brian W. Aldiss was producing the stories that would go into his collection And Who Can Replace a Man?; Jack Williamson was writing "With Folded Hands;" C. L. Moore was writing "No Woman Born;" Henry Kuttner was producing the stories that went into Robots Have No Tails; Alfred Bester was producing "Fondly Fahrenheit;" Philip K. Dick was writing "Second Variety" and "imposter;" Clifford Simak was writing City and "All the Traps of Earth;" and Harry Harrison was writing about The War with the Robots. Most of the anthologies of robot stories that have been published—Damon Knight's The Metal Smile, Robert Silverberg's Men and Machines, Sam Moskowitz's The Coming of the Robots, Roger Elwood's Invasion of the Robots—have drawn primarily on stories from those decades.
The "New Wave" days of the mid to late '60s to the mid '70s, with their emphasis on introspective, stylistically "experimental" work and work with more immediate sociological and political "relevance" to the tempestuous social scene of the day, saw fewer robot stories being published (with a few significant exceptions, such as Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Asimov's "The Bicentennial Man"). In the '80s and '90s, much of the dialogue about robots in the field was subsumed in the examination of the concept of artificial intelligence (see our previous Ace anthology A.Ls for stories of this type), to the extent that Asimov's later robot novels such as The Robots of Dawn and Robots and Empire were criticized as being retro by some commentators, no longer having anything to contribute to the back-and-forth debate about the nature of artificial intelligence going on among the younger writers in the field.
In the real world, the development of humanoid robots, robots of the same shape, size, and general body-plan as humans, has proved surprisingly difficult, even in the fundamental engineering problem of making robots articulate and move like humans, let alone the problem df investing them with some form of self-contained and reasonably functional intelligence—let alone sentience and an intellectual capacity equal or superior to us. In The Door into Summer, published in 1957, Robert A. Heinlein could confidently predict that his robotic servants and house-cleaners, the Hired Girls, would be in existence by 1970, but 1970 has come and gone (even the "future" of Heinlein's novel, the year 2000, has come and gone!), and so far only the most primitive ancestors of the sophisticated Hired Girls, disk-shaped robot vacuum cleaners that scoot around by themselves vacuuming your floors, have actually come on to the market. In spite of the lack of clanking humanoid servants, though, robots surround us in our daily lives—not in humanoid form, but in the thousand forms of industrial robots, from gigantic to tiny, who have taken over many o
f the world's industrial tasks, and in the form of all the myriad machines, unnoticed and unremarked, that perform a multitude of menial tasks for us, from those that help apply the brakes in your car to those that open the supermarket doors for you, saturating our lives in ways that Heinlein never could have imagined back in 1957. Ironically, considering Asimov's famous First Law of Robotics—"a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm"—the most technologically sophisticated robots developed to date are designed specifically for the task of killing people: cruise missiles and smart bombs. Asimov's humanoid, general-purpose, intelligent robots may not be developed for decades to come—if they are ever developed at all.
Robots still continue to fascinate us, though, and, as you shall see in the anthology that follows, still stalk through the pages of science fiction. In fact, robots have made something of a comeback in the later '90s and the aughts, perhaps because of the popularity of Big Budget robot movies such as The Terminator, A.I., The Bicentennial Man, and I, Robot, or perhaps just because the idea itself, sentient machines that look and act like us, is so archtypically potent. Many of science fiction's most significant tropes may spring from a kind of cosmic loneliness, the desire to have someone else in the universe to talk with. Aliens are one fictional solution to the problem of having another race of sentient creatures to interact with—and the other great solution is robots. If you can't find other sentient creatures out there in the universe, the next best thing is to make them yourself. Perhaps this is why robot stories are becoming more popular again, as many people grow discouraged with the hope that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is ever going to turn up anything. This may also be reflected in the changing attitudes toward robots manifested in many of these stories, from the sinister figures out to supplant or destroy or infiltrate us common in the '50s and '60s to helpmates and caregivers, companions, compatriots, sources of solace both physical and spiritual, even our eventual anointed successors in the universe.
So open the pages of this book, and let some of today's most expert dreamers show you more variations on the complex future relationship of humans and machines—some funny, some sad, some moving, some bizarre—than you've ever imagined before. Enjoy!
(For other speculations on these and similar themes, check out our Ace anthologies A.I.s, Beyond Flesh, Nano-tech, Hackers, Immortals, Future War, Space Soldiers, and coedited by Sheila Williams—Isaac Asimov's Robots.)
Itsy Bitsy Spider
James Patrick Kelly
James Patrick Kelly made his first sale in 1975, and since has gone on to become one of the most respected and popular writers to enter the field in the last twenty years. Although Kelly has had some success with novels, especially with Wildlife, he has perhaps had more impact to date as a writer of short fiction, with stories such as "Solstice," "The Prisoner of Chillon," "Glass Cloud," "Mr. Boy," "Pogrom," "Home Front," "Undone," and "Bernardo's House," and is often ranked among the best short story writers in the business. His story "Think Like a Dinosaur" won him a Hugo Award in 1996, as did his story "1016 to 1" in 2000. Kelly's first solo novel, the mostly ignored Planet of Whispers, came out in 1984. It was followed by Freedom Beach, a mosaic novel written in collaboration with John Kessel, and then by another solo novel, Look Into the Sun. His short work has been collected in Think Like a Dinosaur, and, most recently, in a new collection, Strange But Not a Stranger. Born in Minneola, New York, Kelly now lives with his family in Nottingham, New Hampshire. He has a website at wwwJimKelly.net and reviews interne-related matters for Asimov's Science Fiction.
Here he guides us to an ostensibly tranquil future society for a tale of fathers and daughters that's a bit more complicated than it first seems, and where some of the games they play, even children's games, can get very rough indeed .. .
When I found out that my father was still alive after all these years and living at Strawberry Fields, I thought he'd gotten just what he deserved. Retroburbs are where the old, scared people go to hide. I'd always pictured the people in them as deranged losers. Visiting some fantasy world like the disneys or Carlucci's Carthage is one thing, moving to one is another. Sure, 2038 is messy, but it's a hell of a lot better than nineteen-sixty-whatever.
Now that I'd arrived at 144 Bluejay Way, I realized that the place was worse than I had imagined. Strawberry Fields was pretending to be some long-lost suburb of the late twentieth century, except that it had the sterile monotony of cheap VR. It was clean, all right, and neat, but it was everywhere the same. And the scale was wrong. The lots were squeezed together and all the houses had shrunk—like the dreams of their owners. They were about the size of a one-car garage, modular units tarted up at the factory to look like ranches, with old double-hung storm windows and hardened siding of harvest gold, barn red, forest green. Of course, there were no real garages; faux Mustangs and VW buses cruised the quiet streets. Their carbrains were listening for a summons from Barbara Chesley next door at 142, or the Goltzes across the street, who might be headed to Penny Lanes to bowl a few frames, or the hospital to die.
There was a beach chair with blue nylon webbing on the front stoop of 144 Bluejay Way. A brick walk led to it, dividing two patches of carpet moss, green as a dream. There were names and addresses printed in huge lightstick letters on all the doors in the neighborhood; no doubt many Strawberry Fielders were easily confused. The owner of this one was Peter Fancy. He had been born Peter Fanelli, but had legally taken his stage name not long after his first success as Prince Hal in Henry IV Part 1. I was a Fancy too; the name was one of the few things of my father's I had kept.
I stopped at the door and let it look me over. "You're Jen," it said.
"Yes." I waited in vain for it to open or to say something else. "I'd like to see Mr. Fancy, please." The old man's house had worse manners than he did. "He knows I'm coming," I said. "I sent him several messages." Which he had never answered, but I didn't mention that.
"Just a minute," said the door. "She'll be right with you."
She? The idea that he might be with another woman now hadn't occurred to me. I'd lost track of my father a long time ago—on purpose. The last time we'd actually visited overnight was when I was twenty. Mom gave me a ticket to Port Gemini, where he was doing the Shakespeare in Space program. The orbital was great, but staying with him was like being under water. I think I must have held my breath for the entire week. After that, there were a few, sporadic calls, a couple of awkward dinners—all at his instigation. Then twenty-three years of nothing.
I never hated him, exactly. When he left, I just decided to show solidarity with Mom and be done with him. If acting was more important than his family, then to hell with Peter Fancy. Mom was horrified when I told her how I felt. She cried and claimed the divorce was as much her fault as his. It was too much for me to handle; I was only eleven years old when they separated. I needed to be on someone's side and so I had chosen her. She never did stop trying to talk me into finding him again, even though after a while it only made me mad at her. For the past few years, she'd been warning me that I'd developed a warped view of men.
But she was a smart woman, my mom—a winner. Sure, she'd had troubles, but she'd founded three companies, was a millionaire by twenty-five. I missed her.
A lock clicked and the door opened. Standing in the dim interior was a little girl in a gold-and-white checked dress. Her dark, curly hair was tied in a ribbon. She was wearing white ankle socks and black Mary Jane shoes that were so shiny they had to be plastic. There was a Band-Aid on her left knee.
"Hello, Jen. I was hoping you'd really come." Her voice surprised me. It was resonant, impossibly mature. At first glance I'd guessed she was three, maybe four; I'm not much good at guessing kids' ages. Now I realized that this must be a bot—a made person.
"You look just like I thought you would." She smiled, stood on tiptoe and raised a delicate little hand over her head. I had to bend to shake it. The hand was warm, slightly moist, and very
realistic. She had to belong to Strawberry Fields; there was no way my father could afford a bot with skin this real.
"Please come in." She waved on the lights. "We're so happy you're here." The door closed behind me.
The playroom took up almost half of the little house. Against one wall was a miniature kitchen. Toy dishes were drying in a rack next to the sink; the pink refrigerator barely came up to my waist. The table was full-sized; it had two normal chairs and a booster chair. Opposite this was a bed with a ruffled Pumpkin Patty bedspread. About a dozen dolls and stuffed animals were arranged along the far edge of the mattress. I recognized most of them: Pooh, Mr. Moon, Baby Rollypolly, the Sleepums, Big Bird. And the wallpaper was familiar too: Oz figures like Toto and the Wizard and the Cowardly Lion on a field of Munchkin blue.
"We had to make a few changes," said the bot. "Do you like it?"
The room seemed to tilt then. I took a small, unsteady step and everything righted itself. My dolls, my wallpaper, the chest of drawers from Grandma Fanelli's cottage in Hyannis. I stared at the bot and recognized her for the first time. She was me.
"What is this," I said, "some kind of sick joke?" I felt like I'd just been slapped in the face.
"Is something wrong?" the bot said. "Tell me. Maybe we can fix it."
I swiped at her and she danced out of reach. I don't know what I would have done if I had caught her. Maybe smashed her through the picture window onto the patch of front lawn or shaken her until pieces started falling off. But the bot wasn't responsible, my father was. Mom would never have defended him if she'd known about this. The old bastard. I couldn't believe it. Here I was, shuddering with anger, after years of feeling nothing for him.