Slashdot Mirror
Cory Doctorow's 'I, Robot' Posted
maxentius writes "A bunch of new stuff has been posted to The Infinite Matrix , reports editor Eileen Gunn, including a new 15,000- word short story from Cory Doctorow entitled 'I, Robot.' Other new additions include material from Howard Waldrop and Patrick O'Leary."
Except that the original "I, Robot" short story was not written by Asimov, but by a guy named Eando Binder in 1939.
Except that Eando Binder wasn't just one guy, but the pen name for Earl and Otto Binder.
Well according to his footnote:
About this story, Cory says, "Last spring, in the wake of Ray Bradbury pitching a tantrum over Michael Moore appropriating the title of 'Fahrenheit 451' to make Fahrenheit 9/11, I conceived of a plan to write a series of stories with the same titles as famous sf shorts, which would pick apart the toalitarian assumptions underpinning some of sf's classic narratives."
Sounds like it very well MIGHT be. After Sci-Fi clearly fantasy is the next step in unimaginative satire--
The Wolfkin
I like Howard's non-fiction as well as his fiction, which is one of the reasons I wrote some movie reviews with him:
- Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
- The Fabulous World of Jules Verne.
- The Incredibles
(Actually, Howard, Cory and I are all in the Turkey City Writer's Workshop together.Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Pro: Cory's stories (heh, a rhyme!) nail geekdom. My favorite is from 0wnz0red, in which the main character's CVS submit permissions are yanked. It's funny, for geeks.
Con: Every main character in every one of Cory's stories that I've read is a whiny SOB. In "I, Robot", the main character only cries once, which means that Cory's getting better.
Seriously, I hate everyone one of Cory's main characters. They're either whiny put-upon crybabies, or they're taken advantage of by their best friends/wives/other, or usually both. To me, that's the one thing keeping me from really liking Cory's writing. Yeah, the prose needs work, but that will get better with practice. Just stop making charactes that I hate reading about!
So what's the reason for this story? Are we going to start getting postings here every time Strange Horizons updates or there's a new issue of Asimov's?
The BS about the Fahrenheit meme aside, I would think that a guy claiming to be so pro-tech would consider meta-data pollution.
Imagine "everyone" reusing titles verbatim where it's totally unnecessary - like Doctorow did here. Fast-forward a year and think about the result of a simple web search. Thanks.
I wonder if in his comment at the end of the story, the bit about totalitarian assumptions that underpin traditional SF, Cory Doctorow intended to label Asimov as totalitarian. Really? Maybe so.... I do think of Asimov as a conservative. Immensely entertaining, of course, and full of intriguing ideas (I was thrilled by the Three Laws when I first read them, and loved the logic-puzzle flavor of the stories he built around them). But against the "totalitarian" accusation (if one was intended), I would point out Asimov's counter-establishment protagonists in The Gods Themselves.
But Doctorow has a point. Asimov came up with his positronic brains and Three Laws at a time when ideas about AI were...well, 50 years older than they are today. Asimov didn't need to address the issue of effective "cloning" (via saving a digital copy of all the data from a human, or robot, brain) and the ramifications of having multiple instances of the same person because those are such modern ideas (Kurzweil's Intelligent Machines was published in 1990). Today's science fiction writer must face these issues. The hero's wife in today's story is not just one person, she's 3422 copies of herself. Lose one to the ripping robot-spiders, you can still find and hug and love another one. Wife dead? No problem...this copy has the same memories and smells just as good and is just as pleasantly warm.
This story invites a worthwhile comparison of the progression of ideas from Asimov's hayday to today.
Accusations of plagiarism against Doctorow seem to me ludicrous; they have been defused before the fact by the audaciousness of his title. He's not trying to steal ideas and get away with it, he's calling attention to the ideas, exploring them further, arguing against them (and yes, possibly, profiting from their inherent name-recognition value), maybe even paying tribute to them. He is certainly not being underhanded.
I'm curious about the judgement that his writing is "stilted" and "ungainly". Do you mean it is awkward? Too rigid? On the contrary, to me it reads very informally and conversationally. "Capeesh" may clang in my ears, but I suspect the author is taking a stab at creating a future slang, and who's to say how a cop will or will not talk in the days of positronic brains? I don't think Doctorow's prose sparkles the way, say, Anthony Burgess's does, but it is certainly serviceable enough and not a distraction. Not every great writer was great with words.
Here's a sample paragraph, picked from the middle of the piece:
Apart from a couple of what strike me as grammatical errors (is the car or the man the subject of the first sentence?) I don't find much to complain about in the prose. Verbs like shudder, weave, barrel are colorful and bring the action to life. wasn't and pissing off are certainly colloquial and sidestep the label "stilted."
The story is legible, has credible characters with real problems, addresses relevant issues, demonstrates insight into progress made in the AI field, and has achieved the honor of slashdot attention. Furthermore, it is compelling enough that I read it to the end--which makes it a legitimate piece of fiction in my book.