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."

Comments

Catchy Title...

[gowen]

Next week, read the first installment of Cory's brand new fantasy epic, "The Lord Of The Rings"

Re:Catchy Title...

[DigitumDei]

I really wish they'd mentioned that the author intended to rip off well known titles as part of a series of short stories.

But I guess leaving important details out allows the /. crowd to bitch about copyright, IP and court cases without paying any attention to the real reason the story was done.

Re:IP

[OzRoy]

Except that the original "I, Robot" short story was not written by Asimov, but by a guy named Eando Binder in 1939.

GPL'd story?

[Aneurysm]

Is it an official fork of the Asimov book?

Re:I'm writing Cory Doctorow's Biography

[OzRoy]

Well it's a trick that seemed to work for Isaac Asimov. The original "I, Robot" was a short story written by Eando Binder. Isaac Asimov was apparently appaled when he learned that his collection was going to be renamed from "Mind and Iron" to "I, Robot".

The title

[MadChicken]

I realize it's asking a lot, but if people would either READ the ARTICLE or scroll way way to the bottom, they'd see this:

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 [sic] assumptions underpinning some of sf's classic narratives."

Yes, the title is on purpose. Of course if people did that, there would be no discussions here, would there?

Re:The title

[gowen]

the title is on purpose

Where the hell did anyone suggest otherwise?

Re:The title

[froodiantherapy]

In some ways, this an interesting choice on Cory's part for the genre of SF. It seems that Cory is deliberatly attempting to "folk-song" SF; that is, it seems that Cory wants give Sci-Fi the communal aspects of folk music. Just in the way that folk and blues music is a evolutionary genre handed down from generation to generation, Cory wants to hand down Sci-Fi gems down the generations. Whether this is even remotely feasible (or desirable) is a matter for debate, but it seems he's doing this fully aware of its implications.

Re:cool robot scultpture

[iapetus]

Can someone summarize what this story is about?

Robots.

You're welcome.

Oh god, not again

[Anonymous Coward]

Arturo Icaza de Arana-Goldberg, Police Detective Third Grade, United North American Trading Sphere, Third District, Fourth Prefecture, Second Division (Parkdale) had had many adventures in his distinguished career, running crooks to ground with an unbeatable combination of instinct and unstinting devotion to duty.

This man's writing is so amazingly stilted even reading the first paragraph makes me cringe in horror. For the love of my life, I can't understand the Slashdot infatuation with him. Everything I've ever seen by him has been awful even by pulp SF standards.

Re:Oh god, not again

[Sandor at the Zoo]

Everything I've ever seen by him has been awful even by pulp SF standards.

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!

Re:IP

[Eric Giguere]

If the Asimov estate sued, he'd just have to point them to the issue of Asimov's where Isaac himself stated that you can't copyright titles. Now, an argument could be made for trademarking titles in certain circumstances, but in general a title doesn't qualify for protection.

References:

• Copyright protection not available for names, titles, or short phrases
• Protection of literary titles

Eric
Vioxx recall reduces spam (humor)
JavaScript is not Java! (serious)

Reply to sig

[Anonymous Coward]

>"You can meet many former 'homosexuals'; you
>will never meet a former 'African-American'." - >Legislating Morality

I hope not. Of course, I'm old enough that Michael Jackson probably wouldn't be interested.

Re:Reply to sig

[allgood2]

Obviously, let's just overlook a century or more of blacks passing as white; ignore even the current political ramifications of that history and how it helped foster and mutate internalized racism augmented and supported by class-ism in the African-American community (light skin blacks thinking they're better than dark skin blacks, and middle-class blacks thinking they're better than lower class blacks); all so we can make the non-winning, unintelligent, homophobic argument that "if you can hide, you don't deserve protection".

If meant tons of former heterosexuals. Does that mean your willing to give up your protected status??

This is like the time...

[PsiPsiStar]

That I wrote the names of famous baseball players on paper and sold it to kids telling them that it was a genuine autograph.

Okay, I didn't really do that.
Maybe I should have.

Mr Doctorow?

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone called SCO just called. They said something about patenting your story and then threatening to sue everyone who reads Isaac Asimov, I don't know.

Neat Idea - shame about the writing

[samael]

I do like the way he's dissected some of the ideas in Asimov.

It's just a shame his writing style is stilted and ungainly.

I've liked bit of his writing, and a fair few of his ideas, but a great writer he aint.

Re:Neat Idea - shame about the writing

[FreeUser]

I do like the way he's dissected some of the ideas in Asimov.

It's just a shame his writing style is stilted and ungainly.

I've liked bit of his writing, and a fair few of his ideas, but a great writer he aint.

Give him time. He may not be a [insert your favorite author here], but writing styles do tend to improve with time and practice. Try reading some of the early drafts of famouse authors' early works, and you get the idea.

Re:Neat Idea - shame about the writing

[blastedtokyo]

I'm not so convinced. I saw him speak a couple of times. He always spoke like he was reading (and not reading well). It was quite disturbing actually to hear someone so praised come across sounding so much like a kid in junior high who couldn't lift their eyes off of the page to look at their audience.

The saddest part is just how angry this guy always comes across. I really hope it's just an act, otherwise he'll probably have a heart attack by the time he's 40.

Re:Neat Idea - shame about the writing

[Anonymous Coward]

"It was quite disturbing actually to hear someone so praised come across sounding so much like a kid in junior high who couldn't lift their eyes off of the page to look at their audience."

So he reading of his script sounds just like his writing of said scripts then?

Reading through his works on Boing seem to be the same -- his quick postings always seem to be soapbox statements, generally referring to himself in the third person. Its fucking annoying.

I bought one of his books off of Amazon last year when they were blowing it out very cheap and honestly, I couldn't get past the first 30 pages. It read like a high school assignment. He will get better, but the very first thing he needs to do is to hire a great editor -- and not someone that just rubber stamps and spell checks the document before it hits the press (albiet, the anonymous coward writting this post would have been most greatful if this were to have seen if this were the case, capeesh?)

BTW -- I love Boing and I check it before I actually check into /. Some of what he posts is actually interesting. A lot isn't.

Re:Neat Idea - shame about the writing

[FreeUser]

I'm not so convinced. I saw him speak a couple of times. He always spoke like he was reading (and not reading well). It was quite disturbing actually to hear someone so praised come across sounding so much like a kid in junior high who couldn't lift their eyes off of the page to look at their audience.

The saddest part is just how angry this guy always comes across. I really hope it's just an act, otherwise he'll probably have a heart attack by the time he's 40.

You could be right. I don't know anything about this particular guy, nor have I bothered to read any of his stuff yet (I'm strapped for time as it is, despite posting here to slashdot). I was speaking more generally, from my own experience (my writing is improving with practice, and while it isn't where I'd like it to to be, it's a lot better than when I first started) and from my observations of others (I've read early drafts and writings by some of my favorite authors, and compared them to their later stuff, and the early stuff is rough by comparison).

As for the anger thing ... most of us do chill out in time. Maybe not completely, but even stuff which still gets me angry today (monopoly entitlements stifling our culture, creativity, and inventiveness vis-a-vis copyright and patent law, for example, or the religious right's usurpation of our once-democratic government) doesn't leave me enraged the way it would have when I was sixteen. No one can maintain rage on a 24/7 basis, and time tends to mellow one's perspective.

Re:Neat Idea - shame about the writing

[trufflemage]

I too enjoyed Doctorow's interplay with the Three Laws. To me the story is self-conscious SF, written with and intended for an audience with a common working knowledge of Asimov (and Orwell's 1984). Not everyone has such a knowledge base, but SF fans certainly do. One obvious conclusion: Asimov has been hugely influential.

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:

The car shuddered as it wove in and out of the lanes on the Don Valley Parkway, barreling for the Gardiner Express Way, using his copper's override to make the thick, slow traffic part ahead of him. He wasn't supposed to do this, but as between a minor infraction and pissing off the man from Social Harmony, he knew which one he'd pick.

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.

Re:cool robot scultpture

[taaloos]

From BoingBoing:

Today, Infinite Matrix magazine published the latest of these, a story called "I, Robot," which describes the police state that would have to obtain if you were going to have a world where there was only one kind of robot allowed and only one company was allowed to make it.

Re:IP

[AmoHongos]

Except that Eando Binder wasn't just one guy, but the pen name for Earl and Otto Binder.

The reason for the I, Robot title

[Anonymous Coward]

From his interview at Locus magazine:
http://www.locusmag.com/2005/Issues/01Doctorow.htm l

"I gave up short story writing for a while when I started writing novels (which I think every writer does), but I've started doing it again. What spurred me to it was Bradbury going crazy about Fahrenheit 9/11, saying Michael Moore was a crook for having stolen his title. For a champion of free expression, in the original Fahrenheit 451, to assert that the person who comes up with the meme has the right to control the condition as to who can riff on that meme is not just ironic, it's ludicrous! So I started writing a whole batch of new stories that had the same titles as famous science fiction. I've finished an 'Anda's Game' and an 'I, Robot' and my next one might be a 'Jeffty Is Five'. Ellison's original 'Jeffty' is an anti-technological story -- Harlan's an antitechnological guy. He told us at Clarion that we should get offline and stop screwing around (the best advice I ever ignored). I'm just going to play with that for a while and see how it goes. Let a thousand 'Nightfall's bloom!"

Re:IP

[Isao]

But Otto suffered from multiple personalities. One of whom, Emily, thought she was a Czech farmer.

Howard Waldrop Non-Fiction

[Nova Express]

Actually, Howard's latest column has been up a while (though there were several months when Eileen didn't update the web page).

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.

Re:IP

[Vinnie_333]

Except, that the Czech farmer she thought she was, always dreamed of being a butcher.

Titles are not easily protectable

[saddino]

For those who might be interested:

Names titles and short literary phrases are not protected by copyright. Single literary titles are also not necessarily protected by trademark.

However, as with most law, there are cases where a title can be protected (unfair competition, trademark common law if the title has acquired secondary meaning).

The rash of teen movies that are simply titled by appropriating the name of a popular song should be evidence of this enough. ;-)

Proud tradition

[Anonymous Coward]

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 [sic] assumptions underpinning some of sf's classic narratives."

And of course Asimov's title was, in turn,
a riff on Robert Graves' I, Claudius.

But that case is quite different from both Doctorow's i, robot and Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, inasmuch as Asimov's I, Robot is a quite brilliant work of art in its own right.

What's the news?

[iJames]

Look, I'm a science fiction writer. I'm a science fiction fan. I like to read the stuff. But why is this news on Slashdot? When Cory was the first to release a novel in print under Creative Commons, that was worthy news. That he's got yet another short story out is not.

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?

To clear up some possible confusion.

[Celestial Avenger]

The original title for the book was to be "Mind and Iron." Martin Greenberg, however, rejected that title and suggested the book be called "I, Robot." Asimov cringed at this idea because in 1938 Eando Binder wrote a short story called "I, Robot," and felt that he was stealing from another author. Mr. Greenberg "colorfully" dismissed this ill placed loyalty and the title was changed. Some years later there was a televison play of Binder's robot story and several fans wrote Asimov about some joker who stole his title. Asimov, being a man of honor, wrote back to each of them explaining the situation. Postage was a lot cheaper back then.

I, Robot