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Cory Doctorow asked to present a panel at Penguicon about "The Hidden Totalitarian Assumptions of I, Robot." I've been curious ever since he told me this.
Now it turns out he's published a new story about it on the Infinite Matrix website titled I, Robot. After the story he writes, "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."
It's an excellent story but I still don't get the point. The money quote is probably this from a Eurasian missionary/secret agent to a Canadian cop: "You live in a country where it is illegal to express certain mathematics in software, where state apparatchiks regulate all innovation, where inconvenient science is criminalized, where whole avenues of experimentation and research are shut down in the service of a half-baked superstition about the moral qualities of your three laws, and you call my home corrupt?" But as far as I can tell, some characters decided to be totalitarian dictators, and other characters in their society allowed them to be, for reasons which I can only dimly connect to the three laws or to Asimov's book, probably because it's been years since I read it. (The movie, which was a script called Hard Wired until they slapped the I, Robot name on it for no good reason, doesn't count.) Why don't the Eurasian robots, who are not "3 Laws Safe," run amok and take over the world? The story does not say. In asking that question, am I making one of the totalitarian assumptions of I, Robot?
A few months ago I bought it the e-book from Fictionwise.com, but from this LJ entry you might recall how Digital Rights Management screwed me out of my property. I don't know if I'd call that totalitarian though.
Now it turns out he's published a new story about it on the Infinite Matrix website titled I, Robot. After the story he writes, "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."
It's an excellent story but I still don't get the point. The money quote is probably this from a Eurasian missionary/secret agent to a Canadian cop: "You live in a country where it is illegal to express certain mathematics in software, where state apparatchiks regulate all innovation, where inconvenient science is criminalized, where whole avenues of experimentation and research are shut down in the service of a half-baked superstition about the moral qualities of your three laws, and you call my home corrupt?" But as far as I can tell, some characters decided to be totalitarian dictators, and other characters in their society allowed them to be, for reasons which I can only dimly connect to the three laws or to Asimov's book, probably because it's been years since I read it. (The movie, which was a script called Hard Wired until they slapped the I, Robot name on it for no good reason, doesn't count.) Why don't the Eurasian robots, who are not "3 Laws Safe," run amok and take over the world? The story does not say. In asking that question, am I making one of the totalitarian assumptions of I, Robot?
A few months ago I bought it the e-book from Fictionwise.com, but from this LJ entry you might recall how Digital Rights Management screwed me out of my property. I don't know if I'd call that totalitarian though.
