"None for us."
"Where are you?"
She crawled towards him over the bodies of the dead. His blood spurted over her hands.
"Quicker," he gasped, "I am dying—but we touch, we talk, not through the Machine."
He kissed her.
"We have come back to our own. We die, but we have recaptured life, as it was in Wessex, when Ælfrid overthrew the Danes. We know what they know outside, they who dwelt in the cloud that is the colour of a pearl."
"But Kuno, is it true? Are there still men on the surface of the earth? Is this—this tunnel, this poisoned darkness—really not the end?"
He replied:
"I have seen them, spoken to them, loved them. They are hiding in the mist and the ferns until our civilization stops. To-day they are the Homeless—tomorrow—"
"Oh, tomorrow—some fool will start the Machine again, tomorrow."
"Never," said Kuno, "never. Humanity has learnt its lesson."
As he spoke, the whole city was broken like a honeycomb. An air-ship had sailed in through the vomitory into a ruined wharf. It crashed downwards, exploding as it went, rending gallery after gallery with its wings of steel. For a moment they saw the nations of the dead, and, before they joined them, scraps of the untainted sky.
(1909)
SECTION FIVE
All Hail The New Flesh
Being "robotic" is no-one’s idea of a good time. Predictable, passive, unemotional – no-one wants to be "robotic".
But… being a robot? That’s a very different proposition! Evolution has made us clever hunters who enjoy thinking our way into the heads and under the hides of other species. Robots intrigue us as wolves and deer intrigued our ancestors. We want to know our neighbours inside out. They may have something valuable to teach us. In any event we need to know how they live, in case we ever need to kill them.
This section of We Robots invites you on shamanic journeys into the lives and bodies of all manner of mechanical beings. Sometimes – for example, in Nalo Hopkinson’s "Ganger (Ball Lightning)" (2000) – we find mechanical beings are making shamanic forays into our own realm.
Underpinning all these stories is the proposition that a life in metal has qualities of its own which it will be worth our while to explore. What would it be like, to be a robot? To be a human soul wrapped in non-human flesh – or (as in the stories by Joanna Kavenna, M. John Harrison and William Gibson) in no flesh at all?
The machine bodies we have so far made are so much simpler than our own bodies, they hardly bear comparison. The radical simplicity of machine being, compared to biological being, is its own source of horror in M. H. Hasta’s "The Talking Brain" (1926). Having to severely restrict their physiology drives the posthuman heroes of Cordwainer Smith’s "Scanners Live in Vain" to something very like madness.
But what if Spartan simplicity weren’t agonising? What if it was refreshing – even fascinating? Quite what Sam must be going through inside his new metal flesh is a secret saved for the very last line of Damon Knight’s "Masks" (1968), while Deirdre, the once-human heroine of C. L. Moore’s "No Woman Born" (1944) grows ever more strange, even as she rises in our estimation. She’s off on an adventure, leaving her humanity behind but not her agency, embracing a life that’s no less rich and nuanced for being less and less to do with blood and bone.
The heroes and heroines of general fiction dabble with a dangerous world but in the end, they rarely give themselves to it. To see them returning home, wounded and wiser for it, is one of the chief satisfactions of that literature. Literary realists go even further when they explore the fate of those who can’t even bring themselves to let go of the side of the swimming pool.
Science fiction, on the other hand, is very good – for some tastes, far too good – at what the psychoanalysts call "manic flight". Its protagonists are constantly striking out for the deep end of the pool and staying there, whooping and gamboling in transformed fashion in waves that have surely already killed them.
It’s a rare science fiction writer who calls time on the party, and brings their protagonist back to shore. With "Musée de l’Âme Seule" (2014) E. Lily Yu proves herself one of the braver writers in this anthology, for looking physical loss straight in the face. This is a story of victory and renewal, but one that’s strictly for grown-ups. Losing parts of your physical self is a psychological and physical assault for which no amount of bionic wizardry can compensate. To suppose otherwise is fashionable, but contemptible.
Living as a robot seems to promise a solution to life’s great shortcomings: being vulnerable, and having to die. When something breaks, just plug in a spare! But lives ported over to metal, carbon fibre, synthetic flesh or some digital cloud, also present us with what may be a one-way trip to a sort of half-life.
Worse still, we may never know, reduced as we have been, that this life of ours is only a half-life. We may lack the very equipment necessary for us to understand and appreciate what it is we have lost. As H. G. Wells wrote, "Plainly the human animal, of which I am a sample, is not constituted to anticipate anything at all. It is constituted to accept the state of affairs about it, as a stable state of affairs, whatever its intelligence may tell it to the contrary."
Whenever we think about becoming robots, we find ourselves re-evaluating our original, human condition. Bodies are frail and cyborgisation is exciting, but if the stories that follow teach us anything, it is that it is still not too shabby of us to stay human, if we can.
THE HAMMER
Carl Sandburg
The poet, writer, and folk musician Carl August Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Illinois in 1878, the son of Swedish immigrants. After college he roamed the country, supporting himself by selling Underwood and Underwood stereoscopic pictures and giving an occasional lecture on Whitman, George Bernard Shaw, or Abraham Lincoln. When he ran out of money, he hopped a freight train. He eventually settled into journalism, winning plaudits at the Chicago Daily News. He worked as a correspondent during both world wars, and in between covered politics, crime, business, and civil rights. He won three Pulitzer Prizes: two for his poetry and one for an insanely long biography of Abraham Lincoln. (Abraham Lincoln: The War Years alone exceeds in length the collected writings of Shakespeare by some 150,000 words.) Sandburg’s poetry split opinion: the journalist Karl Detzer wrote that "admirers proclaimed him a latter-day Walt Whitman; objectors cried that their six-year-old daughters could write better poetry." H. L. Mencken called Sandburg "a true original, his own man."
GOOD TO GO
Liz Jensen
Liz Jensen (born 1959) lives in Copenhagen with the Danish writer Carsten Jensen. She first worked as a radio journalist in Taiwan, and then for the BBC as a TV and radio producer. She wrote her first novel, the black comedy Egg Dancing (1995), in Paris, where she worked as a sculptor. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2005. Her novel The Ninth Life of Louis Drax was adapted for film in 2016. Her comedy and satire have darkened perceptibly over the years. The Rapture (2009) and The Uninvited (2012) are decidedly unsettling ecological thrillers.