For me, great science fiction is about certain concepts: space travel, aliens, the future, time travel, human evolution, alternate history, artificial intelligence, and robots. As I’ve gotten older, I crave tradition in new stories. I’ve gotten rather fussy about how these cherished fictional topics are handled. I don’t like too much innovation. I want to see evolution in these ideas, but not radical new-fangled reinventions. I don’t mind reimagining or rebooting of the concepts, but it depresses me to read stories that have lost the original intent of science fiction.

I started reading “Perfection” by Seanan McGuire and was hugely disappointed. It’s the first story in Robots Through the Ages, a new anthology edited by Robert Silverberg and Bryan Thomas Schmidt. (Currently, $1.99 for the Kindle.) I love a good robot story, and was excited to start reading this anthology, but unfortunately, “Perfection” wasn’t the kind of robot story I was anxious to read. I’m not saying “Perfection” is a bad story, but it’s not about my kind of robot, or what I would call a science fiction story. It’s told in an allegorical style that suggests the story has a message like a modern-day Aesop’s fable. It could be a little postmodern fantasy commenting on science fiction, or just a nice old-fashioned fantasy fable for the contemporary reader. (Luckily, the editors jump back to classic SF stories about robots after “Perfection.”)

Science fiction is a byproduct of modernism. Religion/mythology is the worldview before enlightenment and modernism and the territory of fantasy, not science fiction. I don’t believe science fiction belongs in the postmodern territory either. “Perfection” blends fantasy and postmodernism and appears to see perfection in a robot — although its message is probably satirized, at which point it’s really rejecting robots. Is the transformed wife and husband perfect? Or are we supposed to be horrified by what the modernistic SF world has sought?

This made me think – what are my kind of robots? Science fiction claims certain themes for the genre, and robots have always been one of its major themes. Science fiction writers haven’t portrayed robots consistently though. What we often call robots vary tremendously, from mechanical beings, to androids, replicants, cyborgs, sexbots, and synthetic humans.

More importantly, the kind of robots I like best are science fictional, and truly modernistic. I dislike fantasy and postmodern robots. Often, it’s difficult to tell what kind of philosophy a robot story is set, especially when the robots look indistinguishable from humans. Sometimes a sexbot is really a robot, and sometimes it stands in for something allegorical, metaphorical, or symbolic.

Me, I like robots to be robots. I want them to be sentient, but not slaves. I don’t like robots that pass as humans. I don’t mind robots to be somewhat humanoid in shape, but I don’t want them to be substitutes for humans. And if they’re sentient, they must be free, and not things we own. Asimov’s robots were not supposed to be sentient, and thus we owned them, and they had to do our work. I liked Simak’s robots better, but they were more like P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves. Simak’s robots were faithful servants, but were they paid? Or were they property? Asimov’s R. Daneel Olivaw was a co-worker. I want science fiction to be about robots that are independent. I expect robots to be the intelligent species that either co-exist with humans or are our descendants. Of course, sometimes that means a story like The Humanoids by Jack Williamson.

I really dislike the concept of sexbots and human brains downloaded into robot bodies that look perfectly human. We have plenty of humans, we don’t need ersatz copies.

Overall, I’ve been disappointed with how science fiction has presented robots. The stories I’ve like best were sentimental stories about robots like “Rust” by Joseph K. Kelleam.

Is Data from Star Trek a robot by your definition? Is he closer to C-3PO than Roy Batty? I don’t consider the replicants from the film Blade Runner to be robots. But I do for the androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Androids that pass perfectly for humans in appearance aren’t robots to me, but Data still acts mechanical enough to consider “him” a robot.

The first robots I remember from my earliest memories are those from the film Target Earth. They were clunky killers and supposed to be scary – they were scary when I was a little kid back in the 1950s, but now they’re laughable looking. The robots in Forbidden Planet and Lost in Space were way cool, but they had lousy hands. Data from Star Trek is probably among the best robots in science fiction, but ST’s producers and writers kept wanting to make him human. I just don’t see humanity as an ideal to model from.

My favorite robots in science fiction were stationary AI computers. Mike from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Galatea from Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers, HARLIE from When HARLIE Was One, and Webmind from the Wake, Watch, Wonder trilogy by Robert J. Sawyer.

I’m reading Robot Through the Ages and We Robots edited by Simon Ings hoping to find more science fictional robots I like. I’m surprised by how many I don’t like. Rucky Rucker had some wild robots. Lots of people love the Murderbot series, but he’s too human for me, but still fun. Lately, there’s been a lot of little stories about droids that are fun and cute.

I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot of great robots from science fiction. What were your favorites? What do you look for in a great robot?

James Wallace Harris, 10/16/23