I, Robot: To Preserve by Mickey Zucker Reichert

Back in February, fantasy author Mickey Zucker Reichert published the third book in her I, Robot prequel trilogy, I, Robot: To Preserve. The books turned out to be not so much a prequel as a reboot of Isaac Asimov's positronic robot series. As I noted in my review of the first book, I, Robot: To Protect, Reichert shifted the time frame of Asimov's original stories by 27 years, so that Susan Calvin's birth takes place in 2009 rather than 1982. This allows Reichert to set her trilogy in our own future rather than in an alternate present, since under Asimov's original chronology To Protect would have taken place in the year 2008.

I liked To Protect. Despite the changes Reichert made to Susan Calvin and to the background of the positronic robot series, she maintained Asimov's focus on the interplay between the robots who obey the Three Laws of Robotics and a human race that has no built-in laws of behavior. Unfortunately, in her second book, I, Robot: To Obey, Reichert shifted the focus away from the Three Laws so that she could write a violent, action-packed thriller centered on a ridiculous MacGuffin. The final book, sadly, continues the tradition established in the second book. Reichert presents us with another violent, action-packed thriller with a seriously unlikely plot.

In the second book, Susan Calvin, second-year psychiatry resident at a Manhattan teaching hospital, suddenly found herself caught between two equally murderous groups: an anti-robot movement called the Society for Humanity, and a hit squad from a military intelligence agency code-named Cadmium. Both groups believed, for no good reason, that Calvin knew a cheat code that would switch off the Three Laws, allowing positronic robots to be turned into unstoppable killing machines. The Society wanted to kill Calvin to keep the cheat code secret, and Cadmium wanted to kidnap Calvin and torture the cheat code out of her so they could weaponize their own positronic robots. The novel ended with a New York cop named Jake Carson thwarting both groups and saving Calvin's life.

As the third novel opens, Cadmium has come up with a new plan to gain the cheat code from Calvin, a plan that is both murderous and needlessly convoluted. Step one of the plan is to murder a brilliant medical researcher that Calvin has worked with, and make it look like the Society was responsible. In order to give an apparent motive for the Society to commit the murder, Cadmium made it look like the Society made it look like the murder was committed by Nate, an android from US Robots who works at the hospital. Unfortunately for Cadmium, the police are too obtuse to notice the clues they planted that point to the Society as the real culprits. Instead, the police arrest Nate for the murder, then arrest Nate's creator, Dr. Lawrence Robertson, the president of US Robots.

Step two of Cadmium's plan is to stage an attack on Calvin while she's walking through Central Park, and have one of their agents save her from the supposed attackers. Calvin believes that the attackers are working for the Society, and that her savior is a recently-discharged Marine named Pal Buffoni. Buffoni is a handsome devil, and it isn't long before he is able to seduce Calvin, winning both her trust and her love. The staged attack occurs shortly after Calvin has stolen Nate from the police, and Buffoni helps Calvin hide Nate in her apartment. Carson, the cop who saved Calvin a year earlier, then shows up at her door looking for Nate, since he has just been assigned to recover the android. Calvin and Buffoni disguise Nate and send Carson on his way.

Step three of Cadmium's plan is to stage another attack on Calvin, this time making sure to kill her closest friend. Buffoni then pressures her to try to figure out what the cheat code is, even though she has assured him that there is no cheat code. Carson reappears, and is able to surreptitiously inform Calvin that Cadmium has been behind all the attacks. Calvin pretends to work out the cheat code while luring Buffoni into a trap, and Carson is again able to save her.

Logically, there was no reason for Cadmium to commit the first murder and try to frame the Society for it. The first staged attack on Calvin in Central Park accomplished everything they wanted to accomplish: convince her that her life was threatened, and make her reliant on Buffoni for her protection. For that matter, there was no logical reason for the second staged attack. Calvin was already in love with Buffoni, and ready to follow his lead. The murder and the second attack occur because Reichert needs them, not because Cadmium needs them. The murder leads Calvin to quit her job at the hospital and go to work for US Robots, which is where Reichert needs her to be at the end of the novel to set up the stories in Asimov's original I, Robot. The second attack allows Carson to figure out that Cadmium is behind everything, so he can save Calvin again.

To sum up: Reichert's prequel trilogy made a very promising start, then suddenly veered into poorly-plotted mayhem. Was it her plan all along to make the prequels such a jarring departure from Asimov's original, or did she run out of inspiration after the first book and settle for writing a couple of violent thrillers? The whole cheat code MacGuffin derailed the trilogy to no purpose, since the hypothetical existence of a cheat code is never mentioned in any chronologically subsequent story.

I suppose if you squint hard enough, the prequels sort of look like the Elijah Baley novels (except much more violent and poorly plotted), so maybe that was what Reichert was aiming at. If so, I can't help wishing that she had tried to imitate the cerebral tone of Asimov's robot novels (and of the original I, Robot collection, for that matter), and not just the murder-takes-place-and-protagonist-solves-it plot structure.

I Robot: To Obey by Mickey Zucker Reichert

Six years ago, Susan Allison, editorial director of the Penguin Group imprint Berkeley Books, announced that the estate of Isaac Asimov had authorized Berkeley to publish a prequel trilogy to Asimov's classic I, Robot story collection by fantasy author Mickey Zucker Reichert. The announcement stated that the first book in the trilogy, tentatively titled Robots and Chaos, was due to be delivered by Reichert late the following year. The book was finally published by Penguin's ROC imprint in November 2011 under the title I, Robot: To Protect. I posted a review of the book on February 13, 2012, three months after publication, because it took me that long to find the time to read it and write a review.

I liked To Protect. Despite numerous changes to the background established by Asimov in the original collection, Reichert stayed true to Asimov's theme of how the Three Laws of Robotics would operate in a world where robots were constrained by a built-in set of moral precepts, but their human creators were not. Reichert introduced Susan Calvin, a first-year psychiatry resident at a teaching hospital in Manhattan, and the daughter of noted roboticist John Calvin. The story followed Calvin as she dealt with various medical cases; befriended Nate, an android built by her father; and uncovered a terrorist plot by a group of anti-robot fanatics.

The second book in the trilogy, I, Robot: To Obey, was published by ROC in September 2013. It is a mark of how hectic my life has become that I am only now getting around to writing a review of it. Sadly, it wasn't worth the wait. Reichert more or less abandons her examination of the Three Laws in To Obey in order to write a MacGuffin-driven thriller. And the worst thing is, it's a completely senseless MacGuffin. In order to demonstrate how senseless, I'm going to have to spoil the novel's plot. It's okay, though, because the plot deserves spoiling.

When Susan Calvin comes home one day to discover that her father has been killed and decapitated (not necessarily in that order), she is plunged into a harrowing ordeal in which no less than two ruthless groups are determined to kidnap and/or kill her: the first is the group of anti-robot terrorists from the first novel, and the second is some sort of hit team from the Department of Defense. Both groups believe for no good reason that her parents designed an off switch for the Three Laws of Robotics. Anyone who knows a particular code phrase can recite it, and any positronic robots within hearing will have their Three Laws switched off, allowing them to be used as merciless killing machines. Even though Susan's parents always insisted that the Three Laws were intrinsic to the positronic brain, the terrorists and the DoD hit team both believe that they were lying, that John Calvin knew the switch-off code, and that he taught it to Susan. After her father's death, Susan discovers that he left her a secret message encoded in a pair of smartphone-type devices: apparently there was a switch-off code after all, and Susan has to spend most of the novel risking her life in order to retrieve it. When she does retrieve the smartphones and decode the secret message, it says . . .

 . . . that there is no switch-off code, and never has been.

So . . . if there never was any switch-off code, then why the hell did John Calvin bother with his stupid fucking secret message? It was the existence of the secret message that convinced everybody that there really was a switch-off code, and Susan Calvin nearly died SEVERAL TIMES trying to retrieve it. It was the secret message that drove the novel's plot, and there was no need for a secret message BECAUSE THERE WAS NO SWITCH-OFF CODE.

There's some other stuff going on in To Obey, professional trouble and romantic trouble for Susan Calvin, but it all pales in comparison to the gratuitous MacGuffin plot. I'm frankly wary about what Reichert is going to do in the last book of the trilogy, which will be called I, Robot: To Preserve, and which is due out next February. Maybe she'll go back to focusing on the Three Laws. Maybe.

I, Robot: To Protect by Mickey Zucker Reichert

November 2011 saw the publication of I, Robot: To Protect by Mickey Zucker Reichert, the first addition to Isaac Asimov's positronic robot series since the publication of Alexander C. Irvine's Have Robot, Will Travel in 2004, and also the first novel in a projected trilogy. When the books were first announced in 2009, they were described as a prequel trilogy to Asimov's original story collection, I, Robot, centered on the early life of Dr. Susan Calvin, the collection's central character.

Having just finished I, Robot: To Protect, I think it would be more accurate to describe this as a reboot rather than a prequel. In the introduction to I, Robot, Asimov gave some of the details of Susan Calvin's curriculum vitae: born in 1982, received a bachelor's degree from Columbia in 2003 and began graduate work in cybernetics, received a Ph.D. in 2008 and joined United States Robots as a robopsychologist. In other words, Calvin was a roboticist who became interested in robotic psychology.

In Reichert's novel, Calvin is a medical doctor specializing in psychiatry who becomes involved in a project to use nanorobots for psychiatric diagnoses, and who also befriends Nate, an android with a positronic brain. In other words, Calvin is a psychiatrist who becomes interested in robotic psychology. Changing Calvin from an engineer to a medical doctor allows Reichert to make use of her own background as a medical doctor, giving the novel a hefty helping of verisimilitude.

As I've noted elsewhere, Reichert also pushes Calvin's date of birth forward from 1982 to 2009. She pretty much had to do this, because if she had stuck to Asimov's original timeline, she would have wound up writing an alternate history novel set in an alternate 2008, rather than a science fiction novel set in the future.

Despite the updating of the story milieu and the change in Calvin's profession, Reichert maintains thematic continuity with Asimov's original positronic robot stories by focusing on the Three Laws of Robotics. The Three Laws were arguably Asimov's major contribution to science fiction. (He once predicted that after everything else he did was forgotten, the Three Laws would still be remembered.) By giving his robots a built-in moral sense, Asimov helped to illustrate the sources of human morality, because once you conceive of a being with an innate set of moral standards, it highlights the way that humans acquire (and, sadly, fail to acquire) their own moral standards.

Reichert is a veteran fantasy writer who has been publishing professionally for over twenty years, so she knows how to write readable prose, and proves it here. More than that, though, along with the story's plot involving doctors, mental patients, and terrorists, Reichert looks at how people react when they find themselves sharing their world with innately moral beings: beings who can think and feel as well as humans do, but who are primarily forbidden to injure humans or allow humans to be injured; who are secondarily required to obey humans; and who are only tertiarily required to protect themselves.

The second volume in the trilogy will presumably be called I, Robot: To Obey. I can hardly wait.

Mooning over "The Moon Woman"

Some odd things can happen when you get non-genre writers writing science fiction, such as C. S. Lewis' Perelandra trilogy, Doris Lessing's Canopus in Argos pentology and Margaret Attwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Not being familiar with the genre's established tropes, non-genre writers can sometimes experience a feeling of irrational exuberance when they come into contact with them. They also fail to understand the underlying rationale behind science fiction, which is the effort to remain within the realm of the scientifically plausible. While this rationale is sometimes honored more in the breach than the observance, even genre writers who flout scientific accuracy at least do so deliberately, in open defiance of the genre's most basic convention. Non-genre writers, on the other hand, tend to disregard scientific accuracy out of ignorance, both of the genre convention of scientific plausibility and of scientific knowledge itself.

It can be argued that Minna Irving's "The Moon Woman", from the November 1929 issue of Amazing Stories, doesn't quite fall into the category of the genre story from a non-genre writer. After all, Amazing Stories had only been on the newsstands for two and a half years when the story appeared, so it might be said that there was yet no such thing as a science fiction genre. However, this argument ignores the genre's long antecedents. Hugo Gernsback may have given the genre a name (actually, two names), but the importance of scientific plausibility had already been established in the 19th century by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells.

A corollary to the importance of scientific plausibility is that whatever strange society you come up with has to have its own internal plausibility -- it has to work on its own terms. Thus, in a science fiction story, you are never, ever, ever supposed to find out at the end that it was all just a dream.

So, it turns out that Professor Hicks didn't decide to spend a year in suspended animation lying in a specially-built tomb, and wasn't betrayed by his debt-ridden colleague Dr. Blinkman. Instead, he spent less than a day in suspended animation, lying in his study while Blinkman kept watch over him. There was no tomb, and of course no Rosaria. It's even possible that Hicks got his numbers mixed up, as people do in dreams, and that the story does not take place in the year 2814, but in the late 1920s, as the passing reference to a trans-Atlantic steamship implies.

Although it fails as science fiction, "The Moon Woman" does contain two interesting bits of etymology: "loan shark" and "bozo" are both older than I thought they were. According to Wikipedia, "loan shark" goes back to the late 19th century, though the term didn't have the association with organized crime that it does now. And according to Merriam-Webster Online, bozo dates back at least to 1916, decades before the debut of Bozo the Clown.

A deep look at "Undersea Prisoner"

February 1940 was a big month for Harl Vincent; he had stories appearing in no less than two science fiction magazines. There was "Undersea Prisoner" in the venerable Amazing Stories, and "High-Frequency War" in the almost-as-venerable Astounding Science-Fiction. I've speculated elsewhere that "Master Control" from the April 1940 Astonishing Stories was written before "High-Frequency War", and that Astounding editor John Campbell rejected the former story while suggesting one of the characters from it be made the protagonist of the latter story. I now speculate that "Undersea Prisoner" was also written before "High-Frequency War", on the basis that any story was likely to be submitted to the more prestigious Astounding first, and only after being rejected there would be submitted to Amazing. I speculate further that "Master Control" would also have been rejected by Amazing before being submitted to the upstart Astonishing, and therefore was written before "Undersea Prisoner", even though it appeared two months later.

Like Amelia Reynolds Long before him, Harl Vincent looked to the Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard for inspiration. By the late 1930s, though, Professor Piccard had moved on from stratospheric ballooning and was investigating undersea exploration. At the time Vincent wrote "Undersea Prisoner", Professor Piccard had designed a small steel gondola that could withstand great external pressure, and an undersea version of a balloon filled with a lighter-than-water liquid to provide buoyancy. As it happened, Piccard's research was interrupted when the Germans invaded and occupied Belgium in 1940, and it was not until after World War II that he was able to complete work on an undersea balloon filled with gasoline. In the story, it is Professor Francis Augustine who makes Piccard's undersea balloon a reality, some seventy years after the original proposal -- which would place the story around the year 2007.

The early 21st century Vincent imagines is remarkably similar to the early 21st century we're living in now. He describes in vivid detail the media circus that greets Burke and Augustine when they emerge from their gondola onto the deck of the Scipio. There are hordes of television cameras iconoscopic eyes pointed at the two men and helicopters gyrocopters circling in the air above the ship. He even has the captain of the Scipio receive a cell phone televis call from Al Smith Brown, the Governor of New York.

A couple points of interest: Zybyski's crime of kidnaping and murdering a small child is doubtless a reference to the Lindbergh kidnaping and the arrest and trial of Bruno Hauptmann, which occurred earlier in the decade and would still have been fresh in Vincent's mind. I note without comment that Vincent made his Hauptmann-analog a Pole rather than a German. The ship that rescues Burke and Augustine, the Scipio, would have been named after one of the Scipios of the late Roman Republic, either Scipio Africanus the elder, who defeated Hannibal of Carthage at the Battle of Zama, or his grandson-by-adoption Scipio Africanus the younger, who destroyed Carthage sixty years later. The choice of name doesn't seem to have any deeper meaning.

Editorial note: Raymond Palmer, the editor of Amazing Stories, didn't like long sections of scientific exposition in his stories. When he encountered one, he would either eliminate it altogether, or condense it and turn it into a footnote. Isaac Asimov pointed out where Palmer had done this to his story "The Weapon Too Dreadful to Use" in The Early Asimov. Palmer did the same with "Undersea Prisoner", reducing two of that story's passages to footnotes. In reproducing the story in this blog, I have taken the liberty of un-footnoting the two passages and re-inserting them into the main body of the text. I make no apologies.

Smartening up "The Morons"

John W. Campbell, Jr., who became editor of Astounding Stories magazine in 1937 and remained its editor through thirty-four years and two name changes, displayed a number of valuable character traits, but a skeptical mind was not one of them. He was a prominent exemplar of what is now known as truthiness, the art of believing something because you want it to be true. In addition to acting as midwife to the psychological theory/religion/con game known as $cientology, Campbell was almost single-handedly responsible for psychic powers becoming a common trope in science fiction, due to his insistence on having his own beliefs reflected in Astounding's stories. The way he did this was to suggest story ideas to his stable of writers (Isaac Asimov's story "Nightfall" is a notable example of the process). Naturally, the story ideas he suggested reflected his own beliefs in various bits of pseudoscience.

At present we have no way of knowing the genesis of Harl Vincent's story "The Morons", which appeared in the June 1939 issue of Astounding, about a year and a half after Campbell first took over as editor, and about a year after Vincent resumed writing after a three-year hiatus. However, given the prominent role played by telepathy in the story, it is reasonable to suspect that, like "Nightfall", "The Morons" was the result of a story idea suggested to Vincent by Campbell. One clue that the story idea originated with Campbell rather than Vincent is that the Venusian natives in the story are not simply human beings, as was the case with earlier stories by Vincent such as "The War of the Planets" and "Venus Liberated", and as would be the case with later stories such as "Neutral Vessel". Instead, the Venusians are quite clearly a different species, rather apelike in appearance, and thus incapable of crossbreeding with humans (as Grayson points out in the story).

The planet Venus we see in the story is the standard version of Venus common to science fiction stories in the period before 1962: a wet, swampy, primitive planet populated by Mesozoic-era monsters and primitive savages. This view of the planet dated back to the 19th century, when the French mathematician Pierre Simon Laplace suggested that the Solar System began as a cloud of dust and gas which gradually contracted, throwing off a series of rings as a result of centrifugal force which coalesced to form the planets.

One of the implications of Laplace's suggestion was that the closer to the sun a planet was, the younger it was. Percival Lowell seized on this idea to suggest that Mars, being older than Earth, was suffering the loss of its original water supply, and that the Martian canals were the result of an engineering project by a native Martian race to bring meltwater from the polar ice caps to the rest of the planet. By the same reasoning, Venus ought to be younger than Earth, and thus ought to be in an earlier stage of its existence, one featuring either cavemen, or dinosaurs, or both. Since Venus' perpetual cloud cover prevented scientists from finding out what conditions were actually like there, writers such as Vincent could be (and were) as creative as they liked.

Mind you, Laplace's nebular hypothesis (as it was known) had fallen out of favor by the time the science fiction magazines appeared, replaced by the near-collision hypothesis of Thomas Chamberlin, which held that the material that formed the planets had been drawn out of the sun by a near-collision with another star. Since the near-collision hypothesis implied that all the planets were the same age, the logic behind the primitive Venus trope was no longer valid, but inertia ensured that the trope continued to be used anyway. The primitive, swampy Venus was finally finished off for good in 1962, when the Mariner II probe discovered that Venus was literally hotter than an oven.

Amping Up "Power"

Reading science fiction stories written during the Great Depression in the midst of the Great Recession is an exercise in retroactive deja vu. It's particularly startling to read a middle-of-the-road mechanical engineer like Harl Vincent declaim about the oppression of the capitalist system and become dreamy at the thought of a dictator seizing power in the United States and instituting radical reforms, as he does in "Power", a story from the January 1932 issue of Amazing Stories magazine. So it's important to place the story within its proper social context.

"Power" was probably written in the middle of the year 1931. The stock market crash of October 1929 and the start of the Great Depression were a year and a half in the past, and the economic crisis had been growing steadily worse ever since. Bank panics had grown increasingly common, unemployment had risen to 15.9 percent, and shantytowns called Hoovervilles had appeared in every city, populated by people who had lost their homes and had nowhere else to go. A government dominated by pro-business Republicans was helpless to address the situation, cutting spending in a counterproductive effort to balance the federal budget, and clinging to the gold standard.

A year earlier, Vincent had written "Gray Denim", a story in which he introduced his stratified world of a purple-clad elite ruling over gray-clad masses. In that simple and rather improbable adventure story, Karl Krassin, who has been raised to believe himself a member of the gray masses, discovers that he is the heir to the throne of the Continental Empire, a state that rules all of Europe, Asia, and Africa. In the end, he turns his back on the Empire, and returns to New York to rejoin the gray-clad workers. In stark contrast, when Scott Terris, the protagonist of "Power", has a chance to gain political power, he grabs at it with both hands and refuses to let go.

Much fiction includes an element of wish-fulfillment fantasy, and this is certainly true of science fiction. "Power", though, is an example of political wish-fulfillment. Unlike the politicians of 1931 who seemed stunned in the face of catastrophe, Scott Terris acts boldly and decisively, and completely transforms his society is less than three months. Terris' dictatorship proves immensely popular, to the point where Gail Destinn, the proponent of democracy, admits in the end that Terris' actions were necessary.

The Bastard of Yonkers has commented on the similarity between Vincent's dystopian future and the one seen in Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis. Although it is unlikely after this much time has passed that we will ever know whether, and how much, Vincent was influenced by the film, it should be noted that Mussolini's rise to power in Italy had made dictatorship a hot topic of the day. For that matter, Matt Crawford of the Power Syndicate was probably inspired as much by Samuel Insull as by any European dictator.

As it turned out, a dictatorship wasn't necessary to deal with the Great Depression after all. The whirlwind of legislation that marked the beginning of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidency in 1933 proved that representative democracy was equal to the task of facing the crisis. By the time Vincent wrote his sequel to "Power" in 1939, events had soured him on dictatorship. Set two centuries after "Power", "Master Control" told of the fall of Scott Terris' new order: wars sparked by power-hungry dictators left the world devastated, allowing the telepathic tyranny of the Central Control to take over humanity.

Confessions of an old Trekkie

I'm what's known in Star Trek fandom as a second generation fan, which means I didn't watch the original series during its network run in the 1960s, but I did start watching the reruns in the 1970s. In fact, I started out as a fan of the animated series when it started in 1973 and only then started watching reruns of the original. I've generally kept up with the series, have seen every movie, and every episode of The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine and most episodes of Voyager and Enterprise. As a result, I am well-versed in Star Trek lore, and I bear the title "Trekkie" proudly.

And I just saw the eleventh Star Trek movie today.

Like others, I was unhappy that J. J. Abrams' reboot (or whatever they're calling it) uses a time travel plot to basically erase all of Star Trek from existence. However, given that Enterprise started out with the timestream being altered by interference from the future, that ship has pretty much sailed. That's right, folks, it was actually Rick Berman and Brannon Braga who erased the original series from the timeline; Abrams was just putting in the finishing touches.

Review: Catch-22

Reasonable conservative Jon Swift is widely regarded on the internets for his series of Amazon.com book reviews -- though not by Amazon.com itself, which removed most of them from its website. It's been said that flattery is the sincerest form of imitation, so I have decided to produce a flattering set of imitation Jon Swift book reviews. I cannot post them on Amazon.com itself, since you have to actually buy something off of their website in order to be allowed to post reviews to it, but that's just as well; in all likelihood, my sincere flattery of Mr. Swift's work would result in my own reviews also being removed from the Amazon.com website. Fortunately for both Amazon.com and myself, I can further flatter Mr. Swift by imitating his solution: posting the reviews here on my blog. As my first subject for review, I have chosen the novel Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.

I have not read this book, and I was initially disappointed when I found out that it was not, as I had at first assumed, about fishing. My disappointment vanished, though, when I realized that it was actually about World War II. Mr. Heller was apparently one of the earliest writers to write about what Tom Brokaw has dubbed the Greatest Generation and its wonderful battle against fascism (which was, as Jonah Goldberg reminds us, actually an early form of liberalism). In fact, Mr. Heller himself was apparently a member of the Greatest Generation who actually served in the European Theater during World War II. Although it is extremely suspicious behavior for someone writing about a war to actually take part in it, Mr. Heller probably deserves a pass, since he lived in a time before it became firmly established that the people who cheerlead a war are at least as important and as deserving of praise as the people who fight in it. Mr. Heller's tribute to the brave officers and men who battled against Eurolibrofascism in the 1940s is as timely today as when it was first published in 1961.