Dr.
Guilds
Film
Studies
4
February2011
Of ‘Bots and Bowmen
Here is a short note to remind us to keep looking
for the patterns, because, it's all connected.
I was recently watching my favorite science fiction
television series, Dollhouse (the
imminent demise of which merely illustrates the principle that by the logic of
television and its need to appeal to the masses, bad writing tends to drive out
the good), where a character noted that "Rossum," the name of the
corporation that runs the Dollhouses, comes from "an old play."
Of course! I said, only then remembering R.U.R.:
Rossum's Universal Robots, the play (published 1920, performed 1921) by
Karel Čapek, the work that gave us the word "robot."
The "robots" of "R.U.R.,"
however, were not mechanical; rather, they were artificially manufactured
humans used as slaves (the word "robot" comes from the Slavic robota,
meaning "work"). They thus resemble the dolls in the Dollhouse
more than they do traditional robots.
Anytime I think of Čapek's work, I also remember
another writer: Isaac Asimov. Just as Čapek gave us the word
"robot" in a work performed in 1921, it was in 1942 that Asimov
coined the word "robotics" in the short story “Runaround,” the story
that also introduced his famous "Three Laws of Robotics."
Those three laws embodied Asimov's simple philosophy
that robots are tools, and like any good tools, would be made with the proper
safety measures built-in. Asimov's stories were so influential that they
essentially ended the "rogue robot" trope that had dominated
tales of artificial men previously (case in point, Čapek's robots) and gave us
the vision much more common today of robot-as-helper.
The ultimate tribute to Asimov's influence came in
1987, when the Android Lt. Commander Data in the new Star Trek series, Star Trek: the Next Generation was given
a "positronic brain." All Asimov's robots had such brains (he
said he came up with the idea because invoking the newly discovered positron
made the technology sound exotic), and Data's positronic brain was a
tip-of-the-hat to one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.
Given all this, I was very pleased when I found
another allusion to one of science fiction's grandmasters hidden in the last of
the Star Trek series, Enterprise.
For if any one man deserves to stand alongside Asimov in his contribution to
science fiction, it is Arthur C.Clarke, who made another major contribution to
our collective image of the artificial man and the artificial mind when he and
Stanley Kubrick made 2001: A Space
Odyssey and introduced the world to HAL 9000.
Few would notice that that movie's protagonist,
David Bowman, is named in honor of the central figure of another, much earlier
Odyssey, Odysseus, king of Ithaca (in fact, the very term "Odyssey"
quite obviously derives from his name); for when he finally returns home at the
end of that great poem, it is through his skill with a bow that Odysseus proves
his identity.
Years later, when the very first captain of a
starship named Enterprise stepped on the bridge, his name was Jonathan
Archer. That he was named in honor of David Bowman is easily seen,
for "archer" is simply a synonym for "bowman"; and as for
Jonathan...well, we recall that, in addition to Ithaca's king, David Bowman was
also named after the king of Israel, and that king had a friend; as it is
written: "the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and
Jonathan loved him as his own soul" (I Samuel 18:1).
