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 The natural habitat of
the robot of popular imagination is in the pages of pulp fiction.
There they were free to run the gamut of everything from the berserk
monster above to the more workaday photographer robot below.
Many people think that every robot between the covers of pulp sci-fi
magazines was doing little more than rampaging, revolting, making war
on the human race, and carrying off women for no readily apparent
reason. In fact, many pulp stories had very sympathetic robots,
and not just those in Isaac Asimov's famous
stories. There were heroic robots, tragic robots, and even
little a lost robot from Mars. Not to mention vain robots that
stared in mirrors all day and a legion of robots that acted as
servants, sidekicks, and general window dressings for the doings at
hand.
The
wonderful thing about the pulp robots is that they were the most free-wheeling sort. They could be menaces, servants,
saviors,
allegories, or metaphors. They could not only be predictions for
the outcome of a particular branch of technology, but also a way of
discussing the relationship between man, his machines, and even
progress in general. They could stand in for any sort of
technical advancement in a way that could be identified with; whether
that advancement was a boon or a menace.
And beyond that, pulp
robots were COOL!
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