Android Protagonist?

Ardent Kat · Dec 12, 2009

Can anyone recommend a good SF novel with an android protagonist? If at all possible, I'd like the android to not just be part of the supporting cast but THE main character. A brief run-down on the story and the MC's personality would be greatly appreciated as well.

Thanks in advance!

Pthom · Dec 13, 2009

"I Robot" perhaps?

"Wall-E"?

Our own "beezle" wrote a story some years ago, about a robot that befriended a child. I enjoyed it quite a lot. Ask him about it, maybe.

defcon6000 · Dec 13, 2009

The thing about I, Robot is that you never get inside the robot's head. Sure, we understand why the robot's act they way they do, but it's all in observation and deduction.

I'm curious too if there has ever been a book actually written from a robot's POV. It's a completely different way too look at the world through cybernetic eyes. Plus, I want to write a magepunk. :tongue

(even if it doesn't actually exist)

spectrefox · Dec 13, 2009

This isn't a book, but a short story. It starts out seeming like fantasy, then moves on to...other things

. There is also an audio version.

Really, giving you a description would totally ruin the story. I listened to it and went "OMG O_O" about halfway in.

Night, In Dark Perfection by Richard Parks

Audio version read by Kate Baker. I don't particularly like Baker, but she does an absolute wondrous job with the character(s) <--

.

Not written in first, but from her POV nonetheless <_<;;

STKlingaman · Dec 13, 2009

Stanislaw Lem - The Cyberiad
The story of two robot builders 'Trurl & Klapaucius'
who build robots and other things (Many short stories)

There is also the later DUNE books
where there is a rather curious/devious antagonist robot
call Ermaus (check spelling). I think he's in the later
books though starting with the Butlerian Jihad,
The Machine Crusade, & Battle of Corrin.
There are both good and bad robots in these.

Straka · Dec 13, 2009

At the moment I'm at a loss at remembering books with a Robo MC.

I would say look into Asimov's body of work though. The three laws of robotics and all that.

BillPatt · Dec 13, 2009

The Tricentenial Man by Asimov - about a robot at the year 2176.
Most of the Lije Bailey books Asimov wrote are written about a detective human/robot team.

Clifford Simak's All the Traps of Earth has several robot protags.

There are more, but that's what comes to mind at the moment.

Ardent Kat · Dec 13, 2009

*reps for all the suggestions so far* Thanks, guys! Please keep 'em coming if you can think of more!

defcon6000 said:
The thing about I, Robot is that you never get inside the robot's head. Sure, we understand why the robot's act they way they do, but it's all in observation and deduction.

Yup. I read Asimov's I, Robot looking for android protagonist and was extremely dissappointed. Nothing from an android's perspective and most of them really are worker robots rather than sentient 'droids. The short stories center around explaining how robots get around the 3 laws and display disfunctional behavior. (Robot Tech Support would have been a more apt title.) With the exception of a mute robot that befriends a little girl at the beginning (and told from the humans' POV), the robots really are mindless machines rather than empathetic characters. The Will Smith movie is completely unrelated.

I'm curious too if there has ever been a book actually written from a robot's POV. It's a completely different way too look at the world through cybernetic eyes.

Exactly! That's what I'm looking for.

jerry phoenix · Dec 14, 2009

isnt 'AI' the movie told from a robots pov?

BillPatt · Dec 14, 2009

When H.A.R.L.I.E. was One by David Gerrold: one of those 'computer comes to life' books, told in the third person, but with a whole lot of epistemology from the computer.

The Adolescence of P1, by Thomas Ryan: Rather ingenious story from the dawn of the computer age, third person, more a coming of age book, with the comp as the adolescent.

The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein. Central to the story is the self-aware computer in the Warden's complex, Mycroft.

I am sure more will occur to me. Numerous short stories as well, but I'll have to research them.

zornhau · Dec 14, 2009

"Saturn's Children" by Charles Stross. All the characters are robots. The narrator and protagonist is also a robot.

Bookewyrme · Dec 14, 2009

BillPatt said:
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein. Central to the story is the self-aware computer in the Warden's complex, Mycroft.

.

There's a couple others by Heinlein in the....well not same universe but also tying into Lazarus Long where one of the main secondary characters is the computer, and later the computer-as-a-human. It's complicated, but interesting. Especially as dealt with in what I sort of take to be the starting book (even though it's written later), "Time Enough for Love".

BillPatt · Dec 14, 2009

Oh, of course. I'm at work...and I was thinking of the early computer stuff.

Time Enough for Love introduces Minerva, the computer. Later, in several of his works, but especially in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, Minerva has been transcribed into a human, whereas her (somewhat editted) copy is Teena, running the spacship Dora. Come to think of it, Number of the Beast is practically infested with self-aware computers, like Gay Deceiver, as well as Dora herself.

I am reminded of the John Barrnes's War of the Memes, in which all computers, including the 'wetware' of human minds are invaded by, essentially, self-aware hacking programs. The systems are left alone until the Meme needs it. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_True

This is all rather far afield of your original query, where you are looking for a mobile robot, telling us a tale as told from his own photorecptors.

AceTachyon · Dec 14, 2009

The Automatic Detective by A. Lee Martinez

Randman · Dec 14, 2009

You could always watch Robin Williams in "Bicentenial Man" where it shows how he evolves from a simple slave type machine to a satient state. The whole story revolves around him and his journeys.

Bookewyrme · Dec 14, 2009

BillPatt said:
Time Enough for Love introduces Minerva, the computer. Later, in several of his works, but especially in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, Minerva has been transcribed into a human, whereas her (somewhat editted) copy is Teena, running the spacship Dora. Come to think of it, Number of the Beast is practically infested with self-aware computers, like Gay Deceiver, as well as Dora herself.

You're right about The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, I think. Isn't that the one introducing "Mike" the moon installation's main computer? And he's arguably the "first" of these sentient-later-turning-into-human computers in Heinlein, though of course Heinlein's time-lines are soooo confusing! XD

Oh yes, and there's always Star-Wars. The movies don't really feature the two droids too much, but I think some of the books focus on them a bit more.

Port Iris · Dec 15, 2009

From what I've read of Asimov's works, I think Robots and Empire would be your best bet.

BillPatt · Dec 15, 2009

Bookewyrme said:
You're right about The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, I think. Isn't that the one introducing "Mike" the moon installation's main computer? And he's arguably the "first" of these sentient-later-turning-into-human computers in Heinlein, though of course Heinlein's time-lines are soooo confusing! XD

Yes, in the Gregorian sense, and on this Universe line, MYCROFTXXX, aka Mike, the Warden's computer, is the first self-aware computer in the Heinlein multiverse.

Here's an interesting contest: what is the earliest written book that mentions self-aware computers? TMIAHM was written in 1966. Oddly enough, that is the same year that Collosus, The Forbin Project, by DF Jones was published.

Anyone remember one any older?

Kitty Pryde · Dec 15, 2009

Robot MCs: Rudy Rucker's Ware tetralogy. They're short, and you kinda have to read them all. There's an ensemble cast of humans, robots, robot duplicates of humans, robot/human hybrids, intelligent organic/synthetic hybrid symbiotes (woo!), and building-sized AIs. Obvs, the books are mostly about what makes us 'human' and such.

veinglory · Dec 15, 2009

Anne McCaffrey has the series about ships. They have human brains but are otherwise mechanical and some have android bodies.

JimmyB27 · Dec 16, 2009

Remember PeeDee? He wrote the excellent 'God In The Machine' as an online serial blog type thing. It's really good - gotm.wordpress.com/

dmytryp · Dec 16, 2009

Port Iris said:
From what I've read of Asimov's works, I think Robots and Empire would be your best bet.

Either that, or "Robots of Dawn". Also, parts of "Foundation's edge" and "Foundation and Earth" have a protagonist who is a robot but doesn't know it (can't remember her name).
Card's later books about Ender ("Speaker for the Dead" and so forth) have a self-aware computer program.

BillPatt · Dec 16, 2009

Here's a excerpt from Wikipedia on Clifford D. Simak:

Intelligence, loyalty and friendship, the existence of God and souls, the unexpected benefits and harm of invention, tools as extensions of humanity, and more questions are often explored by Simak's robots, whom he uses as "surrogate humans"[4]. His robots begin as likable mechanical persons, but morph in surprising ways. Having achieved intelligence, robots move onto common themes such as, "Why are we here?" and "Do robots have souls"? Examples are the faithful butler Jenkins in City, the religious robot Hezekiel in A Choice of Gods, the frontier robots in Special Deliverance and A Heritage of Stars, and the monk-like robots in Project Pope who seek Heaven.

Simak's robot-awareness theme goes farthest in All the Traps of Earth. A 600-year-old robot, a family retainer who earned the name Richard Daniel, is considered chattel to be reprogrammed and lose all its memories. The robot runs away, hitches onto a spaceship, and passes through hyperspace unprotected. Daniel gains the ability to see and fix problems in anything - a ship, a robot, a human - telekinetically. Yet he's still drifting and hunted as chattel. Finally he stumbles on a frontier planet and finds a purpose, helping the pioneers as a doctor, a servant, a colonist, and a friend. And here Daniel achieves an epiphany: human beings are more clever than they know. Human-created robots set loose can become agents with para-human abilities that directly or indirectly benefit humanity. Thus do robots, and Mankind, escape "all the traps of earth".

There's also a short story I am trying to chase down where a robot becomes aware, but gradually loses sentience and eventually 'dies'. It's written in diary form, like Flowers for Algernon. I can't remember the title or the author, but the robot's name is XP2, or "Expeto" in the story.

Ardent Kat · Dec 17, 2009

Thanks everyone for the recommendations! *reps all around*

This is all rather far afield of your original query, where you are looking for a mobile robot, telling us a tale as told from his own photorecptors.

Like Bill says here, I'm really looking for androids rather than sentient computers, and books rather than movies because they get into the android character's head a little more.

It's kind of surprising this has been done so seldom. I feel like if I wrote a book with an android protagonist, an agent wouldn't pick it up because it feels like an "old news" premise, but hasn't been done very often.

My third novel had an android protagonist and it was surprisingly fun and challenging to describe his emotions without bodily cues (swallowing, sweating, trembling muscles, squinting) and to describe his through processes following more programming-style if/then procedures. I trunked the book in the end, but it was entirely due to plot, not challenges with the character.

I wonder if there would have been a market for my android protagonist anyway. Are readers just not as interested in this premise as I am? I like speculative fiction not just because it takes me to other worlds, but to other headspaces far different from my own.

For anyone else following this thread with interest, I'll toss in a find of my own:
Silver Metal Lover by Tanith Lee is a SF romance with a humanoid android as the male lover. I usually can't stand the romance genre and the female protagonist falls into the whiny rich girl camp, but if you're hungry enough for android protagonists like me, check this one out.

defcon6000 · Dec 17, 2009

Ardent Kat said:
I wonder if there would have been a market for my android protagonist anyway. Are readers just not as interested in this premise as I am? I like speculative fiction not just because it takes me to other worlds, but to other headspaces far different from my own.

I think what is "in" now is fantasy, particularly urban. Hard sci-fi has been, for the most part, broken down to soft sci-fi or sci-fantasy. It doesn't mean robots are out though, I mean the Japanese are crazy over robots and even making their own! I think robots will always be cool...and creepy to some. It's just that everyone seems to be riding the fantasy creature trend right now and so we're seeing an explosion of vampires, werewolves...you name it on the scene. But this won't last long (thus the trend) and there will be an opening for something new to kick off the next trend.

Plus, I think you mentioned this, that robots don't feel as humans do so that may deter writers from that sort of subject because they just don't know how to handle it well. Kinda like there isn't too many books where the MC is a vampire, swamp monster, alien, etc. It's just easier to write what you are rather than write from some abnormal creature's POV.

Android Protagonist?

Kill your television

Word butcher

Followed the Red Brick Road

Bored Fanatic

Kill your television

Almost expert!

Swordsman

Imagined half of it.

Odd person

Movie Nut

Imagined half of it.

i luv you giant bear statue

volitare nequeo

Hoopy frood

Kill your television