Why Does a Nobel Prize Winner Write a Sci-Fi Novel About Robots?

And he’s not the only one—robots are hot in highbrow fiction

I loved books about robots when I was a child. Around age 10, I read Adam Link Robot by Eando Binder, and was absolutely rapturous about a mechanical humanoid who becomes self-aware. I considered revisiting that tattered paperback before writing this essay, but I didn’t have the heart to scrutinize such a fond memory of my youth.

There’s no way that book can live up to my warm-and-fuzzy recollections, and I suspect it might fall far, far short. Better to let the happy memories of age ten remain untarnished by a more mature verdict. And if you doubt my judgement on this, just consider this illustration.

If you think I’m going to bring that issue of Amazing Stories to a fashionable cafe to read while sipping a double cappuccino with extra foam. . . . well, think again! I’d have to wear a mask first. (Hey, wait, there’s an idea. . . .)

But Adam Link was hardly my only robot obsession. My older brother Dana brought me to an LA science fiction convention when I was still at a tender and impressionable age, and here I was able to see, among other cinema prop relics, Robby the Robot, who had been a star attraction in the Hollywood film Forbidden Planet. That movie came out before I was born, but still showed up regularly on TV—and I was ecstatic to see Robby in the not-so-fleshy flesh. And then there was the lovable, but overly excitable robot on the television series Lost In Space, who will forever live on in my memory for his most famous line: “Danger, Danger” (or sometimes “Danger, Will Robinson, Danger”).

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But these robots all had one thing in common: grown-ups didn’t take them seriously. You might occasionally hear an adult joking that “robots will someday take over my job”—but no one actually thought that day would arrive. And as for the robots in science fiction stories, they were all balderdash, escapism for puerile minds.

And so matters stayed until recently, when a few surprises started happening. First, robots actually did take away people’s jobs. Maybe I wasn’t so shocked by that, after seeing the consequences of so many other technological ‘marvels’. But even more surprising, to my mind, was the arrival of robots in the pages of highbrow literary fiction.

Let’s be honest—could you imagine William Faulkner letting a robot anywhere near Yoknapatawpha County? Or James Joyce allowing a mechanical humanoid on the streets of Dublin? Could Virginia Woolf have envisioned Mrs. Dalloway plugging in for a recharge?

In other words, Kazuo Ishiguro has to be the first winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature to follow up that award by publishing a robot novel. Yet at almost at the same moment, Ian McEwan—winner of the Booker Prize, the Shakespeare Prize, and the Jerusalem Prize, among other honors—released his own robot novel. Adding to the strangeness, the robot in McEwan’s book is named Adam, just like the protagonist Adam Link in the stories I loved as an adolescent.

Meanwhile Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi showed up on the Man Booker International Prize shortlist. The protagonist here isn’t exactly a robot—he has been constructed from the body parts of terrorist and bombing victims, not metal components and AI. But the end result is the same, a constructed being gains self-awareness, and faces the puzzling consequences.

The curious fact about each of these books is how little they resemble escapist fiction. Robot stories have, in fact, become a powerful way of exploring issues of ethics, responsibility and accountability. They are serious novels not simply due to how they are marketed, but also because of the deadly serious matters they address.

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Recent novels discussed in this article:

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan

Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi

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Years ago, I was a student of moral philosophy, as they called it back then, and was assigned a stack of weighty and sometimes obscurantist books on the subject. But I could envision teaching moral philosophy nowadays, and only assigning robot stories. And these books by Ishiguro, McEwan and Saadawi would each have a place on the syllabus.

Strange to say, this may have been the destiny of robot stories from the start. If you’ve read Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, the classic compendium of robot stories from the golden age of science fiction, you may recall how much these tales focused on ethical principles.

To be specific, Asimov postulated three rules for robots:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law

These were not just part of the back story, but often the plots of Asimov’s tales revolved around these three rules. He devised endless complications or trade-offs—to such a degree, that sometimes this stories seemed like logic problems in software development.

The world of robotics has changed enormously since I, Robot, but the ethical conundrums have become even more formidable—so much so, that we can no longer imagine three rules handling all of the thorny issues. Asimov was worried primarily about the robot’s responsibility to human beings, but what about the other side of the equation. If robots grow self aware, what responsibilities do we have toward them.

This problem emerges front and center in Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me. A struggling stock day trader uses a small inheritance to acquire one of the first of a new model of advanced human-like robots. Soon after Adam arrives, the robot proves all too human—having a one-night fling with Charlie’s girlfriend Miranda, and showing off his own superior skills at stock trading.

It soon becomes clear that this expensive robot is more a smug annoyance than a helpmate. The easiest solution is to unplug Adam, or perhaps even dismantle him completely. But Adam is so much like a person, this feels like a betrayal, or maybe even a crime. Adam, in contrast, operates in a world of simpler moral decisions—or, at least, the robot thinks they are fairly simple, even when they create endless trouble for his ‘owner’.

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Related reading:

• “Science Fiction Was My Mid-Life Crisis”

• “Notes on Conceptual Fiction”

• “When Science Fiction Grew Up”

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The story is fast-paced and persuasive, but adding to the intrigue, McEwan sets his novel in an alternative world—in a 1980s where artificial intelligence is already well advanced, Britain has lost the Falklands War, and Alan Turing is a national hero and wealthy technocrat available to give advice on the ethics of owning your own robot. Turing even shows up as a character in McEwan’s book, and tries to resolve all the open issues—I’ll let you judge how convincingly.

The robot who takes center stage in Ishiguro’s luminous novel Klara and the Sun is far more lovable and compassionate, but this hardly exempts her from difficult decisions. The novelist envisions a future world in which robots are purchased as companions for youngsters—a kind of cross between a nanny and a wiser older sister. But when we first meet Klara, she is merely merchandise in a store awaiting, along with her companion machines, a customer who will bring her home. The whole setting is reminiscent of an orphanage or animal shelter, and the longing among the robots for a kind of quasi-adoption is described by Ishiguro with extraordinary detail and sensitivity.

That’s already a sign that this is not your typical science fiction novel. As he already demonstrated in his masterful Never Let Me Go, the most important aspects of futuristic technology are often not their practical uses but what they reveal about our human souls and psyches. So even if the trappings of this book resemble the golden age of sci-fi, the tone and depth of this work couldn’t be more distant from what you encounter in its pulp fiction predecessors.

The publisher cautiously avoids putting a robot on the cover of the Nobel laureate’s new novel

Klara’s biggest concern about new technology, for example, is the ever-looming risk that it will make her obsolescent. Even before she leaves the store, a new generation of robots has come on the market—because, after all, speed of innovation never slows down. Yet after she’s been purchased and integrated into a family, a whole new range of worries beset her. Something isn’t quite right with her family, and though Klara is devoted to them, her programmed instincts to help are insufficient in guiding her through the barely-submerged hazards that surround her at every point.

At first glance, Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi would seem to have little in common with these high-tech narratives. The Frankenstein story, after all, originated as a gothic horror tale—about a monster stitched together from an assortment of body parts. Yet that was the closest thing you would find to a robot in fiction, circa 1818—and let’s not forget that Frankenstein was named after the scientist whose futuristic vision led him down this dark path of experimentation. In modern times, he would launch Frankenstein Enterprises on the NASDAQ and be admired as a biotech entrepreneur.

But Saadawi envisions another way of updating the Frankenstein story. High tech IPOs aren’t an option in war-torn Baghdad, and the monster’s creator, Hadi al-Attag, is merely a talkative antiques dealer who wants to make something respectable out of the collected remains from victims of the city’s rampant violence. But once assembled into a whole, the creature decides to exact vengeance on those responsible for the deaths.

In other words, this is a Girardian novel about how violence begets more violence, and here—as in so many real-life situations—the equation never balances. Every brutal act that aims to rectify merely perpetuates the bloody cycle. In many ways, the most curious part of this novel comes from the subplots, whose protagonists seem to have two destinies: either they fall victim or decide to leave Baghdad. The effect on the reader is unsettling. How often do you read a novel in which the successful characters pack up and leave before the story ends? In that respect, Frankenstein in Baghdad is like the mirror image of a reality show—the winners here are the first to get voted off the island.

The Frankenstein monster, in this updating, is thus not much different from the AI-driven robots in the more tech-oriented narratives of McEwan and Ishiguro. Even the monster must deal with ethical issues, but in a far more murky situation and without the benefit of the latest algorithms. Yet it’s an open question who makes the better decision: the robot or the monster?

I wish this was all just storytelling, but the complexities dealt with in these books will soon be playing out in society—first in headlines and then in households. How should you treat a robot? If you live long enough you will have a chance not just to offer an opinion, but demonstrate it with your own AI companion. It might not be a bad idea for the technocrats creating that future for us to read these books first.