![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Yuletide Reveal
Jan. 1st, 2016 11:47 amHappy New Year!
For Yuletide this year, I wrote a Lije Baley fic. This is not a very surprising fandom for me- I've spoken numerous times about the profound influence Asimov has had on my life. What's actually surprising is that I quickly realized, having offered the fandom and received my assignment, that it's been fifteen years since I last read a Lije Baley story. I offered Asimov's Robot stories since most of the time the Yuletide fic has seemed to be Susan Calvin or Donovan and Powell oriented, and those stories I reread much more frequently. Naturally that is not what was requested! But it wasn't a problem, I'd read Lije Baley and cherished it and didn't mind the idea of writing fic for it. Still, fifteen years is a long time. So I revisited The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun and The Robots of Dawn a little gingerly, cautious that I might discover they'd gotten worse since I was a teenager.
My childhood is not ruined, I'm pleased to report! The books are actually quite good, I think, though they occupy a strange interstitial place in terms of genre. Asimov was clearly trying to write The Caves of Steel as noir, but in this respect he failed utterly. The other two books don't carry the hallmarks of this attempt- Asimov realized that the Lije Baley stories were not noir stories, they were barely murder mysteries at all, and he developed a much greater comfort with the tempered optimistic futurism that does drive them. What's strange about The Robots of Dawn- written about twenty years after the first two books and full of continuity errors designed to madden a fic writer- is that the scene writing is much better, probably the best anywhere in Asimov's ouevre, but the plotting is worse. Robots of Dawn is a book you luxuriate in, a book that isn't going anywhere interesting but does a great job of getting you there.
Like Asimov, I had wanted my fic to have a plot, but I lost track of it amid the density of themes I wanted to develop. Instead I just wrote a dialogue between Lije and Daneel in which they ask a lot of questions I've long had about the Three Laws and their practical meaning. It was heavily influenced by some reading I've been doing lately on Nick Bostrum, who seems to have supplanted Kurzweil as the leading artificial intelligence crank of the moment. The frustrating thing about Singularitarianism and Existential Risk is that all of the 'research' is just developing tenuous analogies past the breaking point. It's a bunch of really fascinating questions underpinned by absolutely nothing of substance. But the Three Laws are in their own way similar- a deep and fascinating philosophical approach to robotics that has no plausible engineering meaning.
Beyond the Singularity (2067 words) by seekingferret
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Robot Series - Isaac Asimov
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Elijah Baley/R. Daneel Olivaw
Characters: Elijah Baley, R. Daneel Olivaw
Summary:
For Yuletide this year, I wrote a Lije Baley fic. This is not a very surprising fandom for me- I've spoken numerous times about the profound influence Asimov has had on my life. What's actually surprising is that I quickly realized, having offered the fandom and received my assignment, that it's been fifteen years since I last read a Lije Baley story. I offered Asimov's Robot stories since most of the time the Yuletide fic has seemed to be Susan Calvin or Donovan and Powell oriented, and those stories I reread much more frequently. Naturally that is not what was requested! But it wasn't a problem, I'd read Lije Baley and cherished it and didn't mind the idea of writing fic for it. Still, fifteen years is a long time. So I revisited The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun and The Robots of Dawn a little gingerly, cautious that I might discover they'd gotten worse since I was a teenager.
My childhood is not ruined, I'm pleased to report! The books are actually quite good, I think, though they occupy a strange interstitial place in terms of genre. Asimov was clearly trying to write The Caves of Steel as noir, but in this respect he failed utterly. The other two books don't carry the hallmarks of this attempt- Asimov realized that the Lije Baley stories were not noir stories, they were barely murder mysteries at all, and he developed a much greater comfort with the tempered optimistic futurism that does drive them. What's strange about The Robots of Dawn- written about twenty years after the first two books and full of continuity errors designed to madden a fic writer- is that the scene writing is much better, probably the best anywhere in Asimov's ouevre, but the plotting is worse. Robots of Dawn is a book you luxuriate in, a book that isn't going anywhere interesting but does a great job of getting you there.
Like Asimov, I had wanted my fic to have a plot, but I lost track of it amid the density of themes I wanted to develop. Instead I just wrote a dialogue between Lije and Daneel in which they ask a lot of questions I've long had about the Three Laws and their practical meaning. It was heavily influenced by some reading I've been doing lately on Nick Bostrum, who seems to have supplanted Kurzweil as the leading artificial intelligence crank of the moment. The frustrating thing about Singularitarianism and Existential Risk is that all of the 'research' is just developing tenuous analogies past the breaking point. It's a bunch of really fascinating questions underpinned by absolutely nothing of substance. But the Three Laws are in their own way similar- a deep and fascinating philosophical approach to robotics that has no plausible engineering meaning.
Beyond the Singularity (2067 words) by seekingferret
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Robot Series - Isaac Asimov
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Elijah Baley/R. Daneel Olivaw
Characters: Elijah Baley, R. Daneel Olivaw
Summary:
On the way back to Earth- home sweet home!- after his adventure on Aurora, Lije and Daneel talk about the past and the future.