Rabu, 29 September 2010

Pulp Robots

Okay, okay!  I'll remember to take the lens cap off. Yeesh!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!


(source : davidszondy.com)

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