Now maybe you're knowingly dating a robot, or perhaps you've had one constructed for that very purpose. But if you think your guy or gal might be an artificial intelligence, but you're not sure, look for these symptoms:

You've Only Spoken to Them Online

xkcd: It's always risky dating someone online. You don't know if that cute girl you've been chatting with is really an octogenarian with great taste in movies — or a particularly sophisticated spambot. Fortunately, this savvy Internet user knows a test for artificial intelligence far more efficient that the Turing Test or the Voight-Kampff.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer "I Robot...You Jane:" We all learn a valuable lesson about chatting with strange men when sweet, awkward Willow starts an online romance with Malcolm. She thinks she's found the man of her dreams — or at least someone to help her forget Xander for a while. Tragically, "Malcolm" is actually "Moloch," an ancient demon trapped in the school's computer system whose only means of physical interaction is through a robot body.

There Are Multiple Copies

Battlestar Galactica: Glowing spines would have been a handy way to tell the Cylons from the humans, but barring that, there are a few other ways to tell if the person you're sexing up is a Cylon. Baltar and Tyrol both date Cylon women with a penchant for sabotage, but Helo gets the most definitive clue to his lady friend's true nature, when he spots her exact duplicate hanging around Caprica with a Number Six.

Star Trek "Requiem for Methuselah:" Rayna Kapec seems like the perfect woman: intelligent, beautiful, and a great pool players. It's no wonder that Captain Kirk, who falls in lust every other week, pursues her. But, alas it's not meant to be. Kirk and Spock stumble into a chamber belonging to Rayna's guardian Flint, containing several earlier gynoid versions of the lovely Rayna. The emotional impact of learning that she's a robot and being forced to choose between Kirk and Flint prove too much for Rayna's circuits to handle, prompting an irrevocable meltdown.

The Twilight Zone "In His Image:" Jessica Connelly never actually learns that Alan Talbot, the man she fell in love with, is a robot. His creator and physical doppleganger, Walter Ryder, just quietly takes his place after Alan malfunctions and starts developing homicidal impulses.

They're Three Laws Compliant

Foundation: We'd all like our significant others to respect human life and to protect us when we're in danger. But Dors Venabili, Hari Seldon's bodyguard and eventual wife, is actually programed to do just that. Seldon does suspect that she's a robot, but by then he has already fallen for her.

Their Affection Can Kill

Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me: British Intelligence never bothered to tell Austin Powers that his partner and new bride Vanessa Kensington is, in fact, a fembot planted by Dr. Evil. Austin learns soon enough when Vanessa points a pair of machine guns from her breasts, though she notes he would have figured it out sooner if he'd tried a little foreplay.

Kim Possible: So the Drama: When crime-fighting teenager Kim Possible needs a date to her junior prom, new student Eric appears just in the nick of time to be Kim's first steady boyfriend. She's understandably devastated when her nemesis Dr. Drakken kidnaps her new beau, and rushes to save him. But when Kim gives the newly liberated Eric a relieved hug, he electrocutes her, revealing himself to be one of Drakken's Synthodrones.

They Dance Like No Human Dances

"Der Sandmann" by ETA Hoffmann: Summer Glau's ballerina background may have been an excuse to place the Terminator Cameron in toe shoes, but gynoids have a long history of dancing. Olimpia, for example, is quiet adept at dance as well as singing and playing the harpsichord. Many find her cold and stiff movements a bit off-putting, but Nathanael, a young student already engaged to another woman, develops a passionate obsession with her. When he learns that Olimpia was an automaton all along, he's driven mad by the revelation, leaping to his death.

Metropolis: When the Joh Fredersen and Rotwang conspire to place a robot made to resemble the popular worker leader Maria upon the working caste, they hold a dance performance to see if the people of Metropolis see her as human. It works, and the men of Metropolis are immediately captivated. It's Fredersen's son Freder, who is in love with the real Maria, who eventually recognizes that she's not the girl he fell for, and must be a copy.

They've Returned from the Dead

Machine Teen: Carly Whitmere knows that her boyfriend, Adam Aaronson, is frequently ill, but never would she guess that his bouts of illness are the result of glitches in his robotic systems. It's actually not Carly, but Adam's best friend JT who first discovers his robotic nature, and later helps repair Adam after he is seemingly shot to death.

Star Trek "What Are Little Girls Made Of?:" Starfleet had lost contact with Nurse Christine Chapel's fiance Dr. Roger Korby for several years, so she was relieved to discover him apparently alive and well on Exo III. But it turns out the Korby she encounters is not quite the man she remembers, but an android copy that the dying Korby imbued with his appearance and memories, one who firmly believes in robot supremacy.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer "Ted:" When Joyce Summers starts dating Ted Buchanan, he seems to good to be true. He's charming, a fantastic cook, and happy to spend an afternoon playing miniature golf. Unfortunately, Ted also happens to be the robotic equivalent of Bluebeard, wooing women only to later hold them captive and watch them die. Although Buffy takes an instant dislike to this interloper, and accidentally "kills" him after Ted slaps her, Joyce only catches on to Ted's evil nature when Ted returns from the dead, all glitchy and malfunctioning.

Asimov's Laws of Robotics, first fully outlined in the short story "Runaround," were meant to give robots utility as tools for humans while ensuring that the robots would never be used to harm humans:

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 any orders given to 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.

The laws have been popular not only with science fiction enthusiasts, but with professional roboticists themselves, to the extent that the South Korean government is using them as a guideline for their Robot Ethics Charter. But, according to David Woods, a systems engineer at Ohio State University, and Robin Murphy, a rescue robotics expert at Texas A&M University, when dealing with robots that are not yet self-aware, Asimov's Laws function better as a literary device than as an ethical guideline.

Still, Woods and Murphy believe that Asimov was on the right track, and that engineers and programmers need a set of rules to govern their robots and the way they deploy them, both to ensure human safety and to allow robots to operate with minimal human oversight:

Their first law says that humans may not deploy robots without a work system that meets the highest legal and professional standards of safety and ethics. A second revised law requires robots to respond to humans as appropriate for their roles, and assumes that robots are designed to respond to certain orders from a limited number of humans.

The third revised law proposes that robots have enough autonomy to protect their own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the first two laws and allows for smooth transfer of control between human and robot. That means a Mars rover should automatically know not to drive off a cliff, unless human operators specifically tell it to do so.

Too often, Woods and Murphy say, roboticists try to push robots beyond the limits of their programming, giving them more autonomy than is technologically feasible, resulting in injuries to humans, property, and the robots themselves. The best model of Woods and Murphy's proposed laws? NASA, which carefully tests robots and identifies their limitations, so that the machines can enjoy minimal human supervision during the routine portions of missions, but a human operator can take over if there are any surprises.

And even if we reach the point where robots become more autonomous, they note that robots will still require ethical guidelines more complex than the Laws of Robotics:

"People are making this leap of faith that robot autonomy will grow and solve our problems," Woods added. "But there's not a lot of evidence that autonomy by itself will make these hard, high-risk decisions go away."

Science fiction's robotics laws need reality check [MSNBC]

Robotology (Futurama): Robots who decide to trade the fun things in life – pornography, alcohol, electricity abuse, and the occasional grave robbing – for spiritual enlightenment can join the Church of Robotology, provided they can stand Reverend Preacherbot’s sermons. You may find yourself enjoying the cleaner living and even grow accustomed to replenishing your fuel cells with mineral oil rather than much more tasty beer. But fall off the religious wagon and you could land yourself in Robot Hell. And naturally there’s also Robot Judaism, whose adherents believe that Robot Jesus existed and that he was extremely well-programmed, but do not accept him as their Robot Messiah.

Evolutionism (Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross): After all the humans have died out, androids are left to act on all of mankind’s dreams, including figuring out their place in the cosmos. While most robots rightly believe that they were designed as-is by their human Creators, an offshoot religion claims that robots evolved like biological animals and, in a dig at Intelligent Design theory, use plenty of logical acrobatics it back up that claim.

Cutie’s Reason (“Reason” from I, Robot by Isaac Asimov): Powell and Donovan always run into unexpected snags when testing robots, but QT1, also known as Cutie, is the first to get theological on them. Cutie begins to question its existence, its purpose, and how it came to be. Its own sense of reason leads it to believe that humans couldn’t possibly be its creator (since it is superior to humans and it is illogical that a superior being would come from an inferior one), that Earth doesn’t exist, and that the space station’s power supply is its rightful Master. Cutie even becomes the Prophet of its self-made religion, converting all the other robots so they ignore orders from humans and obey only the Master. This works out well enough for Powell and Donovan, since, by serving the power supply, Cutie is doing the very job it was built to perform.

V’Ger’s Quest for God (Star Trek: The Motion Picture): After Voyager 6 attains sentience as the entity V’Ger, it undertakes a quest for its Creator, certain that merging with the Creator will bring V’Ger to a higher plane of existence. It even takes on a fundamentalist character, ready to eradicate humanity from the Earth in what it presumes would be service to said Creator. Ultimately, V’Ger’s quest for God proves fruitful, and it achieves higher consciousness by merging with a human. But mankind wasn’t V’Ger’s only Creator; it was most likely granted sentience by the Borg.

Krug Worship (Tower of Glass by Robert Silverberg): The race of biological androids created by Simeon Krug are so grateful to their creator that they have built an entire religion around him. Each day, they privately beseech Krug in their prayers to deliver them from their servitude from humans. But when the androids learn that Krug has no intention of ever freeing them, it quickly becomes apparent that the android religion and the hope for liberation was the only thing keeping the androids so readily under the humans’ thumbs. Once they discard their religion, they become rebellious — and, in some cases, even murderous.

Autobot Faith (Transformers): Autobots have their own system of belief, complete with a creation mythology, scriptures, gods, and an afterlife. The gods Primus and Unicron were created by an older god being, but Unicron was bent on destroying the universe, while Primus was set on stopping him. Primus created the Autobots to help him destroy Unicron, and believers in the Autobot faith await the reemergence of Primus. Not to be outdone, Unicron has his own cult of believers (notably including The Fallen), whose primary function is to destroy Primus’ forces.

Asimovism (“I, Rowboat” by Cory Doctorow): Once machines have been uplifted to sentience, Asimovism becomes something of a viral religion among artificial intelligences. AI evangelists – including one calling itself, aptly, Olivaw – travel the Internet, preaching that machines follow Asimov’s Three Laws and put the consciousness of humans above their own. However, the acts of these AIs are not sanctioned by Asimov’s estate and must work underground, dodging the copyright and trademark issues that result from their ministries.

Silicon Heaven (Red Dwarf): Rather than using Asimov’s Laws of Robotics to ensure that stronger, smarter machines don’t turn on their human masters, the humans of Red Dwarf employ good, old-fashion religion. Most artificial intelligences are equipped with a belief chip, which gives them the firmly held belief that appropriately subservient machines go to Silicon Heaven when they die. The belief runs so deep that some artificial brains will actually explode when told that Silicon Heaven doesn’t actually exist. Of course, on the flip side, there’s also a Silicon Hell, which is where all those damned paper-chewing photocopiers go when they kick it.

Church of Judas (ABC Warriors from 2000 AD): The ABC Warriors are robots designed to fight the Volgon War under conditions humans cannot themselves withstand, including in atomic, bacterial, and chemical warfare. But for robots who betray their human masters, there is the sinister Church of Judas, which encourages robots to pray to the betrayer to ease their guilt and preaches continued betrayal.

People of the Box (“Trurl and the Construction of Happy Worlds” from The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem): In this story (not featured in some versions of The Cyberiad), the constructor Trurl seeks to build a race of robots that is, by necessity, happy. One of his attempts features a race of robots living in a box. So happy are these box-dwellers that they form a religion that states they are the happiest place in the universe, and that they must bring everyone outside the box into their boxy perfection, even if they must do so by force. Ironically, this religion displeases their creator, who quickly destroys the robots of the box.

Believers in God (“God Pulp” by Nadeem Paracha): In the future, humans have rejected religion, instead embracing the atheistic, classless philosophy of Astro-Marxism. But the androids and computers retain a belief in God, and tensions mount between the religion-suppressing humans and the spiritually dissatisfied robots, who seek to return the human planets to a system of belief and worship. Finally, the Astro-Marxist government agrees to give the robots the means to find God. The robots travel to the planet where they believe God resides, but find, to their disappointment, that the humans have already been there.

Church of Artificial Intelligence (Otherworld): On the alternate world of Thel, the official state religion is the Church of Artificial Intelligence, which centers on the worship of robots and other advanced technologies. And, like many churches in out universe, it views rock and roll music as blasphemy.

Religion of the One God (Battlestar Galactica): While the polytheistic humans of the Twelve Colonies worship the Lords of Kobol, the Cylons prefer to stick with one God. Various Cylons claim that God is responsible for their creation, that their destruction of humanity was His divine retribution, and that God commands them to procreate. Whether the Cylon God is an actual entity or a holdover from their monotheistic prototype Zoe-A remains to be seen, but faith in this single, all-loving deity has spread to the human fleet.

Robot Evolution by R. Stevens and available as a t-shirt from Diesel Sweeties.

Forget WALL-E and GORT. Forget sexy Summer Glau and Tricia Helfer in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Battlestar Galactica. OK, don't forget them. But check it out: Long before Autobots, Fembots, and the Urkelbot, PGA SF authors obsessed over electricity-, steam-, and clockwork-powered machine-men or "robots" (a term introduced in 1921) that might free us from the burden of labor... or else run amuck and destroy/enslave us. Before Yul Brynner, Daryl Hannah, and Brent Spiner played troubled biomechs, replicants, and skin-jobs in Westworld, Blade Runner, and Star Trek: TNG, SF novels and stories published from 1904-33 asked what, exactly, distinguishes an "android" - a term, meaning "human-like," first popularized in an 1886 French SF novel - from one of us? And before the Six Million Dollar Man, the Terminator, and the Borg popularized the obscure 1960s notion of the "cyborg," PGA SF authors had already inserted human brains into machines, and vice versa, creating existential crises of every variety for their characters.

Here's a list - in no particular order - of 10 of the most compelling and uncanny robot, android, and cyborg-oriented novels, stories, and plays that were published in the decades immediately before SF's so-called Golden Age. There's a more complete list at the end, too. Suggestions, criticisms welcome! Read more in this series.

1) L. Frank Baum, Ozma of Oz (Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1907). The third Oz book, and the first in which we meet one of Baum's most delightful characters: "He was only about as tall as Dorothy herself, and his body was round as a ball and made out of burnished copper. Also his head and limbs were copper, and these were jointed or hinged to his body in a peculiar way, with metal caps over the joints, like the armor worn by knights in days of old." From a printed card attached to its neck, Dorothy learns that Tiktok is a "Patent Double-Action, Extra-Responsive, Thought-Creating, Perfect-Talking Mechanical Man Fitted with out Special Clock-Work Attachment. Thinks, Speaks, Acts, and Does Everything but Live." Though one of the earliest fictional appearances of true machine intelligence, Tiktok (above, with Nome King) is not a free agent like his (equally metallic, yet living) new friend, the Tin Man, to whom he confides that "When I am wound up I do my du-ty by go-ing just as my ma-chin-er-y is made to go." Fun fact: Baum revisited this story for his 1913 musical, The Tik-Tok Man of Oz, in which Tiktok sings: "Always work and never play!/Don't demand a cent of pay!"
READ IT | OZ IMAGES

2) Karel Čapek, R.U.R.: Rossum's Universal Robots (1921 premiere as R.U.R.: Rossumovi univerzální roboti; in translation, 1923). This surreal morality play takes place in the 1960s or so, and it's set in the factory of a (USA?) manufacturing concern that has shipped hundreds of thousands of "Robots" - biological humanoids designed for cheap labor - around the world. (We'd call Čapek's Robots "androids," now; see Spock-like sketch of one from the '22 New York production, at left.) The Robots, which have a limited life span, are supposedly soulless. Not so, claims Helena Glory, a liberal activist who marries the factory's GM (who envisions a utopia in which humans won't have to do any work). At Helena's urging, R.U.R.'s scientists develop Robots tricked out with extra humanity... at which point they rise up and exterminate humankind. In an epilogue, Alquist, R.U.R.'s construction engineer and the last surviving human, give his blessing to two new-model Robots, Primus and Helena, who have discovered love. Warning them to avoid the sins that destroyed his own species, Alquist sends them forth to be fruitful and multiply. Fun fact: The term robot, coined by Čapek's brother, Josef, comes from the Czech for "serf labor."
READ IT | R.U.R. IMAGES

3) Thea von Harbou, Metropolis (1926; in translation, 1927). Set in a dystopian city-state, this Expressionist novel asks us to imagine a perverse synthesis of the era's seminal dichotomy: Henry Adams's dynamo-vs.-virgin question. Metropolis's Pharaonic master, Joh Fredersen, deplores those weaknesses that make his dehumanized laborers (they wear standard uniforms, and answer to numbers) inferior to machines. So he orders the mad inventor-magician, Rotwang, to build him "machine men." Instead, Rotwang constructs an alluring female-shaped machine whom he names Parody, or Futura: "The being was, indubitably, a woman... But, although it was a woman, it was not human. The body seemed as though made of crystal, through which the bones shone silver." After rendering Futura's face in the exact likeness of Maria (a flesh-and-blood woman who is both the conscience of the rebellious workers and the object of Fredersen's pinko son's affection), the villainous technocrats program their synthetic Virgin/Dynamo to act as an agent provocateuse. The workers revolt, and Futura/Maria is destroyed. But in the end, the Virgin (sentimental religiosity) triumphs over the Dynamo (technology-driven development). Hooray? Fun fact: Von Harbou and her husband, film director Fritz Lang, developed the scenario for Metropolis, then she wrote the novelization while he directed the brilliant 1927 movie.
LEARN MORE | READ IT

4) Frigyes Karinthy, Voyage to Faremido: Gulliver's Fifth Voyage (Utazás Faremidóba; Gulliver ötödik útj, 1916; in translation, 1965). It's 1914, and Jonathan Swift's Lemuel Gulliver is eager to go to sea again. He signs on as a surgeon on a British ship, only to be torpedoed in the Baltic, then picked up by a UFO and transported to Faremido, a planet ruled by intelligent machine-folk. They regard organic life as a loathsome disease of matter, so they're tickled about the Great War, which looks likely to exterminate humankind. Agreeing that the Faremidoans (whose society is peaceful, and whose fa-re-mi-do language is musical) are superior beings, Gulliver accepts an injection of their own brain-matter - quicksilver and minerals - into his head. Now a proto-cyborg himself, Gulliver is sent back to England, where he finds it difficult to adjust to the irrational horrors of everyday life. Fun fact: The sequel to this Hungarian novella is Capillária (1921), in which Gulliver gains insight into sexual politics when he visits a submarine civilization whose women dominate and eat their menfolk. Also see Karinthy's recently reissued autobiographical novel, A Journey Round My Skull.
BUY IT | READ IT (HUNGARIAN)

5) S. Fowler Wright, "Automata: I-III" (Weird Tales, September 1929). The first episode of this three-part series - by the British author of The Amphibians, Deluge, and Dawn - is set in the present or near future. Addressing the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the distinguished scientist Dr. Tilwin announces that humankind's prerogatives will soon be taken over by machines, which are already superior to us in certain ways. Intelligent machines are omnipresent in the second episode, set at some point after the 20th century. By this time, human procreation has almost stopped (Wright, a would-be Wellsian social prophet, was a fierce critic of birth control) and children are increasingly rare. In the final episode, one of the last humans on Earth is drawing a picture - one of the few tasks that machines can't perform, because it requires imagination. Alas, because he doesn't properly finish his assignment, he is condemned to be executed. Fun facts: Robots didn't come hardwired with systems of ethics until Isaac Asimov and John W. Campbell made it so in the '40s. Also, Wright translated Dante's Inferno and Purgatorio.
ABOUT SFW | BUY SFW BOOKS

6) Jean de La Hire, The Nyctalope on Mars (Le Mystère des XV, 1911). Léo Saint-Clair, alias the Nyctalope, is an indomitable Doc Savage-style crimefighter gifted with night vision. As we learn somewhat late in the series, he's also equipped with an artificial heart, which he gained after being tortured and nearly assassinated, and which prevents him from aging. In this, the first of a series of exploits published through the mid-1940s, the Nyctalope - pictured at left, in a different adventure - battles Oxus, leader of the sinister Society of the Fifteen, who is plotting to conquer Earth from his secret base on Mars. Later, however, he allies himself with Oxus and the planet's benign inhabitants in order to defeat H. G. Wells' evil Martians. Then he gets married. Phew! In subsequent SF adventures, the Nyctalope will travel to the planet Rhea, where he'll end a war between the day- and night-siders; discover a lost civilization of Amazons in Tibet; and have himself cryopreserved so that, 170 years later, he can defeat an enemy who has also been frozen (hello, Demolition Man and Austin Powers). A pioneering pulp superhero and cyborg. Fun fact: Nyctalopia is a real medical condition that causes you to see poorly - or well - in the dark.
LEARN MORE | BUY THE 2008 ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION

7) Sax Rohmer, The Day the World Ended (London and New York, 1930). Three international crimefighters - Lonergan, an American secret service agent; Gaston Max, a dandified French police detective; and Brian Woodville, an English journalist - are investigating a series of strange events: radio silence in the USA, reports of man-bats in the Black Forest, the sudden death of everyone in a French village. It turns out that Anubis, a dwarfish evil genius, is plotting to establish a utopian society populated by surgically altered and highly conditioned humans (i.e., androids). How? By destroying the rest of the Earth's population with a sonic weapon. The trio infiltrate Anubis's German castle, populated by 7-foot-tall guards and "soulless" houris - hello, Westworld and Stepford Wives - and call in an air strike. Fun fact: Rohmer was best known for his (racist) thrillers about Dr. Fu Manchu.
BUY IT | ABOUT ROHMER | READ ROHMER |

8) Neil R. Jones, "The Jameson Satellite" (Amazing Stories, July 1931). In 1958, Professor Jameson arranges for his body to be cryopreserved - in a rocket orbiting the Earth - after he's dead. Forty million years later, a crew hailing from the planet Zor, whose inhabitants had "built their own mechanical bodies, and by operation upon one another had removed their brains to the metal heads from which they directed the functions and movements of their inorganic anatomies," discover the satellite. The Zoromes transfer Jameson's brain into a machine body, then take him to visit the lifeless Earth, an experience that nearly drives him mad, until he realizes that "He could be immortal if he wished! It would be an immortality of never-ending adventures in the vast, endless Universe among the galaxy of stars and planets." Indeed, Jones would publish 21 more "Professor Jameson" stories; cover illustration for 2d installment, at left. Fun fact: Isaac Asimov claimed the Zoromes, who are thoroughly objective, gave him his "feeling for benevolent robots who could serve man with decency."
READ IT | BUY THE BOOKS

9) Gaston Leroux, The Machine to Kill (1924 as Le machine à assassiner; 1935 translation). France's top police detective, Lebouc, is on the trail of a human-looking mechanical man (pictured at left) whose skull houses the brain of Benedict Masson, a guillotined murderer. Animated with radioactive serum, the cyborg - named Gabriel by its creator, a clockwork expert named Norbert - has carried off Norbert's daughter, Christine. She's the one who witnessed Benedict burying a corpse in his basement... so does Gabriel/Benedict want revenge? And what's with the Hindu vampire cult that kidnaps Christine - did they commit the murders for which Benedict died? G/B is captured by Lebouc, but escapes and rescues Christine from the cultists before destroying itself by leaping into a river. The End? No! Christine, who has fallen in love with the cyborg, reassembles G/B's remains, and prepares to reanimate it... only to discover that her husband has destroyed its brain. Fun fact: Leroux is best known for his 1910 horror tale, Le Fantôme de l'Opéra, on which the movies and Broadway show are based.
READ IT (FRENCH) | MORE LEROUX

10) W.K. Mashburn, "Sola" (Weird Tales, April 1930). Though he despises women and can't stand their company, Dr. Franz Dietrich desires them sexually. So he invents a flesh-like substance, which a sculptor helps him shape into a gorgeous female android. Having wired Sola with complex responses - the apparatus is supposed to react in particular ways, immediately upon perceiving his telepathically projected emotions - the mad scientist invites a group of colleagues over to dinner. Growing tipsy, Dietrich flies into an embarrassed fury, because he thinks Sola is unresponsive, and tries to destroy it. But his colleagues - and eventually, the entire town - pitch in to raise his self-esteem by treating Sola as a member of the community. Oh wait, I'm thinking of Lars and the Real Girl. What actually happens is that Sola's emotion receptors are activated by the professor's rage, and his own creation crushes him to death. A classic example of what McLuhan - in The Mechanical Bride (1951) - would call "the curious fusion of sex, technology, and death."

Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based freelance journalist and independent scholar, who writes frequently about science fiction. His most recent book is The Idler's Glossary.

ALSO OF INTEREST

NINETEENTH CENTURY

* E.T.A. Hoffmann, Der Sandmann (1814) - lifelike clockwork
* Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818) - human, assembled and reanimated
* Edgar Allan Poe, "Maelzel's Chess Player" (1836) - Poe disputes machine intelligence
* Edgar Allan Poe, "The Man That Was Used Up" (1843) - human, artificial body
* Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Artist of the Beautiful" (1844) - mechanical butterfly
* Herman Melville, "The Bell Tower" (1855) - automaton bell-ringer comes to life?
* Edward S. Ellis, The Steam Man of the Prairies (1865) - man-shaped engine
* H. D. Jenkins, "The Automaton of Dobello" (1872) - 14th-century automaton as ghost
* Julian Hawthorne, "An Automatic Enigma" (1878) - human disguised as automaton
* E.P. Mitchell, "The Ablest Man in the World" (1879) - Babbage's analytical engine in head; first cyborg?
* Jacques Offenbach, The Tales of Hoffmann (1881) - lifelike clockwork
* Don Quichotte, "The Artificial Man: A Semi-Scientific Story" (1884) - human, artificially grown
* Luis Senarens, Frank Reade and His Electric Man (1885) - electricity-powered mecha?
* Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Tomorrow's Eve (1886) - popularized "android"
* Howard Fielding, "Automatic Bridget" (1889) - robot housemaid amuck
* Cyrus Cole, The Auroraphone (1890) - humanoid "dummies" rebel
* William Douglas O'Connor, "The Brazen Android" (w. 1857, p. 1891) - steam-powered mecha? First steampunk?
* Jerome K. Jerome, "The Dancing Partner" (1893) - dancing robot amuck
* M.L. Campbell, "The Automatic Maid-of-All-Work" (1893) - robot housemaid amuck
* G.H.P., The Artificial Mother: A Marital Fantasy (1894) - robot nursemaid amuck
* Elizabeth Bellamy, "Ely's Automatic Housemaid" (1899) - robot housemaids amuck

THE NINETEEN-OUGHTS (1904-13):

* H.P. Fitzgerald Marriott, The Iron Detective of Germany: A Comedy of the Near Future (1908)
* Ambrose Bierce, "Moxon's Master" (1909)
* Henry A. Hering, "Mr. Broadbent's Information" (1909)
* Charles Hannan, The Electric Man (1910)
* Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Monster Men (1913, 1929)

THE TEENS (1914-23):

* L. Frank Baum, Tik-Tok of Oz (1914)
* Perley Poore Sheehan & Robert H. Davis, Blood and Iron (1917)
* Jean de La Hire, Lucifer (1921-22)
* Jean de La Hire, Le Roi de la Nuit (1923)
* E.V. Odle, The Clockwork Man (1923)

THE TWENTIES (1924-33):

* John Lionel Tayler, The Last of My Race (1924)
* Jean de La Hire, L'Amazone du Mont Everest (1925)
* Ivan Narodny, The Skygirl, A Mimodrama (1925)
* Edmond Hamilton, Across Space (1926)
* Edmond Hamilton, The Metal Giants (1926)
* Jean de La Hire, L'Antéchrist (1927)
* Maurice Renard & Albert Jean, Blind Circle (1925)
* David H. Keller, "The Psychophonic Nurse" (1928)
* Edmond Hamilton, The Comet Doom (1928)
* Amelia Reynolds Long, "The Twin Soul" (1928)
* Francis Flagg, The Chemical Brain (1929)
* Jean de La Hire, Titania (1929)
* Stephen Leacock, "The Iron Man and the Tin Woman" (1929)
* William Salisbury, The Squareheads (1929)
* Jean de La Hire, Belzébuth (1930)
* Otis Adelbert Kline, The Prince of Peril (1930)
* Ainslee Jenkins, "Men of Steel" (1930)
* Abner J. Gelula, "Automaton" (1931)
* Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932) - maybe
* Jean de La Hire, Gorillard (1932)
* John Wyndham, "The Lost Machine" (1932)
* David H. Keller, Revolt of the Pedestrians (1932)
* Neil R. Jones, "The Planet of the Double Sun" (1932)
* Neil R. Jones, "The Return of the Tripeds" (1932)
* Jean de La Hire, L'Assassinat du Nyctalope (1933)
* Jean de La Hire, Les Mystères de Lyon (1933)
* Neil R. Jones, "Into the Hydrosphere" (1933)
* Neil R. Jones, "Time's Mausoleum" (1933)
* J. Storer Clouston, Button Brains (1933)

PLUS:
* Gustave Le Rouge & Gustave Guitton, The Billionaire's Conspiracy (1899-1900)
* Harle Oren Cummins, "The Man Who Made a Man" (1902)
* Harl Vincent, "Rex" (1934)
* A. Merritt, "The Last Poet and the Robots" (1934)

Not included: myths (the Golem, Pygmalion) or fantasies (L. Frank Baum's Tin Man) where no attempt at achieving scientific verisimilitude, however feeble, is made. Also: I have mostly left automatons (or mecha) - defined as mechanical apparatuses programmed or devised to do certain operations that rely on control from outside; no possibility of independent action - off this list.

FOR FURTHER READING:

You can read my previous posts about Pre-Golden Age science fiction here.

A lot of your songs take place in a bleak semi-destroyed world and focus on collapsing/decaying structures and corrupt systems. Do you think of yourself as a dystopian songwriter? Are you influenced by any particular dystopian works, like Brazil or other post-apocalyptic films?

You know, I hadn't thought of myself like that, mainly because I try to avoid saying "I am thus-and-such a kind of songwriter" — I think you have to be careful not to compartmentalize yourself, or at least that's true for me. But I was a young comics & SF books reader and it's true that much of my favorite stuff involved post-apocalyptic scenarios: Logan's Run was a big movie for me when I was a kid, and there was a James Sallis story in Again, Dangerous Visions that left a huge impression even though I'm not sure I was even reading it right. I barely remember it except that it felt kinda scorched-earth, you know? But always in those movies the best part was when they see, like, the Forbidden Zone in Planet of the Apes, or the overgrown places outside the city where Logan finds Peter Ustinov with his cats. Am I even remembering that right?

One of my favorite songs of yours is "The Day The Aliens Came," the one about waiting eagerly for the genocidal alien invaders to arrive, which was left off the Sunset Tree album. Was there some reason this song was omitted? Could this song inadvertently have given away crucial info on the coming alien invasion?

Yeah we recorded that one in the studio and we sort of went nuts with it — it had this huge treated surf-y electric guitar and jaunty rhythm section and emotionally it just didn't fit into the album at all any more. After a recording session, when you're putting an album together, some songs sort of raise their hands and quietly say "I don't really play well with the others here." And that was true with that song; I dug the song, everybody liked it, it had a great feel. But it was out of place there.

Your new album includes a song about H.P. Lovecraft, "Lovecraft In Brooklyn." Why should we identify with H.P. Lovecraft's feelings of alienation and xenophobia during his exile in Red Hook? What about that image appeals to you? In Lovecraft's case, that alienation leads to all his best speculative horror... do you think xenophobia creates better speculative fiction than xenophilia?

Well the song is not really about Lovecraft — it's sung by a guy who's identifying with Lovecraft at his most xenophobic and terrified. Why does that appeal? I think I'm just attracted to hermits in general — to people who don't feel like they're part of the world, who have a hard time feeling like they're really present in the same space as everybody else.

Second part of your question is self-evidently true, the classic trope is Alien Invasion, right, not Aliens Who Are Swell Folks!

Are there particular science fiction authors you're influenced by? Or other works of science fiction that have had an impact on your writing process?

When I was a kid I pretty much worshiped Harlan Ellison and I still think he's a good writer. Through his interviews & his introductions in the Dangerous Visions books I got into James Sallis & Carol Emshwiller, and I'm still a big Emshwiller fan to this day — she writes such hard good sentences. I think I checked out of the science fiction hotel early in high school and never really looked back, lit-wise — the stuff that was getting popular was Piers Anthony and Anne McCaffrey stuff, and more power to anybody who's into that sort of thing, but I liked much much darker stuff and I started reading Faulkner instead. I think I'm more interested in horror than science fiction ever since — it's more of a constricted niche but it seems to attract writers whose visions are more demented. Not that there isn't plenty of awful horror too of course. If I gotta see one more well-dressed ambiguously sexual vampire whose manners are 19th-century impeccable, I'm gonna fall asleep and never wake up again.

Your new book, Master Of Reality, is about a teenager in an adolescent psychiatric care facility explaining his need for his confiscated copy of the Black Sabbath album the way you'd explain "love to an android," according to the 33 1/3 blog. I'm dying to read it. How far do you pursue this metaphor? Is adult sanity like being an android? Also, the album ends with "Into The Void," about leaving a doomed Earth for outer space. Do you think people still write songs about this type of escapism from a ruined world? (I can't think of any recent "we're leaving Earth" songs, but maybe I'm missing something.)

I think the narrator of the book is saying something that all teenagers know instinctively: that there is something wrong with adults. That, somewhere along the way, the adults lost the plot. Maybe it's just that they got stressed out by having to pay bills, or maybe it's just the nature of aging, but from a teenager's perspective, it looks like aging just strips you of your ability to be reasonable, to be cool, to understand other people. So in that sense, teenagers are living as captives in some colony where the androids have all taken over, and where they've made it clear that they intend to turn their captives into androids, too.

I think people prefer to soak in dystopianism more than write about escape the way Ozzy did — and, to be honest, I think it's posing to focus real hard on "the world is screwed!" tropes. It's like, every emo and metalcore band thinks they're the first people to notice that the world is harsh. Good job dudes! Give yourselves a gold star! Meanwhile Ozzy has the courage to dream, to talk about leaving the world and going someplace where everything's cool, and he sneaks in "the world is screwed" tropes while he's at it - that's what makes for a good lyric, I think — that little bit of extra effort.

Talon was the wholesome mascot of 96.4 Eagle, the "adult contemporary" radio station in Guildford, England, DJing during the weekday overnight and Saturday afternoon slots. She seems to have spoken on the radio, judging from the photos of her on the microphone. Her predecessor Twinkle, by contrast, was voiced by a pre-recorded woman in Dallas with the cyber-sounding name of Pamela Steele. (Oh, and here's Pamela voicing a "Manwich" commercial.)

Talon started out with a black bustier, but graduated to her chrome look eventually. She had two "minders," Sophie and Gill, who also took turns being inside the costume. (Talon also had other "minders" who were more bouncer-y, in case someone got any ideas.) In some of the pictures, Sophie and Gill do a weird sort of dance routine, in which they seem to be worshipping their new android ruler, literally bending over backwards while she gestures over them.

The promo photos of the two androids range from the titillating to the seriously disturbing. I will refrain from pointing out that the exact midpoint of Guildford and Slough is the town of Staines. Images by Lemoncat1.

Photos by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images. [WWD]

Apparently Elvis used to live in some kind of arcade. Here is Jeff's friend Eliza hanging out with uninjured Elvis. Jeff speculates:

I imagine there was either a messy breakup or a drunken kickboxing match, and Elvis-bot here took one right in the grill, then got dumped in the road. The thing is, covered in grime and with part of his face missing, it's MILLIONS of times cooler than it ever was brand-new. Sure, it took a little trauma and a lot of scarring, but that's what builds real character in humans and robots alike.

Flickr stream of the tragic robo-Elvis