Metropolis and Robot City | Two 10 Pesos Robot Books

Something I picked up for 10 Pesos at Booksale: Isaac Asimov's Robot City.

I've never read a sci-fi story by Isaac Asimov before, so imagine my dismay when I found out he just lent his Robot City universe to Robert Thurston.  I misread the book's title "Intruder" as Foreword.

But Intruder is surprisingly good, philosophically tackling the curious question of "What is truly human?", but without sounding like an underpaid high school science teacher.

The robots are interesting too, reprogrammed by a Big Brother-like Watchful Eye who's now taken over Robot City.  Now the robots deviate from their usual boring routinary selves: Timestep tap dances, and Bogie, now with a penchant for slang, quotes lines from old movies left and right.

Ironically enough, the Watchful Eye suspects the real humans Ariel and Derec--prone to indecisiveness, outbursts and violence as they are--to be inferior and consequently less than human than the robot Silversides named Adam and Eve, who are suddenly now discovering they have a capacity for caring and concern after all.  All these for 10 Pesos.

Come to think of it, the only other book I've read that sort of featured a robot was The Wizard of Oz.  (In Wizard of Oz, the Tin Man wants a heart to become a human, while in Robot City, the crazed Dr. Avery wants a positronic robot brain to become a full-fledged robot.  They could just swap.)

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Actually, thanks to Wired's list of sci-fi best robots (lots of robots on the list, by the way, with a blatant disregard for the Three Laws of Robotics)--if it weren't for it, I'd have forgotten about the robot in Metropolis.  Another book I bought from a friend--again, for just ten Pesos--during my high school days.  

I remember reading Metropolis with pervading admiration every single page.  It read like a parable.  The repeating verses were like a mantra, hypnotic, but also mirroring the mechanical fate of the slave workers in the dystopian city.  The book's prologue goes:

This book is not of today or of the future.
It tells of no place.
It serves no cause, party or class.
I has a moral which grows on the pillar of understanding:
"The mediator between brain and muscle must be the Heart."

Maschinenmensch

From Wired.com

Source code: Fritz Lang's 1927 silent sci-fi labor allegory Metropolis.

Execute win! The most notorious of cinema's robot pioneers.

Major malfunction: A terrorist gynoid straight outta Pygmalion, who performs riot-inciting erotic dances to destabilize the social order? Paging Dr. Freud!

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In the film version by Fritz Lang (the author's wife) , the robot's name is Maschinenmensch (German for machine human); in the book, she is called Parody or Futura, and is made to become  a doppelganger of Maria the leading lady.  This fake Maria thus proceeds to mislead the workers of the catacomb cities, revolt against the city's creater Joh Fredersen, and destroy the source of their scourge: Metropolis itself.

Metropolis the film was beautifully avant garde and amazing.  Every five seconds or so I kept wondering how the hell they made this so and so special effects back in the 1920's, which can be sort of distracting from the whole point of the film, but then with a fantastic film as Metropolis, awe is simply inevitable.

I liked the book better though.  I was so engrossed in Parody's deceit I completely forgot she was a robot.