Book #74

I, robot
by Howard S. Smith

Why would you take a title that's already been used? And not used by just anyone, but used by one of the greatest and best-known science fiction writers in history? And not just used by that author, but later turned into a massive Hollywood blockbuster starring one of the most popular actors of the day, thereby assuring that, unlike many famous science fiction titles, every person in the US knows this particular title? I would think you'd have to be either paying homage in some way to the previous works with the title, such as a depiction of how the book became a movie or some form of biography, or else you'd have to be terribly, terribly stupid.

After reading Dr. Howard S. Smith's novel I, robot, I have to go with the second option, with a qualification. Dr. Smith is an MIT-trained engineer and clearly an intelligent and learned man. Unfortunately, as an author, the man is a complete buffoon. Hence the title -- which Dr. Smith actually tried to justify by pointing out that his title uses a small "r" in "robot." Thereby proving that he doesn't understand grammar, or the purpose and value of a title on a work of fiction, and also resurrecting the memory of Vanilla Ice claiming he didn't steal the melody from the Bowie/Queen song "Under Pressure" because "Ice, Ice, Baby" used an extra beat instead of a rest in the drum track.

The book has two main elements, which are the necessary parts for any good (and, of course, any bad) near-future science fiction novel: it has science, and it has fiction -- a storyline, with plot, characters, setting, and so forth. Dr. Smith does one of these well. The robots described are, I'm sure, well-designed; not being a roboticist myself, I did not try to decipher the technical descriptions (nor answer the technical questions that Dr. Smith included in his "Discussion Questions" at the end of the novel, as if this -- thing -- is ever going to be an Oprah book pick or a standard school text) nor the diagrams, of which there are several. I didn't have any desire to analyze the technical diagrams, as they have nothing to do with the story, and I took this book up as a novel, not as a textbook on robotics with a sidebar in nuclear weapons technology. What I cared about was the storyline, the characters and the setting, and in those areas, the book showed about as much style and grace as did the aforementioned rap "song."

So what's wrong with the fiction elements? First, the novel is set in 2010, and at the beginning of the book, North Korea successfully tests an ICBM with a nuclear warhead, thus threatening Japan, and terrorists in Lebanon (Versions of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda so thinly veiled by imaginary names they might as well be called Losama in Baden and el-Qaedo. Or maybe he could have used a small "r" to show the enormous difference between his version of the name and someone else's.) fire rockets at Israel. And somehow, despite the US and China and all the other nuclear powers having a very serious interest in any country becoming nuclear and developing attack capabilities, particularly if that nation is North Korea, somehow Japan is left to deal with a nuclear North Korea all by itself. And despite the fact that terrorists have been attacking Israel since its creation as a sovereign country half a century ago, when these rockets are fired, the Israeli military lets them land because their countermeasures are expensive and "they [the terrorists] never hit anything anyway." Then when the terrorists do hit their target, and the military are finished standing and staring like slack-jawed yokels, Israel counterattacks in the dumbest possible way, with an airstrike without gathering any intelligence -- despite Israel's preeminent intelligence-gathering ability, one of the tools that nation has used to survive these sorts of attacks for the last half-century -- and when they bomb innocent civilians in Lebanon (something that has happened repeatedly over the course of Israel's struggles), all the other nations of the world immediately turn on Israel, declaring sanctions and threatening to arrest any Israelis within their borders. Despite the fact that Israel has never been sanctioned for defending itself against terrorists. Maybe it was because the Israelis turned so stupid overnight -- a problem that is compounded when the Israelis send their tanks into Lebanon to deal with the terrorists directly, and all of them are wiped out by terrorists with anti-tank weapons. Because the Israeli army has no idea how to deal with anti-tank weapons. Not like they won a war in six days, or anything. But because these two nations have these suddenly insurmountable problems, they strike a deal: Israel will give Japan several working nuclear weapons, and Japan will give Israel several hundred thousand robot foot soldiers, with which they can invade Lebanon and remove the terrorist threat.

Once the setting has been established, the characters come in. The main character is a Japanese police inspector named Haruto. Haruto has obsessive compulsive disorder, and is thus a stickler for the rules -- he turned in most of the detectives in his precinct for taking free meals from a restaurant, thereby destroying their careers and his own marriage. Fortunately for Haruto, his obsession with following the rules -- which leads him to blow the whistle on the secret nukes-for-robots deal, as he can't abide his nation breaking the rules and possibly leading to a second Hiroshima/Nagasaki defeat -- only rises when it is convenient: when he is falsely accused of murder, he says that sometimes you have to break the rules, and he refuses to turn himself in. Whenever he gets into trouble, he makes up new rules to get himself out of trouble -- when he falls overboard into the Pacific Ocean, for instance, he makes this new rule for himself: "Find the lifebuoy and conserve energy until a passing ship comes by and picks him up." (Please ignore the use of third person within an internal dialogue; it happens to people who don't know how to write.) That's a good rule. Good thing he thought of it. Good thing he has such wonderful control over his obsessive compulsive disorder, which is usually characterized by the need to perform actions that obstruct a normal life, rather than preserve it.

The story doesn't get better. The love story is ridiculously cliche -- she is an Israeli kibbutznik, whom Haruto impresses when he beats up her former (now abusive and threatening) boyfriend, impregnates almost immediately thereafter, and declares his undying love for. The war scenes are described with mathematic precision but little else, as we are given repeated instances of Dr. Smith's multiplication ability -- the Israeli robotic units are made up of one human soldier, 22 biped scout robots called Alphas (who are depicted on the front cover and look almost exactly like the robots in the film I, Robot, but I'm sure that's a meaningless coincidence), and eight multi-legged carrier robots called Betas, and Dr. Smith repeatedly used lines like, "Lieutenant Chaim Dayan, 32 soldiers, 704 Alphas and 256 Betas -- nine hundred and ninety-three men and machines, were in Lebanon now." But when they attack, it's more along the lines of, "Then the robots ran up and set off the explosives, which killed all the terrorists. The end." (Not a direct quote.) When Dr. Smith cannot turn to mathematics or technical jargon, he falls back into the ivory-tower science-nerd's obsession with trivia: he uses the word "amaranth" to describe a character's red shirt, he has a Japanese character pause in the middle of a serious argument to give a small dissertation on seppuku -- the colloquial term is hari-kiri, not hari-kari, and there is almost always a second man called a kaishakunin who decapitates the samurai after the disemboweling, and aren't you glad you know that now? Me too -- and Haruto's karate is described in loving detail, with the Japanese names for the specific blows and a running tally of the duration and time elapsed between strikes -- he lashed out with an oi-tsuki strike that shattered the man's nose in one-eleventh of a second, that sort of thing.

What else can I say? The story ends badly, with Haruto coming to an epiphany too late and ending in tears -- albeit totally cured of his OCD -- and the nations of the world falling into a new and deadly arms race, putting the lie to the claim on the back cover that "The love one man has for a woman has the power to save the world. Or destroy it." Because in the end, Haruto had no effect on the robots-for-nukes deal, nor on the events that follow. Then the last chapter jumps ahead 800 years to a world where humans have died out but the robots remain, a future completely unrelated to the novel's plot or themes (what there is of those) except for one thing: the robots have Haruto's OCD. After that there is an extensive glossary, with lengthy explanations of all technical terms used throughout the book, and an annotated bibliography that would fit much better at the end of a scholarly article. Which is probably what Dr. Smith should have written, instead of inflicting this bunk on the science fiction world. All in all, this is a terrible book, a poorly written, poorly considered, and amateurish attempt to do what Isaac Asimov did so very well fifty years ago. Dr. Smith should have left the writing to the writers.