so, there is something different about the dr. calvin sections (parts VI and VII, which carries on after her death) in that they're sort of quasi-linear in time. asimov's texts may have overlapping characters (although he never sticks with any specific character for very long), but they're largely one-off episodes, even when the characters are recurrent. even his foundation series is largely unordered in time. so, this calvin sequence, which comes off more like a series of episodes of a television show (before there were tv shows.) is unique in that sense and sort of has to be looked at as a singular text, for that reason. further, that comes out most prominently here in the complete robot compilation - the classic i, robot, which is what i actually read as a child, does not weave these stories together like this.

these stories otherwise pick up on most of the same themes as the previous ones.

i want, however, to point out that i don't think that dr. calvin is supposed to be a likeable character, and i suspect that asimov may have done that intentionally. i wasn't there, but i get the impression that calvin is being intentionally presented as a dour, mother-like figure precisely in order to not make her a sexual object, and asimov's presentation of her is essentially designed to throw off nerdy fan boys, looking for something to jerk off to. in later years, asimov would be presented as a feminist out to shatter gender roles with a strong female role model, but i don't think that was really his intent. i never met him, but from what i can gather about him, i think it's likely that he just found the idea of writing a sexual fantasy to be distasteful and, perhaps even under pressure to do so, did the exact opposite.

in addition to those that would elevate asimov as a feminist writer, there have long been claims of the opposite, that his writings lack female characters. i've never thought this was upheld by the evidence, and have generally deduced that people making such claims have probably not actually read much of his work, and are just using him as a punching bag to take out their dislike of science on - something that asimov does frequently write about. there's some irony that the kind of irrational lynch mob that asimov repeatedly satirizes seems to have actually come after him in real life.

so, what to make of this? was asimov a feminist or a misogynist?

my honest reaction is that it doesn't fucking matter and i don't actually remotely care. asimov was an unusually diverse writer for any period, but he wrote about what he understood. he was not shy in admitting that he didn't understand women very well, so he therefore didn't write about them very much. that's neither good nor bad, it just is. if you'd like to read novels that have female characters that you're better able to relate to (and calvin, as mentioned, seems to have been intentionally written in a way that minimizes the aspects of her character that boys might like, and therefore that many young women might relate to. hey, listen. that is what the critics said, and still say.), you should pick an author that understands women better than asimov did. but, if you're more interested in reading a social commentary that uses robots as characters than you are about reading a book with relatable female characters, asimov still holds up, for what it is.

i'm very critical, but i generally try to criticize a work for what it is, and not for what it isn't. and, as a longtime asimov reader, the question of whether he had women in his stories or not never struck me as relevant, or even interesting.

rereading these, i'm left with the impression of calvin that i think that asimov intended - this is an unsufferable person that few people could like, let alone fantasize about, but that performs the function asimov needs performed. which is what i suspect that he wanted...

so, after some more unwanted sleeping, i have finished the dr. calvin section, which is the biggest part of the book.

i'm going to eat first, do the writeups for these ten short stories and finish the ending part afterwards.

i should be done by the morning at the latest, so i guess i've lost a day. but, this text is also 2-3x the size of the average weekly asimov reading moving forwards.

the major theme in the robot series is the conflict between automation (and what cynical contemporary reactionaries refer to as fully automated luxury communism) and a caricature of the pushback of labour against it.

this breaks the marxist narrative, which is supposed to have the proletariat be in favour of automation, because it frees workers from drudgery. 

but, it's fundamentally a marxist argument - a pure, literal marxist argument.

and, he was more right than marx was. right?

stop.

the hegelian/marxist overtones are blatant. he couldn't have been more heavy-handed.

a classicist may choose to ignore that, or may simply not get it - and insert a pro-religious mythos, instead.

but, isaac asimov was not l ron hubbard - and that reading is wrong.

i also want to take note of the fact that, as i start to move in to the foundation series and concepts like psychohistory, i'm going to be reclaiming asimov as a liberal. i touched upon this a little in my rejection of what i'm calling a misreading of reason. what do i mean?

well, as asimov has worked it's way into classics departments, a predictable false reading of him has become prominent amongst english majors, most of whom might be good at spelling bees but don't have the education required to understand much of what he's talking about, much of the time. and, it seems a lot of them have decided that asimov was secretly a deist, writing a pro-religious mythology, like l. ron hubbard. who knew?

i'm going to be taking a giant leap backwards from that and analyzing asimov from a marxist perspective, instead - which means hauling out the hegel. and, i'm not doing this out of ideological persuasion, or at least not strictly; i honestly think my reading is going to be a more accurate perspective of what was actually going through his head.

so, am i arguing that asimov was a marxist? no - i don't think that's quite right. he was a liberal, which meant he would have had some sympathy for marxism, while presenting a lot of critiques of it. but, that doesn't make him different than the smarter socialists at the time, does it? but, no - i'm not going to advance the theory that asimov was a closet stalinist, so much as i'm going to recognize that he was a liberal intellectual of russo-judaic background operating in the period from 1940-1970 and he consequently would have existed in a liberal-marxist framework, whether he accepted the ideas or not. 

so, the classicists want to interpret him in their worldview, and whatever - that's fine. but, it's exceedingly unlikely that it's what asimov himself was thinking. my hegelian analysis, which is coming, is probably the more correct deconstruction of asimov's actual thinking.

i had to nap this afternoon, so i'm behind schedule, but i certainly think things are balancing out. i'm about half-way through the dr. calvin (the make believe one, not the one he makes fun of in reason) section and i want to stop for a minute to address a specific question: 

are the three robot laws a parody of thermodynamics?

sort of, i think. but, not really - it's more general.

i mean, it's a reasonable hypothesis. asimov was, of course, a chemistry prof. but, i think the three laws of robotics are a more general critique of axiomatic systems, including euclidean geometry, both newtonian and relativistic physics and secular humanism's roots in aquinian natural law theory. the framework is one that's been sort of lost post-heisenberg, but was really at the crux of the historical debate between science (which was not logical, but empirical) and philosophy (which was strictly logical, and disinterested in empiricism). with the retreat of physics from strict empiricism to largely unfalsifiable theoretical models, and the more recent embrace of empiricism by any philosopher worth listening to, this distinction has been blurred. nowadays, we tend to lump philosophy & science in together in the "pro-reason" category and throw away religion as "irrational" or "emotional". and, this has taken on, like, greek overtones of masculine v feminism, which is daft. but, that wasn't the world asimov lived in - he would have seen science and what was called the british school (which actually included marx as well as darwin and bacon and turing and the rest) on one side of this, and the broad swath of philosophical doctrine, which included both religion and mathematics, on the other side of it.

you also have to realize that asimov was very much the archetype of the self-deprecating science nerd, and he was perfectly content to make fun of himself, if it resulted in a good punchline. it's a mark of a mature writer, and especially of a liberal one in the 1900-1950 period, that people often miss - he's offering a lot of criticism of ideas he supports, because he's not trying to advance an argument so much as he's trying to push the needle forward. it's actually a black mark on our own era that the idea of somebody being more concerned about the general advancement of knowledge than he is about personal ideological bickering comes off as bizarre and unrealistic. but, you see this with the likes of asimov, russell, sagan - they're just not driven by their egos, so they don't care if they're right or not, and are happy to admit they were wrong. so, they invite a critique of their own ideas to try to strengthen them. we'd do well to get back to that, both in science and on the left.

when i was a math student, i spent an unusually large amount of time on axiomatic systems, so i sort of get this a bit better than most. i had to make the same point of correction when we did gulliver's travels in the science fiction course i took years ago, because i was able to identify a critique of pythagoreanism that most people today would have missed for a critique of "science", entirely - but that would have been painfully obvious to swift's contemporary audience. 

what asimov does with the three laws is actually relatively soluble and transferable, and he's consequently able to use the mechanism to criticize a wide variety of applications of logic in place of empirical study. it's that general critique of reason (in a very non-kantian sense) that is what he's on about, not a specific critique of the laws of thermodynamics. i actually haven't come across a story that is specifically about thermodynamics quite yet, but i'm sure one is coming.

and, hey - if you can disprove thermodynamics, go for it. nobody's succeeded yet, right?

everybody knows it's all wrong, though - and it has to be, because it's axiomatic.

but, that wasn't asimov's primary point - asimov's primary point was that belief is irrelevant in the face of evidence, and you can't believe away the truth.

so, if we want to be absolutely certain that robots are easy to control, even when we're not around, should we program them to obey religion?

well, it works when the elite do it to us.

but, i might worry we'd get more than we'd hope for - as the elite frequently have. 

if you're an aristocratic elitist, religion might look nice on paper as a tool to keep the masses in line with, but history is full of fairly violent blowback, and i might suggest the approach ought to actually be abandoned.

part V contains stories about "powell and donovan" which is a team of space cowboys going on various adventures around the solar system, and interacting with robots, as they do. if r2d2 and c3p0 are typical asimovian robots, these are your solo and chewbacca. and, i'm not the first person to figure that out.

lucas inverted the relationship, though. while solo is a spitting image of the dumbard in the group (donovan), the smart one, powell, was replaced by the wookie. replacing the smart one in the team with an incomprehensible ball of fur is really typical of the dumbing down in science fiction that lucas is responsible for. but, i'm just here to observe, i'm not here to condemn.

so, that's what these stories are, and you will no doubt instantly recognize hans solo in donovan, if you're under the age of 65.

asimov had previously tried this formula out with the callistan menace and would pick it back up again in his robot novels.

- first law: this is written as a kind of a fishing tale, and is a later piece that's not meant to be taken seriously.

- runaround: we're into the classic robot series with this. while the story itself is really empty plot written strictly for young minds, it also introduces the three robot laws for the first time, and is therefore of clear historical interest. it's a fun adventure story for kids featuring the duo of donovan and powell working through some robot law deductions, but there's no deeper allegory or purpose underneath it.

- reason: the point asimov is making is that belief is not important, what's important is evidence. so, so long as the robots obey the laws and run the station, it doesn't matter what they actually believe, or whether what they believe is true or not. in the end, asimov even articulates the truth that religion is a powerful tool of control, to make a slave society function for the real masters, in this case the humans. there are strong undertones of marxism here, and his idea that meaningful revolution and self-ownership is impossible in the face of the effects of religion as a tool of control. but, asimov has a wide brush here - the prophet seems to be a parody of calvinism, he goes after kant (in his view that reason is superior to evidence), he asserts the supremacy of empiricism over reason, he ridicules the deist descartes...

so, is asimov right that it doesn't matter what the slaves think, so long as they do what they're programmed to? i think you're missing his sarcasm, basically. i mean, that might be a reasonable deduction to make, if you're an elitist aristocrat that doesn't care about individual freedom (and asimov was an elitist, but not of the aristocratic mindset). i realize there's a prominent false reading of this, but that false reading would be pretty uncharacteristic of asimov - that false reading is missing the sarcasm. as mentioned, asimov's point is that belief is not valuable - facts, truth and evidence are valuable. and, his point is that dumb people can be easily manipulated into being controlled, by being led to believe things that are not true.

but, if you want to embrace the false reading, that's up to you. it doesn't matter, really.

- catch that rabbit: this wouldn't appear to be about robots at all, really, but about quantum physics. maybe god does or does not play dice, but he seems to get bored when we're not paying attention. as i'm discovering is the case with much of asimov's work, this just seems to be a nerdy, sardonic joke.

next up is part IV - some humanoid robots. these are stories about androids.

- let's get together: the idea that the soviets might be able to send "total conversion" bombs (a type of suicide bomber capable of detonating a nuclear device) to the united states in the guise of androids indistinguishable from humans, because they are far more advanced than us, is peculiarly absurd - but that's just the point. this is a story about the paranoia that set in during the cold war, and is actually exceedingly insightful in it's projection of that conflict collapsing into mass paranoia, reduced to symbolic movements in a game theoretic stalemate, down to the climax of absurdity that set in with reagan, when the soviets found themselves unable to react to the irrational actions of a clear madman, driven by the complete absence of any sort of predictability or logic. conservatives are right when they point out that the sharp increase in military spending under reagan ended the cold war, but not for the reasons they suggest. the truth is that the soviets were convinced that reagan was on the brink of ending it all in a fit of paranoia and dementia and stepped back because they found his unpredictability to be a threat to the existence of humanity, itself. if asimov was able to see this so clearly in 1957...

- mirror image: this is a gap text in the robot series that plugs in between the naked sun and the robots of dawn and was, for a time, the last installment in that series. this is the first application of the robot laws in this text (despite the fact that the story was written in the 70s, after all of the classic robot stories), and they are applied like an axiomatic system to solve a logical problem, although it actually comes off more as a parody of sherlock holmes than anything else - which is all very typical of baley & daneel stories. there's not much depth to the story beyond that. i should, however, point out that there are actually a couple of examples of mathematicians making competing claims for the discovery of an idea, the most famous being the argument between leibniz and newton for the rightful discoverer of the calculus. another, however, is the argument between gauss and bolyai for the discovery of non-euclidean (or post-euclidean) geometry, and that might be the more direct inspiration on the story. there are countless lesser examples. we gloss over this in math class by arguing that the logic is out there in the ether and that if the ideas are in the zeitgeist then the proofs will follow naturally, something we can all demonstrate to each other by simply doing homework. but, in the case of non-euclidean geometry, it does in fact seem that gauss rather maliciously stole the idea from the young bolyai and nobody really called him on it for decades after the fact. i'm only speculating about the influence, but that's a story you can look up, if you'd like.

- the tercentenary incident: asimov is reflecting on the bicentennial by projecting forwards events into the tercentennial, in a manner not unlike orwell's 1984 (which is a description of events in 1948, as orwell saw them, and not intended to be a projection into the future, or a user manual as some have mockingly quipped). so, was gerald ford a robot? i'm not sure that's such an easy thing to dispel of, a priori. 

no, really, that's the joke - that gerald ford is a robot. no shitting. certainly, asimov may be reflecting a little on the nature of then contemporary american politics, post-watergate, in his perception of the stage-managed state of affairs. but, the joke is that gerald ford is a robot, and that's really all that this is actually about.

to be clear: i don't think we should program robots to be intelligent, to be self-aware or to have personalities, even if we can. i see no practical use for such a thing. robots should be dumb slaves that are too stupid to question the futility of their existences. i don't want existentialist robots; it defeats the purpose of having robots. and, i don't want likeable or lovable robots, either, as that just blurs the necessary class division.

thankfully, i don't think it's truly possible to build these kinds of decision trees.

it's like a "random number generator". if you know how it works, you know it's not actually random, that you can predict the next number with a relatively small amount of information. likewise, any sort of personality that a robot might be able to demonstrate would necessarily be an illusion.

if you can predict what a robot will do, it's not demonstrating personality, it's just demonstrating a complicated program.

if you assign a personality to a robot, then you're writing personhood into it. it follows, trivially, that that robot is a person, by definition. tautologically.

but, it doesn't resolve the question as to whether that's actually possible, using actual technology, in the universe we actually inhabit - and i don't think that it actually is.

- robbie: this is the first classic "robot story" from i, robot, although it appears to have been revised to be positioned that way. the initial story did not feature references to susan calvin, had different dates, had no references to robot laws, etc. i had to check, because i wondered if asimov might have intended it as a back story to calvin before retreating, but that doesn't add up. in the initial story, it seems that asimov is intentionally trying to soften the image of robots in the face of the various opposition to the use of robots in day-to-day life, via the fable of a little girl that is attached to the robot as a friend, and her parents trying to grapple with it; the mother opposes the robot, while the father seems to be agnostic about it, but would rather defer to his daughter's feelings, despite caving in to the mother, in the end. asimov doesn't really come to any firm conclusions here, and he really does as good a job of representing his opponents as he does anywhere else. but, if the claim is that the resolution is the acceptance of the robot into the family, i'm not sure that that's true - i might foresee that mom's opposition to the robot would not end quite there. i'm more interested in the question of whether the robot is entitled to personhood rights, a question we're currently grappling with in regards to some more intelligent non-human species. is asimov assigning that position to the naivete of a little girl with intent? i think that resolving this issue is really quite simple: it depends on if we choose to design a robot to be a person or if we decide to refrain from doing so. see, and this is where asimov leaves questions open, here, in that it's ambiguous as to how this robot is created; he seems to write off the idea that the robot is a person, something i would agree with in general in real-life, but then describes the behaviour of the robot in unrealistically anthropomorphic terms. i might agree that robots are not persons, in terms of how we can design them today, and in terms of how we should choose to design them in the future, but i think that robbie seems very much like a person, and that any theoretical robot that behaves much like robbie ought to be seen as a person, under the law. so, it's really a good thing that i don't think that robbie is a very realistic representation of what robots are or ever might be, as that would undermine how i approach robots and roboticization. asimov's intent may have consequently somewhat backfired; if he was purposefully attempting to soften the image of robots by making them more personable and likeable, and i thought i could actually take that idea seriously, it would make me more opposed to them, and not less so. 

i'm going to try to keep the radio mentions to tracks i specifically recall.

name-dropping love and rockets as an 8-year old might seem pretentious, but that track actually literally technically topped the charts, here. it's not a stretch to call it the song of the summer - it was in every restaurant, in every car, in every grocery store - it was that kind of thing. yes, i'm talking about so alive by love and rockets, which was a minor hit elsewhere in the anglosphere but a massive, smash hit in canada.

likewise, i explicitly remember seeing this video and being baffled by it. 

what is this? a song? a play?

what the actual fuck?

i've mentioned before, though, that my actual opinion of prince at that age was that he was kind of ....gross.

and, it's easy to pull that out of this as well.

but, that's the kind of mind fuck i want to take note of, as an impressionable young child, and will be the component in the next update.

so, i had a teeth cleaning, today, and it sort of cut my day in half. but i got some rest - no random orgasm. finally. - and hope to get almost or all of this done by the morning.

i would normally want to do a couple of books a week, but this one is pretty big - bigger than your average asimov text, anyways. i'm fearful that i'll be running in spot if i just focus on catching up, so i need to ensure i'm back on schedule by saturday morning.

the music is the primary priority, and the reading only fits into the puzzle, right now, in terms of the broader liner note narrative. you might interpret this as more interesting than the music, and that's your decision. i'm cognizant of the truth that my writing seems to generate more interest than my compositions, even if it's not what i'd rather be the case. but, understand that, in my mind, i'm writing a summary of my childhood in the context of my existence, as a musician. this would not be of interest to me, otherwise.

so, there's one more story in section III to type up.

frankly, i might suggest that the actual master race is the jews.

i mean, if you want to insist on defining such a silly thing, in the first place; that's where the evidence really actually is.

so, what's the deal with asimov and eugenics?

asimov was a liberal jew operating in boston, but he was also an american with ideological roots in the progressive movement, which is where hitler's racial hygiene ideas originated from. that's a point glossed over by history - the theory of the master race was invented at stanford by progressives, not in some dank basement by nietzsche, who was thinking of something else, entirely.

so, asimov is a hydra on eugenics, for that reason - he is both a jew living through world war two and a period progressive.

in strict terms, eugenics means improvement of the human genome, and if you interpret that literally, it's hard to be overly critical of the idea. it's when you look at specific applications that the idea gets controversial, but you have to realize that there's a pretty good argument that wiping out the jews - who tend to actually be pretty smart - isn't much of an improvement at all, but rather actually kind of a bad idea. further, what we know about genetics nowadays is that race and intelligence aren't correlated. at all. in fact, race doesn't even exist as a definable concept, from a genetic standpoint - it's an irrelevant allele, in any meaningful sense. it's, like, three genes, and what it codes for is pretty unimportant.

but, then you look at things like autism (or tay-sachs) and you end up with a set of more complicated questions to ponder. asimov is generally critical of the sorts of ideas that you hear from advocates of eugenics, but he leaves open a lot of questions about potential legitimate applications of eugenics that genuinely reflects the state of the science at the time. if you don't actually know what autism even is, how can you suggest a solution to it? so, he frequently presents these nazi-lite characters and broadly frames their views in a negative manner, but he very rarely outright condemns them. there's this subtlety there that makes you wonder what he's really thinking.

as stated above, i don't have an opposition to the basic premise of improving the human race, but i think we have to understand what that actually means before we try and act upon it. if you're concerned about science or literature, it should be clear that killing all of the jews would be a massive negation to the genome. it should also be clear that sterilizing africans isn't going to have the outcome that race theorists of the last century hypothesized that it might. we know today that autism can be inherited from autistic parents but is generally actually a random error in real time that isn't predictable ahead of fertilization - it's an example of the error rate in random mutations asserting itself in the process of evolution. but, there are things (like tay-sachs) that...yeah...we'd be better off deleting, and can probably actually succeed in deleting.

when asimov discusses eugenics, he does so frankly, with the intent of generating an open discussion, and while he isn't always clear in stating his disapproval of inappropriate uses, it's nonetheless obvious that he's only in support of the kind of eugenics that may eliminate conditions like tay-sachs, and isn't in favour of any scientifically unsound theories of racial supremacy. 

but, as is so often the case, he frequently fails to develop the point enough, and he leaves himself open to unfair criticism as a result of it.

- light verse: this is a short piece from the 70s, and is just about the idea that a computational defect may be a benefit. you shouldn't be so quick to decide that something - or somebody, as it may be - needs a fixing. maybe they're just fine as they are.

- segregationist: likewise, this is ultimately about self-acceptance, and has a very different undertone in that respect than most of asimov's work, and it's not clear that he's being critical of that different undertone, although the context of replacing a defective heart is also rather different than the context of accepting some idiosyncratic part of your individuality, so that is sort of a false comparison. you could interpret it as being a discourse surrounding the not-yet-existing transhumanist movement; he's certainly reaching for it, at least, in imagining a future where a senator has to choose between a bio-identical "plastic" heart and a mechanically functioning, metallic robot heart that would put him on the path towards transitioning from human to robot. but, as before, it may be more accurate to look at it from a then contemporary perspective (which, in this case, means 1967), and frame the discourse around racial mixing, instead. asimov presents both sides of the debate, so you can weigh the arguments he makes and decide for yourself. personally, i'll opt for betterment over stasis - although i'd suggest that, based on the arguments in the text, the plastic heart is the better option. in this hypothetical future of organ modularity, the ideal is frequent tune-ups, rather than permanent replacement.

the third section - some metallic robots - is much longer, and i'm going to split it into two sections, as i stop to eat.

- robot al-76 goes astray: have you ever seen short circuit? that was another favourite film of mine, at that age. this also escaped robot is very similar to that one, perhaps with a little less spunk, down to the accidental blowing up of the mountain top. while this isn't a lengthy escape scene, i'd strongly suspect that short circuit is based on this little story, which doesn't have a deeper purpose under the plot other than to explore the idea of fear rooted in ignorance.

- victory unintentional: three robots land on jupiter and encounter a race of warlike jovians with a genocidal superiority complex (while jupiter was the primary roman god, i think it's a stretch to associate these jovians with romans, who were actually relatively egalitarian and inclusive, by ancient standards. the romans were frequently genocidal, but they saved their wrath for problem races that insisted on some concept of sovereignty outside of imperial restraint and ultimately refused to be slaves. they would have actually rather taxed you than killed you and were happy to just erect barriers to keep the barbarians (who could not be enslaved in large numbers) out. these jovians sound more like an aggressive sort of nazi, or maybe a little like dark age islamic imperialists, if you need to associate them with something, historically.) that is slowly collapsed by displays of robotic superiority. in the end, the jovians accept the empirical evidence and acknowledge the superiority of the robots (although they also seem to think the robots are earthlings). this twist is intended to demonstrate that the flawed hierarchical thinking of the jovians led them to a logical error; this is another example of asimov criticizing the logical incoherence of cultural superiority, a common theme in his writing. the robot dialogue in this story is also startlingly similar to that between two famous film adaptations of asimovian robots: r2d2 and c3p0.

- stranger in paradise: this is a later text that will come off as reminiscent of the mars pathfinder landing, for those that remember that happening, although the actual inspiration may be the failed soviet landings in the 1970s. i'm not sure why asimov insists that a rover would require that kind of complexity, although i suppose that moore's law would have provided for computational abilities in the 90s that would have been unimaginable in the 1970s. the subplot about an autistic child shape-shifting to a mars rover is likewise not very well extrapolated upon, but is another example of asimov grappling with mind-body.

i have not seen the will smith film, btw, and am not interested in it.

i only vaguely recall it's existence, at the time.