Inhuman, maniacal robot; inhuman,
maniacal soldiers (4/5)
Kate Wilhelm is among a handful of
female science fiction writers who need no introduction. She’s authored scores
of short stories, about thirty-six genre novels, and eleven collections. She’s
probably more prolific than many common and respectable male authors, yet she
receives very little of the limelight that’s due to her (outside of
SFMistress’s occasional posting on her work). Of her novels, I read her most popular work Where Late
the Sweet Birds Sang (1976) and the much lesser popular Let the Fire Fall (1969),
their respective popularity very much reflecting their quality. Het two-story
collection in Abyss (1971) had some tantalizing perspective, a draw
which had me put out my feelers for more of her work. Thus, I purchased three
more Wilhelm books: the generically titled The Killer Thing (1967), one
of her late novels Welcome, Chaos (1983) and a slightly more substantial
collection: Children of the Wind (1989).
Prior to reading The Killer Thing,
I couldn’t help but guffaw at the title of the novel. A fellow heavy-reading colleague
of mine initially tore the title to pieces, but we ultimately found that in
that title, there probably lurks a few layers of meaning; however, when
interviewing a candidate who also had a flare for books, I didn’t mention the
title I was reading—too ashamed of the her opinion of my reading preference.
And yes, it felt awkward to be reading such a bad title in public.
Book’s own synopsis:
“In a last-ditch effort to liberate his
beloved planet Ramses, a scientist us the twenty-third century develops a
super-robot—one with a computer for a brain and a two-mile laser for an
eye—that somehow destroys its inventor and programs itself to kill all life.
The universe is strange and
unimaginable. Earth has colonized Venus, Mars and other planets in a series of
devastating coups that have left civilization scorched and populations
decimated. World Group Government keeps watch over an uneasy truce, but
everywhere the contaminating greed of Earthmen is hated, their influence
despised in a simmering passion that drives alien beings to quite
human—superhuman—lengths.
Dr. Vianti, for example. His native
planet, rich in platinum ore, was summarily seized by the World Group, the
mines taken over, and Vianti left with the task of speeding up production of a
robot he had designed to do the work of twenty-five men in the mines. Secretly,
he worked on his own project.
When Trace, a Captain of the World
Group Army, arrives on the scene, the killer robot has already succeeded in
piloting a force-field and laser equipped fleet ship, destroying an entire city
and threatening several small planets. Trace and his crew chase the robot to an
arid, desert planet, where a sinister and unexpected showdown occurs. Suddenly
Trace finds himself the sole survivor, pitted against an inhospitable planet
and a computerized death machine on the rampage. Weakened by the elements and
the lack of food and water. Trace has just one advantage over the
robot—imagination. But is it enough to win his inexorable battle with The Killer Thing?
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That’s one damned good synopsis that I
have very little to expand on other than specifics about the battle plagued by
Trace’s boredom, the robot’s insufferable drive, and blatant overtones of the
anti-war sentiment.
So, the premise sounds pretty lame,
right: a maniacal robots that shoots laser beams wants to kill all humans and
later stalks a soldier on a desert planet. That’s exactly how the novel start
off, too. With limited resources on the insignificant desert plant, Lieutenant
Ellender Tracy (Trace) cowers away from the heat of the day in his dinghy for
most of the time, occasionally shooting off toward the distant horizon when the
robot nears. His fuel is limited, his food is limited, his water is limited,
and his patience wears thin while waiting for rescue. Regardless of his pains,
“he had to get up and get out, he had to find the [robot’s] dinghy, had to
fortify the valley” (112).
The robot’s dinghy (I hate this word)
entered the atmosphere just before Trace did. It’s unfortunate that the robot
has an invisibility cloak on its dinghy, but Trace knows its general location
and so establishes a form of fortification among the rocks. His salvation lies
in his plan to steal the robot dinghy’s resources so that he can eke out
another day: “He would refuel his own dinghy, take the water and oxygen,
destroy the other dinghy” (114). But simply dodging the perpetual attacks by
the roving killer robot is not enough—Trace also hopes to kill the menace
somehow because it’s not only a threat to his life, but to all of humanity.
The robot was once a mining robot:
eight-foot tall, weighing eight tons, armed with a stone cutting laser, and
gifted with a logic circuit. Though the planet of Ramses is littered with many
of similar robots that mine ore from the mountains, Dr. Vianti took special
interest in developing this one robot in his underground laboratory. The
conniving doctor was proud of his work, but his robot of wonder was one step
ahead of him. Coming to terms with its intelligence, ability to learn, and its
gift of life, it must follow its two directives: 1) the first is “the immediate
satisfaction of the goal achievement” and 2) the second is “self-preservation
in order to function and achieve goal satisfaction” (43). Without a primary
goal to achieve, the robot sees that self-preservation is its prerogative. When
the doctor says aloud that he needs to destroy the robot so that it will not
fall in to the wrong hands, the robot feels threatened and thus kills its
creator, escaping into open space.
Trace had once met the robot and its
creator before it turned killer. Now they are together again on the same podunk
planet and the robot feels threatened not only by Trace, but by all of mankind;
“all man wanted to destroy it”, therefore “all men were the enemy” (146). Trace
takes a philosophical approach to probing the robot’s intentions asking himself
if it can be reasoned with, if it even knows what “kill’ is, and who had taught
the robot to hate. Unlike the monomaniacal robot bent on destroying all of
mankind in order to secure its own life, Trace can’t allow himself to hate: “You
can’t afford to hate the enemy because hate involves emotions and a man with
emotions driving him it not a man to be trusted in war” (173).
This isn’t exactly the opening salvo of
the anti-war sentiment which runs throughout the novel, but it does highlight
the opinion that soldiers must be emotionless robots, too, in order to face
war. However, though these emotionless drones of war benefit the government
which seeks to wage war, the soldiers remain emotionless even among people,
especially foreign people. The planet of Ramses, where the robot was created,
is one recently dominated by the World Group and the soldiers have had a fun
time with the women there. Trace has partaken in this debauchery only because
he was learned the truth from the one woman he loved on the planet. She thinks
the soldiers are a disease spreading throughout the galaxy, and Trace begins to
take the same sentiment.
Trace knows himself and knows that he
has emotion, which he also considers his only unique weapon against the
otherwise strictly logical killer robot. Offering advice to himself, Trace says,
“Whatever you can reason out, so can it … use your humanness on it, your
instincts, your intuition, anything that isn’t a part of logical planning”
(54). Trace’s wild card against the robot is that it would not understand human
thinking: “It couldn’t know about the very human ability to gamble on a long
shot” (57-58).
There’s an obvious parallel between the
cold inhumanness of the robot and that of soldiers, that war is fought by
mindless drones and in order to kill without feeling, the kernel of emotion
must be removed; thence, the primary directive of self-preservation is key. In
the robot, this is by its own design, but in humans, this primary
self-preservation is selfish, anti-social or even psychotic—to feel more for
oneself rather than for the collective. Kill or be killed is the robot’s
motto, similar to the illogical move of governments to resort to war—it’s
either them or us! Much as history repeats itself, this human
fascination with inhuman war carries itself through our history and into our
fiction and into our science fiction; some novels (and nations, people, and news
media) sickeningly glorify war and the soldiers who fight them, but The
Killer Thing is a novel for those with similar anti-war sentiments. And by anti-war
sentiments, I don’t mean the “well, freedom isn’t free” kind of mentality,
rather the “you people are idiots and I want to leave the country (so I did)”
kind of mentality.
But there’s one more thread to the
novel which spurs further interest: that of “the Outsiders”. Rather than
believing that God will come to save them, colonists where the World Group has
invaded, the people believe that the Outsiders will answer their prayers. Trace
used to find the idea of the Outsiders “superstitious and ignorant” (66) but he
later begins to admire the concept, the rumor, the possible existence of the
perfect beings:
They had conquered everything that plagued man;
they had no disease, no death, no unnameable desires. It was as if they had
climbed continuous stairs and were nearing the top while man was only then
beginning to suspect that the evolutionary ladder continued upward far beyond
the point that Earthmen already had reached it. (111)
This is one further jab at man’s
obsession with war. The novel isn’t too militaristic in regards to using rank
or maneuvers, but it is a bit heady-handed on the vilification of aggressive military
action and the insistence that soldiers ought to be dehumanized in order to do
inhumane acts. Thankfully, Trace’s
character is a scorned lover with a fresh insight into his own nature and that
of World Group, providing a good vehicle between mindless robot and mindless
soldier.
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