Robotic Melding

I’ve be asked again to provide mental melding on the SF Signal blog.  The topic this time is “The Coolest Robots in SF.”  I’ve cross-posted my entry here, but you should go see the rest:

The coolest robots in SF? That’s a tall order. The field is vast, including everything from the ambulatory logical puzzle machines of Isaac Asimov’s Robot stories, to the Cylons of BSG. Gort to Wall-E. It’s almost an impossible task to narrow it down…But, if we agree that we’re talking about “coolness”, I think it becomes a little easier. If we define cool in the sense that ninjas, Harleys and dinosaurs are cool, and in the way that a ninja dinosaur riding a Harley is way cooler, well I think we can narrow things down a bit (I mean, Wall-E is cute, and cute <> cool).

So my three coolest robots:

• Bender from Futurama. Bender is anti-social, lecherous, dishonest, and hard-drinking. His only visible means of support is grand larceny. His evil twin is the good guy. If Han Solo was a robot, he’d be Bender, and he’d kick C3P0’s metrosexual ass.
• The Terminator, from the movie, natch. The Terminator defines cool for cinematic ass-kicking robotdom. The opening scene has him walking up to a set of Doomed Punks™ bare ass naked, and rips a guy’s stomach out for the poor schlub’s clothes. He dresses in a motorcycle jacket, carries an arsenal, wears a badass pair of shades- after doing home surgery on his own eyeball– and, after delivering one of the most quoted one-liners in cinema history, drives a truck into a police station before ventilating everyone in the place. And he’s a time-traveling robot from the future! That will always give bonus cool points.

And speaking of time-traveling robots from the future, there’s one robot cooler than the Terminator by at least five levels of Chuck Norris badassery (and please note that’s a logarithmic scale):

• The Shrike from Dan Simmons’ Hyperion and sequels. If Edward Scissorhands (another good robot, but emo, and emo<>cool) was a prophet, the Shrike would be his God. Here we have an near-omnipotent, near-invulnerable, time-traveling walking knife drawer that- if it doesn’t turn you into sushi while dodging every weapon that you throw at it- takes you home so it can impale you alive in its front yard where you get to writhe in agony forever while it looks on like the silent mega-badass it is.