Awesome Robot Time

(Sig banner by my sister.)

Today, I'm going to talk a bit about a charming story called The Runaway Robot. Conceptualized by Lester del Rey and ghost written by... some other guy, it's an old SF kids' book. As the review I linked notes, many people remember it fondly for being a charming story about a boy and his robot, who turns out to be far more human than anyone thought possible.

This leaves me with several possible subjects. I could talk about robot rights, which is a biggie.

Or I could talk about the charming anachronisms, such as sending messages through space on tapes.

I could talk about how the "boy and his robot" thing is practically a sub-genre. (I even read a book years ago that would fit in the sub-genre while defying its conventions, where a little girl met a huge, surly exploration robot, who complains about plot holes in science fiction movies, among other things. Here it is on Amazon.)

I could even talk about how Rex, the main character and narrator, is good-natured and pleasant without being sickeningly so.

But I'm not going to talk about any of those things.

I'm going to talk about Rex's unintentional awesome factor. Like Robot John before him (or after him, depending on if you mean my personal timeline or the blog's timeline), Rex is pretty awesome.

While Robot John is awesome because he overcame his own clunkiness and tried to throw the foolish scientist who built him into a lava flow, Rex is awesome because he's a devious, devious guy.

Case in point: Rex can't technically lie. He's programmed not to. But, when faced with a situation where he needs to deceive someone, he can lie by omission. (He does so many times.) But that's only the tip of the iceberg.

At one point, he totally makes up some nonsense to distract some people. (Something like "Help! Help! A mad robot killed my whole family! I had a stick I was using to hold him off, but I dropped it!" Technically, that's lying-I don't know how his anti-lying circuits missed that. By the way, mad robots, robots that randomly went berserk, were a common element of the story. We don't see too many, but they're mentioned often, as they're one of the worst perils of the society. The reason he was distracting people was because there was a real mad robot out there, and some fools mistook him for it.)

Here's a real kicker, though-knowing he wouldn't be able to escape a ship captain that he was taking passage with, and determined to do so, he made fake serial number plates with his own and another robot's serial numbers, and switched serial numbers with the other (lackwitted) robot in order to escape. Those anti-lying circuits didn't define lying very well, did they?

Then, while he's walking down the street, he learns that Paul (the boy who "owns" him but from whom he has been separated by the plot of the book) is going to get in trouble for stealing him (even though he didn't get stolen-he ran away). So in order to ensure that Paul doesn't get in trouble, he uses a simple ploy-he pretends to go mad. (Mad robots usually just ran around like crazies, but reportedly they sometimes gained magic powers that let them control people and other things like that. Hence, if he had been a mad robot, he would have kidnapped Paul instead of being stolen.)

This was completely outside of any possible programming parameters he might have had (he started his rampage by punching a guy out, and he was programmed so he couldn't hurt people). Further, it was pure suicide-the only sane response to a mad robot is to melt its head off with a ray gun. (Rex was saved by the fact that he wasn't mad, but happened to encounter another robot that was mad-when the other robot tried to run down some children, he stopped it, and a police sergeant, knowing he wasn't mad, switched him off instead.) Anyway, afterwards (at the end of the book), he was taken to the company who built him, which was going to try to figure out what made him such a weird robot. And they were going to let him stay with Paul, too.

Happy sappy ending, yeah, but it's a good read. And Rex is pretty tricky.

-Signing off.