Building Robot Characters

                                          By John Gaines

                One of the greatest challenges of writing a science fiction novel is designing robots and technology.  Many robots of early science fiction were simple automatons, capable only of silently fulfilling their master’s commands.  From the Mechanical Men Superman once fought in a Max Fleischer cartoon to the imposing Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still, early robots served primarily as tools, instruments whose defining characteristics were their physical forms rather than their personalities.  One of the early innovators of robotic characterization was Isaac Asimov, whose Robot series created the first concept of encoded robot behavior (the Three Laws of Robotics) and robots who possessed well developed personalities, dialogue, and characterization.  Asimov’s robotic characters such as R. Daneel Olivaw went on to inspire popular androids such as Data of “Star Trek: the Next Generation” and created a demand in the science fiction fandom for compelling, memorable robots.  Life Sentence and its sequel offer a unique perspective on how sentient robots could interact with humanity in the future, continuing the speculative fiction tradition of questioning the place of robotics and artificial intelligence in the years ahead.

                As we began writing Life Sentence, there were no sentient machines.  The early chapters I worked on took place on the planet of Domremy and had very minimal interaction with robots, as the frontier planet did not have access to high-tech manufacturing.  The few robotic characters I created for the Domremy scenes were service automatons with no free will, simple tools to aid the colonists in various tasks they didn’t have the training to do themselves.  Towards the end of the process of writing Life Sentence, we decided that we finally needed to create a sentient robot for a pivotal sequence.  We created Doctor Torghh, a robotic physician.

                Torghh was intelligent, thoughtful, and unique among the characters we devised for Life Sentence.  He was the only thinking robot we created for the first novel, and we created him as a modular robot who could plug instruments and needed equipment into himself to utilize him—the ideal doctor of the future!  Although Torghh’s appearance in Life Sentence was quite brief, we enjoyed creating the character so much that we decided to give him an expanded role in the sequel, as well as a companion robot named Rack.

                 Incorporating these new characters into the world of Life Sentence has proved a particularly interesting challenge for me.  For the longest time, I had perceived the world of Life Sentence as being one where only humans and other organic characters truly “mattered”; most of my effort went into Klein, Ayan’we and the other organic characters.  After we agreed to utilize Torghh and Rack extensively in the sequel, I faced the difficulty of having to change my own beliefs about the universe we created in order to make Torghh and Rack true central characters.  How would a robot fear for its own mortality? How would it perceive and interact with other automatons?  And how would they perceive the world of living beings around them?  All these things cycle through my mind as I create the sequel of Life Sentence, the possibilities of a world in which robots could be the equals of humankind…or surpass us.