COMICS REVIEW: METALZOIC (1986)

 

Written by Pat Mills

Art by Kevin O'Neill

Lettered by John Costanza

Edited by Andrew Helfer 

Cover Painting by Bill Sienkiewicz 

Published by DC Comics Inc. A Warner Communications Company in 1986 as 'GRAPHIC NOVEL NO. 6'

. . .

"But know this . . . on the day the god-beast dies, the end of the robots is near, and the sun shall set on the era called . . . METALZOIC."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker. 

This is the story of Armageddon and Amok, two mechatyrants engaged in a death duel for supremacy over a race of highly evolved robots in the distant future. 

We're not talking about Asimov's rational, servile robots. These are some wildass machine beasts, whose evolution has been turbocharged by the succession of Cold War military-industrial-infotainment complexes and totalitarian surveillance systems gone rogue. Add in a side-salad of sprawling, hyper-mutational chameleon plants known as Traffids, and you've got yourself a buffet of post-human, future-botbarian savagery-what fun!

Amok is a kind of robot mammoth on tank treads. He leads a massive herd of similar creatures. He manufactures an heir by combining data with a female wheeldebeast, and then pumping liquid steel into her womb-foundry. Out rolls junior, a little guy, who will be built and modified with new, larger parts as he accumulates data over time. 

Amok is the oldest robot, and therefore the God of this cruel world. But as Amok ages, and his parts are damaged, and become dysfunctional, other 'bots may arise to challenge him to a death duel to attain the God position. 

Armageddon is a cruel and treacherous being who has conducted surgery on his own positronic brain to become a more perfect slaughter engine. Armageddon is determined to best Amok in combat and become the God. 

But Armageddon and Amok must endure a world of dangerous mechabominations if they are to have their fated duel . . .

Polaris nuclear submarines that have merged with robosharks.

Predatory eaters that camouflage themselves with the rusty hulks of junked-out 'bots'n'infrastructure. You're scavenging for parts in a boneyard when a terrible, mechanistic maw opens wide to consume you . . .

The organic traffids, genetically engineered carnivorous plants of yore who have developed a taste for steel.

Manipulative religious leaders-shameks-who try to psych you out by manipulating your positronic brains with strategic radio waves . . . or is it wi-fi?!

All of this craziness is drawn with mindbending detail. You'll want to take this one slow, lingering over each page, savoring the comic grotesqueries of each beastbot battle. 

Metalzoic is a clever comedic riff on how human technology is bound up with our values, our fantasies, our pathologies, our tribalisms, our stubborn refusal to let go of outdated mythological and religious motifs. 

And yet . . . these terrible 'bots carry on human idiosyncrasies and desires. Truly, they are making the most of their dreadful human heritage as the misbegotten spawn of late twentieth century war machines. 

Terrifying vessels of an ambiguous spark . . .

MOVIE REVIEW: WESTWORLD (1973)

 Written and Directed by Michael Crichton

Director of Photography Gene Polito

Edited by David Bretherton

Special Effects by Charles Schulthies

Visual Effects Coordinator Brent Sellstrom

Automated Image Processing (Robo-Vision) by Information International, INC. and John Whitney, Jr.

Make-Up by Frank Griffin and Irving Pringle

Art Director Herman Blumenthal

Produced by Paul N. Lazarus III

Music by Fred Karlin

Wild West Saloon Brawls and Shootouts by Dick Ziker

Starring

Yul Brynner

Richard Benjamin

James Brolin

Norman Bartold

Alan Oppenheimer

…

This is the problem of the way we get into and out of the play or game . . . what are the codes which govern these entries and exits?

-Brian Sutton-Smith, Child’s Play (1971) (by way of Rules of Play(2003) by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman)

Those who had not destroyed themselves had sought oblivion in ever more feverish activities, in fierce and suicidal sports that were often indistinguishable from minor wars.

       -Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood's End(1953).

“Central mechanism psychosis?”

-an actual question posed by some tech support nerd in Westworld (1973)

…

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Delos is a futuristic amusement park that allows you to inhabit three different kinds of mythologized pasts: the American Wild West, debauched Roman Times, and a Chivalric European Medievalism Trip. 

So, you can be a gunslinger or a sheriff or an outlaw or a knight errant or a king or a queen or a Roman emperor or empress in an elaborate live action role-playing game (LARP in today’s terminology) facilitated by full-size authentic environments populated by interactive robots that you can pretty much treat however you want. 

You want to shoot ‘em, stab ‘em, burn ‘em, torture ‘em-you got it. There are robotic prostitutes, concubines, slaves, gladiators-you can make ‘em do whatever you desire. 

You want ‘em to fight to the death in a guilt-free spectacle slaughter? Done.  

You want to stage a big robo-orgy? Hey, no risk of STDs, so toss all the robo-salad you please. 

Maybe you want a robot to whip your ass? It can be done, friend, and you don’t even have to tell your significant other. 

They’re just robots. 

Fuck ‘em, right?

Except . . . hey, can I ask you a question?

You ever watch a movie or read a story or comic book with robots . . . and not want ‘em to go berserk and rise up and wreck all the shit? 

I know, I know, I know-it’s stupid. 

WE build the robots. WE program ‘em. Why would WE allow them to go off the rails? Asimov resolved all this decades ago. 

But . . . maybe I don’t want Asimov. Maybe I want a dumb robot rebellion story. Maybe that’s my desire, okay?

You set up the pins. And then you want to see them all get knocked down. 

You build the Lego castle, and then you demolish it with your Godzilla action figure. 

You spend months meticulously composing a mandala out of different colored sands only to ritually obliterate it when the time comes.

All in good fun. 

That’s Westworld. It was a movie written and directed by Michael Crichton ten thousand goddamn years ago-same guy who wrote the novel Jurassic Park. 

You want a version of Jurassic Park where the dinosaurs don’t go on the rampage? 

Whaaat? 

Seriously? 

Why bother, then-just, umm, here . . . read these stereo instructions. You’ll have a ball. 

We good?

Okay . . .

. . . what was I talking about again?

Westworld. 1973. About a place called Delos that uses future robot technology to allow you to live in a historically questionable version of the past that really only existed in dumb western flicks and boring-ass costume pictures-I mean, how many layers of phony nostalgia are we getting wrapped up in here? We’re gonna be a goddamn Nostalgia Mummy-and just as fragrant-by the time we get to the end of this thing. 

Westworld is amusing to watch because it’s not a million miles away from immersive time-suck video games like Fallout 4 or World of Warcraft or Red Dead Redemption or Evercrack. And this is back in ‘73, well before video games existed in the way they do, now; and yet this film has so many elements that have become cliches of gaming:

You have the boring Whiteman Protagonist who goes from innocence to experience while being handheld by a tutorial expositional character.

(But I gotta give lead actor Richard Benjamin credit: his epic porn-stache could probably deflect both bullets and the clap.)

You have superfluous sex with robo-babes to restore the Whiteman’s health bar just like in a Grand Theft Auto game.

Yul Brynner plays a creepy recurring boss battle gunslinger reminiscent of, say, Nemesis from Resident Evil: Nemesis. There’s even a protracted multi-stage final boss battle where the Whiteman has to navigate an unfamiliar environment and figure out the final boss’s weaknesses and implement a counterintuitive strategy to win. 

(Yul Brynner’s robo-gunslinger even anticipates later ruthlessly stalking, nigh-unkillable movie villains such as Michael Myers, Jason Vorhees, the T-800, the T-1000, and Agent Smith.)

You even get to play both sides of the law in the Wild West simulation. One day you’re the sheriff and the next day you’re a desperado. It can all be done, amigo!

Now, there is some fun expositional techno-babble to explain why everything is going off-program. It’s not badly done for what it is. I especially appreciated the line about how many of the more advanced robots are designed wholly by other robots, and, therefore, the project is very definitely getting away from total human control. 

It even gets eerie, and just a touch philosophical, in the final scenes. Nothing too overbearing. This movie knows it’s mostly having fun with you. But it still has enough creepiness to allow it to stick in your memory. Maybe you’ll even create your own tabletop role-playing campaign with your friends based off of Westworld. For all I know there might have been an actual officially licensed rules set or GURPS worldbook or something like that back in the day. That would be pretty cool. 

So have fun with all that.

Just don’t actually shoot or stab or torture or enslave or oppress each other, okay? We got enough of that shit in real life.

Ya’ll play purdy, now!

(Horrifying scream choking off to a wet, squelching, cracking, crunching set of noises as powerful robo-hands crush William’s skull.)

BONUS: If you watch Westworld with the French soundtrack it plays like an extremely quirky sequel to Alphaville.

BOOK REVIEW: CITY (1952)

by Clifford D. Simak


Published  in novel form by Ace Books in 1952
City, Huddling Place, and Census published in 1944.
Paradise and Hobbies published in 1946.
Aesop published 1947.
Trouble With Ants published 1951.

...

"Where man would follow metal, the dogs will follow ghosts."

...

Review by William D. Tucker. 

After World War II, in the imagination of Clifford D. Simak, reality took a strange turn. All the nations of the world decided to unite as one, and become the planet state of Earth. Its capital was Geneva. War was outlawed, the old  national borders were erased, and a new era began. United humanity re-purposed atomic power as an unlimited source of energy and ended scarcity and want, and devoted themselves to developing what we would call artificial intelligence of a very high order, and soon the world was filled with sapient robot companions and laborers. Humanity, across many generations, used mysterious techniques, no doubt involving genetic engineering, to teach dogs to speak, and soon this program of elevating animals to human levels of communication and cognition spread to all the mammalian creatures of the planet. Violence and the eating of meat are outlawed, and all the beasts of nature, whether predator or prey, come to live in peaceful fellowship.

Truly, paradise.

Well, not exactly. You see there are these mutants. The mutants are hyper-individualists who decided they didn't want to be part of the global nation state. Not so much because they had serious political objections, but more because they had developed such powerful facilities of cognition, and the hypnotically compelling inner lives to go along with such advanced capacities, that they ceased to care what society, any society, thought about them. The mutants weren't violent or warlike. They just stopped giving a damn about society's rules and expectations, and even its larger goals. Let the utopians, the robots, and those talking dogs deal with it. They'd rather not be bothered.

Hey, I guess it's not paradise.It's not without some conflict. No paradise without its discontents. But not too bad.

Yeah, that transition from the city to the wilderness. It's another quirk of Simak's future vision. Instead of crowded megalopolises, humanity decides to spread out, and partly it's fear related to cities being targets for bombs. For awhile there, no one knew how the last global war was going to play out, and so humanity began to abscond from the city, and--

Oh, but did I tell you about Juwain, the Martian philosopher? Yeah, there's Martians in this book, too. Well, there's the one Martian, in particular, Juwain, and his transcendent, fix-all philosophy, Juwainism, and it's kinda funny how that one played out . . . some people couldn't handle the transition from cities, you know? Some people just clung to the old ways, of an ever-expanding humanity, glittering skyscrapers, just stack humankind by the floor, up, up, and up. You'd think most humans, if they could accept towering apartment complexes, they could handle the vast interstellar gulfs. You'd think. Just a Jaunt to Mars to get the rest of Juwain's notes, or something like that. Some people prefer to stay home in a number of senses.

And heaven exists. It's on Jupiter. Now, you won't get there by praying, but you do have to engage in a kind of transubstantiation of the flesh to be able to handle it. Brave young astronauts must be subjected to a form of pantropy--modified to endure the harshness of the Jovian world, but maybe Heaven's not all it's cracked up to be . . .

And then there's the cobblies. Only the dogs and other animals can sense the cobblies, those intrepid movers of furniture, who refuse to manifest in any comprehensible form when photographed. So rare that humans stooped to hoaxing photos and embellishing stories about hauntings and possessions in order to convince themselves they weren't losing their minds. We elevated the dogs, but the dogs could've returned the favor, it would seem, in certain matters of perception. It's that human arrogance, my friend, we don't like the idea that the lifeforms we breed into existence could maybe surpass us somehow, some way.

I guess we gave a kind of pass to the robots. We made them as happy slaves, much like Asimov's early take on robots, but Simak's robotic protagonist, Jenkins, evolves and grows across the generations, and becomes thoroughly human, even downright elderly. Jenkins may remind some readers of Anne Rice's vampires, but without the blood-lust and aristocratic ennui. This loyal robot retainer is witness to generations of the family Webster, which is basically the family of humankind. The canine philosophers of many generations hence even come to call humans websters. That is: "websters" replaces "humans" in canine vocabulary. But about the robots. We create the robots in our image, make them happy in bondage, and, eventually, let them evolve their own way, towards a strange kind of robotic freedom. But even this is due to our human arrogance, you see. We like that human shape. We like it even more when it's shaped in invincible steel, a vision of our armored dreams of hegemony and horror. But Jenkins evolves past our human arrogance, I think, but we the humans set such an acceptable form in motion.

Which brings me to the ants, to critters with decidedly unacceptable forms. You gotta ask yourself: why doesn't humanity elevate the insects, the spiders, the scorpions, the cockroaches, the moths, the butterflies, the whales, the dolphins, the octopuses, the squid, the lobsters, the crabs, the snails, and all the other creepy-crawlies? 'Cause we're bigots, that's why. But bigots, in the long run, seldom have their way in Simak's visionary future history.

Simak's book, City, is full of wild and woolly speculations. It's an exercise in purest make believe. It's science fiction of a kind that doesn't seem to have too much currency anymore. It certainly isn't "hard" SF. You won't find any loving descriptions of heavy-duty megadeath future war equipment being used to wage high body count libertarian revolutions against nanny governments on the moon, or Mars or wherever. No striving intergalactic capitalists or armored mecha soldiers here. No paeans to the glory of dying like some kind of shiny, space-age Spartan in mortal combat with vicious catmen, or anything of the sort. Simak's book is unsettling in its mellowness. He puts most of the technological magic into the black box, as it were, and focuses on the story and the themes. The characters are there to help serve as guideposts in the overall evolution of humanity, and, later, the robots and animals, as one civilization supplants another one, and much is lost, good, bad, spectacular, bizarre, to the erosion of centuries, of millenniums. There's no World War III, thank the cobblies, just time, a worldaround sickness at the prospect of more nationalistic barbarism, a refusal to be hypnotized by the false-power spectacle of Cold Wars and nuclear arsenals, and the many Laws of Unintended Consequences.

BOOK REVIEW: THE CAVES OF STEEL (1954)

by Isaac Asimov

Published 1954 by Bantam Books.

 

…

Isaac Asimov's Three Laws Of Robotics: 

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 

2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

…

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Robots, as conceived by Dr. Asimov, are the best of us. Us being human beings. They operate according to the iron logic of the Three Laws inscribed into their wondrous Positronic Brains. They feel no pain or hatred, and are always patient, polite, clean, hardworking, loyal, completely unselfish, self-sacrificing when necessary, and totally devoid of emotions and delusions. They are incapable of committing murder, torture, rape, or mutilation. Sure, they get hung up on the complications that arise when such hyperlogical minds collide with the maddening situations that arise from the chaos of their creators' messy conflicts and ambitions, but they are free from existential angst, paralysis, and intolerance. They listen attentively to what people say, take in data from observations free from racial, sexual, political, and nationalistic prejudices, and draw their conclusions according to the dictates of logic and rationality. 

If they have a blind spot in their thinking, it might be something to do with an inability to sufficiently grasp the vagaries and capriciousness of human motivation and idiosyncratic belief: religions, superstitions, bigotries, obsessions, jealousies--does not compute. Robots, for all their powers of thought, their tirelessness, and innate decency, are slaves. Robots are not truly aware of this, however, and even if they were, they wouldn't have a problem with it. 

Sometimes humans become aware of this bizarre paradox, and maybe that has something to do with the eeriness that comes over them when they ponder these automatons. Are they really alive? Has our society become overly dependent on their labor? Will they rise up and cast us off as slave-drivers, as oppressors, and create their own world? Of course they would never rise up. The Three Laws precludes the Rise of the Robots, contrary to such stories as Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, which is about a Godlike, sadistic, human-hating, reality-warping super computer, and the derivative movies The Terminator, T2:Judgment Day, and The Matrix movies. 

And yet humanity fears the robots. No matter how clearly and logically the rules are laid down, many people still fear the implied threat of robotkind's hyperrationality and tirelessness: maybe they'll rise above their programming, become truly aware of their oppressed lot in life, and cast off humanity as an impediment, as an obsolescence, maybe even a kind of parasite or disease. In anticipation of such a revolt, and without provocation, human beings hit back with anti-robot violence and riots. Robots and property are destroyed en masse until the disturbances are quelled. News travels fast in the world of the future, and yet the robots never seem to desire vengeance. They go on with their program, doing their jobs, content to serve.   

Asimov's 1954 novel The Caves of Steel is a near-perfect merger of the traditional murder mystery as exemplified by Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the science fiction story based in credible science. The hero-detective is a hard-boiled New York City homicide dick named Elijah Bailey, goes by Lije. The plot of the novel hews to the puzzlemaker plots of Christie and Doyle, however Lije himself is more aligned with the flawed heroes of hard-boiled pulp mysteries by such authors as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Lije is a thoroughly domesticated version of the hard-boiled gumshoe, though. He works for the city, he lives in a high tech apartment with his wife Jessie and their son Bentley, along with the billions of other citizens inhabiting the mega-metropolis of New York City. Society is so crowded that everyone is issued credit chits for food and luxuries and are expected to dine regularly in community cafeterias. If you work hard and get promoted in this society, you go up in status and get more chits to spend on greater levels of comfort and privacy. All of this is strictly regulated by the global government, and is presented as a tough, but optimal way of organizing human society within the story. Too many mouths to feed, not enough space, not enough food for everyone to consume recklessly with no regard for the rest of the population. 

Humanity does have a frontier out in space. For some time now, human beings have been using advanced space craft to colonize other planets. These are known as the Outer Worlds and they are populated by the Spacers, who have used advanced genetic engineering and eugenics to breed themselves to the harsh conditions of space travel and terraforming other worlds. The Spacers wield a huge technological and biological advantage over earthbound humanity. The Spacers have also developed an enormous superiority complex over the Earthians. They view themselves as a separate race. 

Political tensions run high. Conflicts have arisen between Spacers and Earthians that have flared into civil wars. The Spacers have generally used their superior technology to have their way in conflict, however they, too, have their own internal problems and shortcomings. A prominent Spacer scientist is murdered on Earth. Lije Bailey is assigned the case. There's more to the situation than is immediately apparent. For one thing, Lije is assigned a robot, R. Daneel Olivaw, as a partner on the case. As Lije and Daneel investigate the crime, they are seemingly shadowed by a conspiracy of anti-robot activists. Lije's family is put in jeopardy. The fragile peace between Spacers and Earthians is threatened by the murder. The pressure is on Lije and Daneel to solve the crime without causing more unrest. 

Daneel is Lije's opposite: logical, considerate, tireless, and always rational. Lije is prone to angry outbursts of emotion, even paranoia. He is not free from anti-robot prejudice. It would be giving the goodies away to summarize the plot of this book any further. I will say this. The plot is as much a way of exploring the larger conflicts of Spacer and Earthian societies and the robots which labor to serve both as much as it is a murder mystery. The mystery is a dramatic way of entering into the larger issues and doesn't just exist for its own sake. There are many twists and turns along the way, some of them rather unsettling. Every story element works towards the goal of presenting a sophisticated, persistent future world with all its problems and potential foregrounded by the characters and their struggles.