Review of i-ROBOT Poetry by Jason Christie

(Originally featured on ‘Yet Another Book Review’ website in 2007)

I, Robot is a landmark collection of short stories by science fiction elder Isaac Asimov. It’s also the title of a 1939 short story by Eando Binder titled “I, Robot,” snatched from Robert Graves’ 1934 novel, I, Claudius. In 1950 Asimov’s editor nicked Binder’s title, quashing Asimov’s first choice – Mind and Iron. In 2004 Twentieth Century Fox released a futuristic cop thriller titled I, Robot, which starred Will Smith as a wisecracking detective who thwarts a robot insurrection, with a barely discernible relationship to Asimov’s book. iRobot is also a real-world tech firm that markets robotic minesweepers, robot fighters used in war zones such as Afghanistan and Iraq and several models of autonomous vacuum cleaner, includng the Roomba and Scooba.

Finally, i-Robot is the title of a volume of robot poems by the Canadian poet Jason Christie.

Naming any new book i-Robot, especially one published by a sci fi imprint like Edge Science Fiction, must be done with some awareness of its namesakes. Christie’s i-Robot seems hyper-aware of all the above and more. It’s a book of many allusions, from its transparently allusive title onward. One poem refers to “that Will Smith film,” in the voice of someone who forgets the name of the movie, and may not even know there’s a book.

Christie uses the small “i” in his title, and I wonder if that’s a nod to branding – iPod, iShuffle, iTunes, iRobot Scooba. However, putting the small “i” where it’s supposed to be big has been a conceit of poetry so many times before I can’t be sure.

i-Robot is certainly chock-full of robots, and references upon references to robots, reaching back to the birth of “robot” from the pen of Czech dramatist Karel Čapek in his 1921 play, “R.U.R.” (Rossum’s Universal Robots). The word “robot” originates from a Czech term meaning “forced labour.” Christie makes use of that loaded meaning in “Robot Patent (Found Poem),” where he inserts “robot” in place of “servitude” in a historical text about Hungarian serfdom.

Čapek’s play is about a race of mechanical beings made to serve humanity, who rise up and destroy it. It’s Frankenstein with mass production, but also maybe a comment on dehumanization of populations by technology – something debated unfavourably and favourably by last-century thinkers like Alexei Gastev, a Soviet ideologue and poet who enthused over “a new mass engineering that transforms the proletariat into an unheard-of social automaton.” It’s a theme that has recurred many times in SF – recently in the new Battlestar Galactica series.

Christie makes reference to “R.U.R.” in one poem as a disastrous reading choice for school-age robots,

LIT BOT: Well, I gave them R.U.R. to study.
PRINCIPAL: [leans forward] Are you sure that is such a good idea?

Later on we’re in the world of “R.U.R.” viewing a “Robots of the World!” pamphlet.

Christie shows us the banality of human anihilation. “Anyway, last night I voted for the robot candidate,” reads “Organoptropy” – “even though her main platform policy is the extermination of all human beings.”

The poems in i-Robot largely resemble one-page stories, or single pages torn from longer epics based in some future history, although I’m not sure you can sift all of the book’s contents into one coherent future. It might be missing the author’s point to try.

Some pieces in i-Robot are interesting stand-alone science fiction concepts, like Satellite City, whose entire population are uploaded cyber-minds, but they seem to largely be studies in pastiche, and – excuse my language – postmodern readings of the robo-lit canon. I can’t say whether i-Robot is trying to advance the genre of sci fi poetry or deconstruct it. Not to complain that Christie isn’t a genuine fan. He seems impeccably well-read on his topic, and has real fun with it.

Christie’s Robots not only plot human destruction – they launch class action suits, play the commodities market, or agitate for a fair day’s pay from the roof of McMaster with a media-jamming “ampliphone.”

Corny tech names are another staple of robot lit that are well-represented in i-Robot, with marvellous ham-handedness, especially when it comes to robot names: linguistbots, garndenerbots, sniperbots, mechanicbots; ballerinabots, and even the celebritybots.

Home appliances have gained sentience. “Now my toaster and fridge conspire with my DVD player and 56 inch plasma TV to convert the couch to their virtual religion,” reads “Quantum Cryptography.” A similar inventory of home appliances join their owner for movie night in “History 101,” and laugh at the garborator as it complains about the quality of the waste in “Epistemic.” Once they made our lives easier. Now we have to shoo them off like pets: “I shrugged and had to tell the dryer later that night that it wasn’t allowed to sleep in our bed anymore.”

How can a dryer fit into your bed? This is never explained. We’re left to work that out. How an assembly line robot can remove all its clothing (what kind of clothing)? What disease could a robot could possibly report when it calls in sick?

Christie’s robots are cartoonishly likeable, even when they plot revolution, mostly thanks to his touch with the small gesture. “My robot falls asleep while she sends faxes,” we read in “Robot Love.” Robots hold hands, indulge in daydreams, and get detention.

Christie reserves the most sympathy for older robots, such as the rust-laden, abandoned robot of “Merciless,” that tosses and turns as it tries to bed down in the street; or in “Robot Ossuary Poem” about “an ancient robot from before the language, memory and gender updates,” which handles the remains of demolished robots and suffers its fate in silence, “except for its own whirrs and clanks, since there is nobody to oil its joints.”

The stoic, speechless ossuary robot writes poems, as do other chrome-plated scribblers, including the emotionally troubled Robopoet v.2.1.

Christie attempts robotic re-takes on “Howl,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” and – this by far my favourite – Eliot’s “The Wasteland” – “I’ll show you fear in a handful of rust.”

Sometimes the robot is the poem. That is when the po-mo really cranks up. Poems such as “Like Rain” traffic in strange stuff like, “The robot invents a noun strong enough to contain teleology…”

What’s “teleology” doing in a poem that mashes up sentence-as-machine comparisons with food metaphors? Glad you asked. Maybe.

Teleology is a philosophical trope that’s lately the hobbyhorse of creationists as they spin their anti-Darwin crusade as “intelligent design.” Teleology, the intellectual quest for design and purpose in nature, was once a favourite word of Norbert Wiener, who coined the term “cybernetics” in the late 1940s. Wiener was interested in the feedback loop – the self-regulating machine – which he called the “teleological mechanism.” The self-regulating “teleological” loop is a mixed blessing, as anyone who’s dealt with an automatic answering service for the government knows.

Poetry, or any written text, is a self-regulating system, as a robot and/or poem explains in “Robot Mouth: An Open Letter to the Author”: “…I am a robot. I am a subject only so far as the sentence allows… It shines from my eyes, what I can’t say because my program won’t let me.” Words, once written, are automatic and their structures inevitable. In Christie’s universe all language is programming language; and poetry, like robots, is a technology that mimics sentience.

Christie’s intellectual games are balanced with innate lyricism, even in “Robot Mouth,” which ends with this bitter lament: “If I said I have a dream you wouldn’t believe me. I’m at your service.”

Overall, iRobot was an excellent choice for Edge as their flagship release of a cover-to-cover edition of science fiction poetry. It’s well-written, intellectually meaty stuff, which still manages to be funny, and own its pedigree as science fiction.

Maybe your iRobot Roomba will learn to like it as well.