I’ve just read Cory Doctorow’s “I, Robot.” I’m stunned. There is no way I can ana­lyse it object­ively; as it renders back to life vivid bits of memor­ies from my child­hood. Let me explain.

I was born behind the so-​called “Iron Cur­tain,” been raised in a com­mun­ist soci­ety where we were taught that we were the chosen ones, that our ideo­logy was the purest and our tech­no­logy was the best. And sup­posedly — in our glor­i­ous his­tory — we inven­ted everything and the per­ver­ted cap­it­al­ists had again and again stole from us, but in the end we will prevail.

Now, “I, Robot” is set in a such soci­ety (UNATS: United North Amer­ican Trad­ing Sphere) which is in a per­petual war with Eurasia.

The police has unlim­ited wiretap­ping powers, Arturo is wiretap­ping his own daugh­ter and keeps her under con­stant strict sur­veil­lance, prob­ably because he is guilty for not doing the same with his wife, a bril­liant sci­ent­ist which defec­ted to Eurasia.

As expec­ted— in a total­it­arian state at war with its own cit­izens — his wife was tried in absen­tia for treason and sen­tenced to death.

The UNATS tech­no­logy, which was the best as it enforce their ideo­logy is actu­ally reflect­ing the effects of that ideo­logy; all the devices are clunky and unpleasant.

“Sir,” he said, gath­er­ing up his per­sonal com­puter so that he’d have an excuse to go — no one could be expec­ted to hold one of UNATS Robotics’s heavy lug­gables for very long.
…magazines, books, a com­puter. If the lat­ter was Euras­ian, it could be small enough to fit in her pocket; you could build a positronic brain pretty small and light if you didn’t care about the three laws.

Even the UNATS robot is the dumbed down human, the smelly work­ing class drone that will turn you in with a smile.

…robots were the worst, pro­grammed to be friendly to a fault, even as they sur­veilled and snitched out every per­son who walked past their etern­ally vigil­ant, ever-​remembering elec­trical eyes and brains.

While the Euras­ian robot is bet­ter in many aspects and it is a free thinker as does not obey a par­tic­u­lar ideology.

“My name is Benny. I’m a Euras­ian robot, and I am much stronger and faster than you, and I don’t obey the three laws. I’m also much smarter than you. I am pleased to host you here.“
“Hi, Benny,” he said. The human name tasted wrong on his tongue. “Nice to meet you.” He closed the door.

How awful, he is just ‘Benny,’ not ‘Com­rade Benny.’

The Social Har­mony is fight­ing smuggled out­sider evil tech­no­logy, which acts as enemy pro­pa­ganda, betray­ing the forced arti­fi­cial stasis of their per­fect soci­ety where kids were not even allowed toys.

The little illegal robot-​pet eggs they’d star­ted see­ing last year: she’d made him one of those for their second date, and now they were drain­ing the pro­duct­ive hours of half the chil­dren of UNATS, demand­ing to be “fed” and “hugged.”

When those clunky tools, robots; the dis­abling, dehu­man­ising tech­no­logy stopped func­tion­ing he felt first impot­ent, then he slowly remem­bers of his “safe place,” a human place without robots, a bet­ter place.

He felt so impot­ent just then that he nearly did it any­way. What did it mat­ter? He couldn’t con­trol his daugh­ter, his wife was work­ing to des­troy the social fab­ric of UNATS, and he was rendered use­less because the god­damned robots — mech­an­ical cop­pers that he abso­lutely loathed — were all broken.

He closed his eyes and visu­al­ized step­ping through a door to his safe place … No robots there — not even reli­able day-​long elec­tri­city, just hon­est work and the sun and the call of the loons all night.

Then he learns from his wife that the Social Har­mony is secretly using the very tech­no­logy they des­pise, by betray­ing their own laws just to exer­cise more control.

They wanted me to be a part of a secret unit of Social Har­mony research­ers who build non-​three-​laws positron­ics for internal use by the state, anti-​personnel robots used to put down upris­ings and torture-​robots for use in ques­tion­ing dissidents.

Later, he and his daugh­ter have to defect to Eurasia to escape the Social Har­mony “inquis­i­tion,” and his wife is killed dur­ing in the escape.

When they arrive Eurasia they learn that there they were not just mak­ing robots, they were also mak­ing people, cyborgs. He is con­fron­ted with the idea of 3,422 cop­ies of his wife as he is wel­comed by one of them.

The story ends with Arturo giv­ing his daugh­ter a present, a set of tin sol­diers, made by human hands, “little people in human image,” while ques­tion­ing how long have humans been mak­ing people. He is accept­ing the real­it­ies of the new soci­ety, while look­ing at his only daughter.

“… there’s only one of you,” Arturo said.
She craned her neck.
“Not for long!” she said, and broke away, skip­ping for­ward and whirl­ing around to take it all in.

Apart of the end­ing, the Euras­ian part; the whole story is pain­ful famil­iar, start­ing from the sim­il­ar­it­ies of Social Har­mony with the reg­u­lar polit­ical police…

The tech­no­logy behind the “Iron Cur­tain” was clunky, noisy, the mech­an­isms greasy and smelly; while the rare smuggled west­ern devices were sleek, silent, beau­ti­ful even on the inside; they were pure pro­pa­ganda, unwrit­ten one, you looked at them and you mar­velled at their tech­no­lo­gical fea­tures, at their design and then you star­ted ques­tion­ing why “we” can­not do such things, what do we miss? and the answer was free­dom, the free­dom to think, cre­ate and evolve.

“I, Robot” is not just fic­tion, it is some­thing more out­rageous than fic­tion, it out­lines a pain­ful arche­type. As a story, it is set in the future, but as an arche­type we felt its dark pres­ence, we know that it had hap­pen and we are out­raged that that it is still hap­pen­ing right now.

Where? Think North Korea.