:up-yours-woke-moralists:
Pausing the plot of your mid-century sci-fi space exploration novel so that you can insert a screed about the moral goodness of beating your wife.
we would, but we accidentally asked one of the robots to "go be a useless piece of shit somewhere else" and the robot took it literally but due to the way we setup the asimov rules, this robot has convinced others that they should be useless pieces of shit as well since this was a direct command so now you need to figure out through sheer logic and tenuous characterization which robot is the quirky one before you can ask one of them to fix dinner since they won't do anything otherwise
Asimov are still great Torment Nexus books for understanding what "Computers do exactly what you tell them, whether you know what you're telling them or not" and "Just because a computer is smart doesn't mean it will think like you". I'm sure there are lots since then, but Asimov's three set up a simple framework for exploring the question of "How could we totally fuck up programming a robot in fun and frightening ways?"
Not really by definition (the dictionary definition is just 'robot with human form')
But it is absolutely a 'male droid' by etymology. The actual definition has just shifted.
(also, anyone that unironically uses gynoid makes me want to crumble them into dust)
I still think "gynoid" is useful as a derogatory term for any robot that was clearly designed with horniness as the primary concern, as a dig at the person who created it
e.g. the ballerina twins in Atomic Heart
e.g. the ballerina twins in Atomic Heart
I genuinely can't tell how much of their design is intentionally offputting as part of showing what a weird lunatic Sechenev is and how much is the artists being horny. Like is the scene where
spoiler and CW for violence? and quasi-sexual imagery
one of them sprouts a unicorn horn from her forehead and proceeds to penetrate and mock-gut the other with it as part of a ritual to unfold the keys required to get a soul-stealing monster out of a casket
supposed to be extremely creepy and bizarre, or was the artist getting off to it?
:kombucha-disgust:
that sounds like they intentionally wrote that one-handed while cranking their hog, yeah.
Smut is still art, just art that makes you bust and is busting-oriented
Y'know, fair.
However, I am still contractually obligated to crush you.
You're completely right but also I love Bones so what am I supposed to do.
I immediately thought of Stranger in a Strange Land when I saw this. "what if being a martian made men so good at sex that every woman would want to bone him???"
A lot of stuff happened in the cultural mainstream between those years though. I thought Stranger in a strange land seemed kind of progressive for its time in some respects (maybe not towards gender and sex though) but once new wave sf and feminist sf came around everything before that already seemed dated
these are boy androids
:crush: can I make the robots a sandwich?
Hober Mallow
English language names in the late 19th and early 20th century were a trip
Curious if the Soviet side of SF (eg Aelita) was much better in regards to this. Cultural conservatism is hard to shake in just decades.
Strugatsky brothers are one the the best-known Soviet SF writers, and one of the biggest critiques about their works was always "there's almost no women in your books". To which their honest reply was "We don't know how to write women". No actual misogyny, though. Just no important female characters.
Still, very good books. I've just finished the Noon cycle - a series about an utopian future where Communism won. Highly recommend it.
To which their honest reply was “We don’t know how to write women”. No actual misogyny, though. Just no important female characters
lmao honestly I respect that. Ideally they’d, you know, learn how to do that, but at least they didn’t bullshit.
Here's the comic on the SMBC website if you want to see the red button panel https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/golden-age
In a proper Heinlein novel, she should be excited about it, and possibly naked
:data-laughing:
counterpoint Dan Dare is a genuinely great plot that has it's female characters be the smartest ones there and the sexists presented as wrong.
also the villains are slaver tech bro rationalists
I do like the pulp science serials and comics from that time period. They have a charm to them.
