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Rhys: Capitalism is the default political setting of the modern individual human being? What about a future world inhabited solely by robots? What kind of political system would prevail there? Paul Di Filippo :I have been fascinated by all-robot societies ever since I read Brian Aldiss's "Who Can Replace a Man?", around age twelve. But I have only written two free-standing stories in that vein. In the first, "Providence," robot society is organized around commerce in remnant vinyl LP records. Don't ask me to justify this now, but I think the reader will buy it for the duration of the story. More recently, I dared to work in the canon of one of my other heroes, Stanislaw Lem, by writing "The New Cyberiad," which takes his nearly omnipotent robot tinkerers on a new adventure involving time-travel, the construction of artificial planets, and the recreation of the extinct human race. Lem's robots are motivated by idle curiosity and less savory human emotions, but existing without need for commerce or work, they can indulge their whims in much more grandiose fashion than we can. In my novel Fuzzy Dice I offer a brief glimpse of a robot hell, where robots have exterminated all organic life. The secret behind some of this portrait is a great little book called Legal Daisy Spacing, which portrays an insane brand of terraforming. Grab a copy whenever you see one! |