Alien Talk comes out on January 4th, and in a few days I will release it for preorder at Amazon as the second book in the Newcomers series.
Alien Talk introduces a new, advanced AI Android, Robin Taylor. I thought it would be fun to have a companion for Andy Bolton, the Reluctant Android who began the Newcomers series. The two of them could knock heads and save the world together.
In writing Alien Talk, I became aware that gender, in a robot, doesn’t make complete sense. As machines, Andy and Robin are outside of biology and evolution. What does gender mean for them?
An android is a human-looking and human-behaving robot. They’re designed for deception. You are supposed to be convinced that they are at least humanoid, maybe even fooled into thinking they are human. Ordinary industrial robots, like the kind that welds car parts together, are not androids so they don’t look like people.
Andy and Robin were designed from the start to appear as people and they are so perfect that they blend right into everyday life. They have jobs and rent apartments and go shopping,and nobody suspects a thing. So naturally they had to look and act like people,which meant they had to be gendered, at least in appearance, clothing, and behavior.
I might have been bolder and created a gender-neutral android, but I didn’t. Gender was not my main theme. Artificial intelligence is. Still, gender crops up as a strong secondary issue in Alien Talk and the ‘droids discuss it often.
One way I explore gender in androids and in people is to describe Robin’s difficulty in establishing and maintaining intimate relationships with humans. Early in the book she is married to a wealthy real-estate developer, but he turns on her in a jealous rage when he discovers she is “seeing” Andy. Sid, the husband, does not know that Robin is an android, and she can hardly explain that Andy is also one and in any case, that neither of them is capable of anything like romantic feelings. Robin is a behavioral machine who has kept Sid very contented up until this point.
Robin is utterly perplexed by jealousy. She leaves Sid and concludes that his irrational behavior must have been somehow related to her inability to reproduce (even though she had told him she was infertile). Nothing else could explain his desire to own her and his incredible rage when he thought someone was rustling his cattle.
Eventually Robin establishes a close relationship with a woman. Robin and Holly get along intimately, though for Robin, every word and deed is merely a calculated response to a situation. But Holly is satisfied, and so is Robin. She is satisfied that she has solved the problem of maintaining intimacy with a human.
Spoiler alert: the relationship hits rocky roads. Robin is again mystified. What is the deal with humans and interpersonal jealousy? Andy cannot offer any explanation, and surprisingly, either can Jennifer, the genius engineer who designed them both. “Humans don’t even understand jealousy,” she tells her babies, as she calls them. The Newcomers wonder if she’s kidding. How can she not know? She’s a human.
The main story line of Alien Talk is about how, long ago, a virus infected humans and gave them the gift of language. That parasitism has worked out very well over the millennia, as humans built all of civilization out of language. But when the virus goes on a deadly rampage, humans have no clue what’s going on and it falls to Robin, with the help of Andy, to save the world. Hint: they do.
Even so, the sub-theme of gender relationships adds depth and context to Robin’s character and raises some important questions about the relationship between natural and artificial intelligence. In the end… well, I better not say how it ends.
Watch for Robin’s debut on January 4th on Amazon. You can pre-order on Amazon and on Smashwords.com on December 15th. Search on my name, William X. Adams, or on Alien Talk. It’ll be available in paperback for $12.99 and in ebook for $3.99.
Meanwhile, if you have not yet read Andy’s story, get a copy of Reluctant Android and start reading while you wait for Robin to appear.
Reluctant Android:
Amazon paperback: bit.ly/RA-paperback
Amazon Kindle: bit.ly/RA-kindle
Smashwords epub: bit.ly/RA-smash
