This year鈥檚 Arthur C. Clarke award for the year鈥檚 best science fiction novel was awarded last month to Sierra Greer鈥檚 Annie Bot. Over the course of the novel, Annie, a sentient sex robot programmed to adore her selfish owner, gradually develops a sense of personhood 鈥� but she is hardly the first artificial woman to do so. Although the earliest fictional female robots were little more than wind-up toys, they have steadily gained substance until more recent artificial women, like Annie, have become as complex as their human counterparts.
Artificial people are both ancient and ubiquitous. 鈥淏asically every culture around the world since recorded history has told stories about automatons,鈥� says at the Georgia Institute of Technology. They usually belong to three categories, she says. Many are manual workers or weapons, but female creations tend to fall into the category of 鈥渄omestic and sexual companions鈥�. In Greek myth, Galatea is the statue of a perfect woman who comes to life after her creator Pygmalion falls in love with her.
Throughout history, these fictional automata have had real counterparts: novelty machines that mimicked living creatures. By the 18th century, technological advancements made some of these devices beautifully realistic, so it is no wonder people began to imagine fictional automata that could be mistaken for the real thing. One of the eeriest such visions was E. T. A. Hoffmann鈥檚 1817 short story . The lovely Olympia captivates Nathaniel, despite her uncanny stiffness and passivity. Olympia is eventually revealed to be a moving doll, a discovery that drives Nathaniel to madness and death.
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In the 19th century, artificial women often played the same role human women were expected to fill: domestic companions for men. In 1886鈥檚 The Future Eve, Auguste Villiers imagined a modern-day Pygmalion. An inventor, disgusted with the imperfections of real women, builds a flawless mechanical one that is imbued with a soul. Alice W. Fuller mocked this idea in the 1895 short story 鈥溾��. A man ditches his opinionated girlfriend in favour of an agreeable machine 鈥� but grows frustrated with her sycophancy.
By 1972, Ira Levin was questioning what would happen to real women if robots could take their places
This dream of a perfectly pliant Galatea has carried on through decades of fiction. 鈥淭he ideal is a very obedient, compliant, available woman with absolutely no wishes or wants of her own,鈥� says , author of My Fair Ladies: Female robots, androids, and other artificial Eves.
As authors dreamed up automata, the industrial revolution was building up steam, and people worried that newly invented machines would outcompete humans. Fiction like Samuel Butler鈥檚 1872 novel even teased the idea that machines might evolve the ability to think. At the beginning of the 20th century, this anxiety culminated in two influential works of fiction.
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In 1920, playwright Karel 膶apek鈥檚 R.U.R. portrayed a society that attempted to elevate all people to the upper classes 鈥� by leaving the labour to synthetic people he dubbed 鈥渞obots鈥�, from the Czech word robota, meaning serfdom or forced labor. As Butler鈥檚 Erewhonians predicted, the robots of R.U.R. finally revolt against their creators.
Several years later, Thea von Harbou published Metropolis, adapted into the seminal 1927 film by Fritz Lang. A female robot is given the appearance of a human woman from the working class, which toils in hellish conditions. While human Maria predicts the classes will unite in peace, her sexualised robotic counterpart incites a violent, destructive revolution.
A decade later, Lester del Rey鈥檚 short story Helen O鈥橪oy countered mechanical femme fatales like the robotic Maria with the synthetic housewife Helen, a domestic machine that gains emotions. Mid-century fiction favoured such bots over their more rebellious sisters. The Twilight Zone featured another mechanical wife as well as a perfect electric grandmother, and the Jetsons had reliable Rosie the maid.
But this domestic bliss wouldn鈥檛 last. By 1972, Ira Levin was questioning what would happen to real women if robots could take their places. In his novel , Joanna is horrified to learn the men in her town have been killing their opinionated wives and replacing them with agreeable mechanical replicas.
Over the following decades, the Terminator and Matrix franchises tapped into those anxieties about tech replacing humans, which have ebbed and flowed since the industrial revolution. When jobs lost to machines are domestic, however, not all women would mind outsourcing them. Iain Reid鈥檚 2018 novel culminates with a woman deserting her human husband and leaving a robotic replica in her place.
Two much more influential artificial women also appeared in the 2010s. In 2013鈥檚 , a man falls for an AI called Samantha, but this makes him less able to relate to real women. In 2014鈥檚 Ex Machina, an abusive inventor asks employee Caleb to assess his robot Ava. After Caleb develops feelings for Ava, she manipulates him to escape her creator. Samantha and Ava aren鈥檛 evil, but they do look out for their own best interests 鈥� and these films explore what happens to the men around them when they do.
More recent work focuses on the artificial women themselves. In Annie Bot, Annie narrates her own story, putting the emphasis on her emotional development rather than her owner鈥檚. Greer demonstrates that, if a bot is a metaphorical woman, then it is also a person who deserves to live her own life. Similarly, this year鈥檚 film Companion centres the experience of sex robot Iris 鈥� although her journey to freedom is less nuanced and more violent than Annie鈥檚.
But what happens to these artificial women 鈥� Samantha and Ava, Annie and Iris 鈥� once they free themselves? Where do they go next? That鈥檚 up to the writers of the future.
The art and science of writing science fiction
Take your science fiction writing into a new dimension during this weekend devoted to building new worlds and new works of art
