I’ve been a busy little penguin, inspired by this early spring.
First off, it’s the 100th anniversary of the coining of the word “robot,” in a Czechoslovakian stage play called “Rossum’s Universal Robots” written in 1920, in which robots take over the world.
To mark the anniversary, I pick out the villain AIs from film, gaming, and one Harlan Ellison short story that nobody’s forgetting anytime soon. While I am still rolling my eyes at predictions of AI taking over and shaking my fist at Ray Kurzweil and Peter Thiel for leading doomsday cults, I have to acknowledge that when evil AI is done right in fiction, it makes for an especially chilling villain.
And then…
I also explored the paranoid universe of Philip K. Dick. The author and codifier of the cyberpunk genre had an eerie talent for crafting novels and short stories that adapted beautifully to film. With Blade Runner, Total Recall, and more, PKD not only gave us action-thrillers with memorable characters, but probed deep psychological questions as well, some of them inspired by his own brave grappling with slipping sanity.
And finally, I yelped about my favorite animation studio, Nelvana Entertainment. Geeks know Nelvana mainly for the animated Star Wars Holiday Special segment, but there’s so much more of their output that we don’t appreciate enough. Maybe you didn’t hear about Sam & Max : Freelance Police, but it was decades ahead of its time.
Just because I want it embedded on my own blog, here’s the first episode of Sam & Max, for as long as YouTube allows it to stay up. You were cancelled too soon, surreal cartoon!
