Could you help me, help you think about me?

[sovay]

My first completed fiction in four months appears to be more fanfiction and not even for a canon I had been trying to figure out how to write: "The Double Bluff."

It was conceived and partly written in between finishing a rewatch of Chris Boucher's The Robots of Death (1977) and reading Corpse Marker (1999) for the first time, in consequence of which it is nowhere near canon-compliant with the novel except where the infrastructure was important and the author's observations of Kaldor society accorded with my own. It is almost certainly not in continuity with Magic Bullet's Kaldor City (2001–04) or Big Finish's The Robots (2019–), either, but since I have been given to understand that neither of those series is in continuity with one another, I don't feel so bad about throwing another alternative into the ring. It is kind of a fix-it, for certain values of fix. It is very probably thisbluespirit's fault.

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

but since I have been given to understand that neither of those series is in continuity with one another, I don't feel so bad about throwing another alternative into the ring.

I don't think either of them really would diverge too much from this, especially not Kaldor City, which effectively follows on from Corpse Marker.

It is very probably [personal profile] thisbluespirit's fault.

\o/ *dances*

(Today is mundanely miserably, btw. This was a Good Thing. <3)

[sovay]

I don't think either of them really would diverge too much from this, especially not Kaldor City, which effectively follows on from Corpse Marker.

I can live with that!

(Today is mundanely miserably, btw. This was a Good Thing. <3)

*hugs*

I am glad to be a counterweight.

[davidgillon]

Kudos!

[sovay]

Kudos!

Thank you!

[selkie]

Around him the indifferent city went on blinking and buying, its true foundations not ancestry or lucanol but circuitry, the thinnest of shells over a gulf as unfathomable as his own memory.

I enjoyed those two thousandish words of I don't even go here, thank you very much! [YAY, YOU.]

[sovay]

I enjoyed those two thousandish words of I don't even go here, thank you very much! [YAY, YOU.]

You're welcome! Thank you!

*hugs*

[asakiyume]

That was great! I don't know anything about the source material, but I liked that moody piece.

[sovay]

That was great! I don't know anything about the source material, but I liked that moody piece.

Thank you so much!

The source material was a recommendation from thisbluespirit early in our acquaintance; I loved it and wrote about it and then it just sort of hung out in my head for the next five years until I finally became interested in checking out the much later-written sequel novel (the author's strength is not in his prose, but I enjoyed how much the plot riffed on the original patterns and themes), which I thought served as a good impetus to rewatch the serial. It is currently on Dailymotion in its original four parts. We never see Kaldor City in The Robots of Death—the entire story is set aboard the doomed storm mine—but we get the evocatively sketched picture of the kind of society where despite the decadence afforded by the ubiquitous service of robots, everyone owes their souls to the company store unless they are rich enough or hereditarily privileged enough to be the paymasters instead; the company in this case is a mining concern which is monopolized by and essentially interchangeable with the government, dominated by the descendants of the old colonial elite and thrumming with paranoia, not just because of all the corporate maneuvering. Robophobia is so unmentionably shameful precisely because it calls attention to the anxieties the rest of society is doing its damnedest to repress. The first scene in the serial involves one of the crew receiving a massage from a robot while one of his colleagues winds him up with the urban legend of a robot massage that ended in dismemberment. When I tried to imagine Poul coming back as one of the few survivors of Storm Mine 4, I kept getting J.G. Ballard a lot more than Hugo Gernsback. It was encouraging to find out that Chris Boucher agreed with me, but then I had to ignore most of what he thought had happened instead.

[asakiyume]

I went back and read your earlier entry last night, and then went and looked at some trailers and clips, I was so intrigued (you truly captured in prose how the setting looked, stylistically).

So now I have to ask--please go ahead and spoil me--what does Boucher imagine happens next?

[sovay]

I went back and read your earlier entry last night, and then went and looked at some trailers and clips, I was so intrigued (you truly captured in prose how the setting looked, stylistically).

That makes me really happy to hear! I love the production design of The Robots of Death, not least because corporate dystopias are so often homogenized or utilitarian and this one is diverse and gorgeous and carelessly decorative. It looks fantastic. I just wouldn't want to live there. (I already live here.)

So now I have to ask--please go ahead and spoil me--what does Boucher imagine happens next?

An extremely complicated conspiracy! Set perhaps a decade after the events of The Robot of Death, the plot of Corpse Marker concerns the efforts of the Company administration to reconsolidate their power against self-made upstarts like Uvanov by hiring an off-world psycho-strategist (one of Boucher's characters from Blake's 7, which I can appreciate in the abstract even though I have not actually seen the show) to stage a shell game of assassinations and investigations intended to culminate in the public revelation of the truth behind the tragedy of Storm Mine 4, discrediting the former generation of robots in favor of a new, deliberately human-appearing class whose introduction would otherwise have met with much more resistance while at the same time demonstrating the transparency and stability of traditional family rule, with the bonus that one of the assassinations would have been Uvanov's. Like many extremely complicated conspiracies, it does not go according to plan for multiple reasons, including the return of the Doctor and Leela. But one of its prongs involves psychologically destabilizing Poul in the guise of treating his PTSD so that he can be easily and defenselessly framed for the new-style-robot-committed murders of Toos and Uvanov, neatly wiping out all three survivors of Storm Mine 4 in case the revelation of the truth behind its tragedy should need to differ from the reality of the truth. All three of them make it out alive! Poul is actually doing far better by the end of the novel than its beginning, although he has some very rough patches for most of it! But the plot of the novel as well as the schemes of the psycho-strategist require him to have no conscious recall of the events that traumatized him, whereas I needed him to retain his memories—even if he has been spectacularly gaslit about them—because the story occurred to me with the line "He still thought of her sometimes, the girl who had called him a hunter."

I didn't get as far as envisioning an extremely complicated conspiracy, but I agreed with Boucher as far back as The Robots of Death that the society of this unnamed planet is heading for some kind of crack-up if it cannot reckon with its own realities, like the fact that it's all very well to say that robots are incapable of violence when by definition robots are capable of whatever they have been programmed to do. We concurred, with some difference of opinion on the details, on the cover-up of Storm Mine 4, on a desk job for Poul, and that any mental health treatment he received on the part of the Company would have been self-serving to say the least. The problem is really that I want an ending for him like thisbluespirit's "Robophobia (And How to Cure It)" and he persists in living in a hellbent dystopia, but I couldn't believe that his instinct to pursue the missing piece of the puzzle—the incongruity, the implication—would just disappear. It would have been safer for him on Storm Mine 4 to go on denying that robots could be murderers, except he couldn't make it stick even to himself. I am not sure he lives in a culture where it is particularly healthy to be a good investigator. Alternately, he should just be in film noir.

(Toos and Uvanov are fine in my fic, they are just completely off-page because I couldn't even think about mentioning them without risking the story branching off to check for itself.)

[asakiyume]

like the fact that it's all very well to say that robots are incapable of violence when by definition robots are capable of whatever they have been programmed to do. --SO TRUE, and so often ignored.

And I see there's a new fic for me to read--and now I'm situated for it! Thank you.

[alexxkay]

I particularly liked the polysemic final word.

[sovay]

I particularly liked the polysemic final word.

(Yay.) Thank you.