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Machines as characters
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One of my favs, but it’s pretty old, is The Forbin Project. Made a movie out of it as well.
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James P. Hogan’s Code of the Lifemaker features first contact with a machine civilization. Back in the day I thought it was quite interesting.While I remember the book fondly, it has a 50/50 chance of not standing up today, since Hogan became a victim of the Brain Eater and ended up as a fruity nutbar. But the prologue was excellent, either way.
Edit: looks like Baen has the entire book online for free. Free book!
The prologue is every bit as good as I recalled. https://www.baen.com/Chapters/0743435...
Yes, Colossus, The Forbin Project. I haven’t found a copy of it but I do have the movie on DVD. The first book was great and then there was a second and maybe a third that went off the rails with aliens and such.
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I need to re-read my James P Hogan collection before tossing them out. I am running out of shelf space and my old paperbacks are starting to fall apart. I read Code of the Lifemaker and other Hogan books in the 80s.
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Oh course all the ships in the Iain M. Banks CULTURE books are sapient machines (with amusing names).
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Sentient ships:Frank Herbert and Bill Ransom's Pandora Sequence (The Jesus Incident and onwards).
KSR's Aurora
IIRC one of the main characters in Piers Anthony's Apprentice Adept series is an android.
AndrewP wrote: "IIRC one of the main characters in Piers Anthony's Apprentice Adept series is an android."Oh my! Forgot about her.
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Split Infinity. There are multiple intelligent machines in that series, and they back Stile in hopes of him being able to get them rights as people. That's more fantasy than space opera, but it was a fun read.
Most of the ships in Iain M. Bank's Culture series can be considered characters too.
In the old Captain Future series two of the aides were Grag, an intelligent robot, and Otho, an android. There was also Simon, a human brain encased in a mobile metal case of some sort.
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Sprockets: A Little Robot by Alexander Key and
The Brave Little Toaster. They won't count as space opera though.
And of course the sentient robot, android or computer is a common element in comic books. One story does bear mentiong and that is "Judgement Day" concerning a planet inhabited by a robotic civilization which is being inspected to determine if it can join some sort of galactic federation. It was originally published in Weird Fantasy #18, March-April 1953.
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If we’re including comics, Livewires: Clockwork Thugs, Yo by Adam Warren was a surprisingly good YA story about androids that came out of left field from Marvel, having no connection to their superhero universe,
Teresa wrote: "Do you recall the criteria for Judgment Day? I find different rules for determining sapience or worth for joining galactic society of interest."The robots were of two groups, orange and blue. They were identical save for their colour and the fact the machines use to "educate" the blue robots were inferior to those used by the orange robots. As a result the orange robots considered the blue ones inferior and treated them as such. The inspector stated that until both groups were treated equally the planet could not join the federation. At the end of the story, once back on his ship he removed his helmet to reveal a human of African descent.
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And of course, there's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.
But I'm not sure they count as space opera.
This is a common trope in science fiction.
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Teresa wrote: "My memories of Friday were that she was born in a lab using DNA from multiple humans, so not a machine. It's been some time since I reread that book though."Both you and Betsy are correct, Friday had a mantra in the book... "my mother was a test tube, my father was a knife" and she was referred to throughout the book as an artificial person.
What about Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 and Aurora? Both contain very good AI characters, their growth and learning process and aplay a big part in teh story Another intersting one is Children Of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky - where Ai with uploaded persons data develops into entity of its own.
MadProfessah wrote: "Oh course all the ships in the Iain M. Banks CULTURE books are sapient machines (with amusing names)."Especially in Excession, which is my favorite Culture novel. The ships are essentially the main characters.
These aren't Space Opera but ...
vN by Madeline Ashby has a pretty interesting "machine" protagonist. Great book.
And The Ware Tetralogy by Rudy Rucker is littered with machine characters which are extremely inventive, controversial, whimsical, gross or just straight out weird. Definitely not for everyone but hard to forget!
And finally ... no link ... my first novel which isn't self-promotion because it was written so amateurishly that it isn't publishable and will likely never see the light of day. My wife's favorite character in it was a valet machine, and the sentience of machines was a major theme in the book. **sigh** You'll just have to take my word for it. {:(
I've been reading a lot of Star Wars novels lately, and what really stuck me is how important the droids are, in particular C3PO. I mean, you know they're not sentient or human, they're just machines, but the characters are so memorable and intricately important to the plot that you become attached to them, almost more than the human characters. I think that is a very good use of robots in a novel, almost like pets.
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It’s pretty clear the Star Wars droids are sentient beings. They have their own personalities and agency. Plus, they feel pain for some bizarre reason.The movies have really missed a trick in not exploring the inner lives of droids, because they are obviously slave analogs. I haven’t read any of the books, so maybe that’s been gone into there.
I haven't seen it mentioned yet, but the AI in Hyperion series is pretty interesting. One of the all time great series IMHO.Machines as characters are quite a common theme, both in "Space Opera" and pop culture. Hal, Terminator, Data, the Doctor on Voyager, many movies and tv series feature sentient ai as characters (although one might say that the thread of an artificial lifeform trying to understand humanity has been done and done.)
Don't forget Marvin, the depressed robot, in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
My favourite are Keith Laumer's Bolo. Non humanoid, totally loyal to humanity, and noble.
Audrey wrote: "Don't forget Marvin, the depressed robot, in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."Damn! Now I have to go rummaging through my music library for that song about him.
Marvin reminds me of Marvin the Martian from the Bugs Bunny Looney Tunes..We now return you to the original topic...
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https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
There are so many great suggestions in this thread. Which one do I want to nominate??? Maggie in Hellspark is adorable. Bechimo in Ghost Ship? Julien in The Silver Ships?
I'd like to choose Mike from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress but I can't find an ebook edition* and I'd want to reread it. My eyes don't do well with dead tree books, and I don't enjoy audiobooks nearly as much as reading.
* This item can't be purchased in the United States
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So do you have any more books for this theme? We’ve already read Hellspark and two books by Becky Chambers that fit but there are so very many good books in this theme.
Well, there are "the Murderbot Diaries" by Martha Wells, starting with
.It's really funny, the robot is a big fan of tv shows and soap opera !
Ally wrote: "Well, there are "the Murderbot Diaries" by Martha Wells, starting with .It's really funny, the robot is a big fan of tv shows and soap opera !"
I quite like these, too, and I don’t think they’d been released back in January.
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Does the Bobiverse count? Bob is a human mind transferred into a computer that controls a starship who eventually builds copies of himself like a Von Neumann machine. There’s no question that We Are Legion (We Are Bob) is Space Opera.
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Looking at my shelves, I’m reminded that Megan O’Keefe’s Velocity Weapon features an AI, as do Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time and Children of Ruin. In O’Keefe’s book the AI is more of a major character.
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Space Opera Fans
Books mentioned in this topic
Children of Time (other topics)Children of Ruin (other topics)
Velocity Weapon (other topics)
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (other topics)
All Systems Red (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
Becky Chambers (other topics)Alexander Key (other topics)
D.F. Jones (other topics)
David Gerrold (other topics)
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
There are a lot of good books where one of the characters is a computer or android. What's one that you recall fondly?
Sometimes it is a computer that one day seemed to wake up, such as Mike in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and I think Maggie in Hellspark.
The Liaden Universe has several sapient machines that appear to have been designed that way from the start, such as Bechimo, Jeeves, Tocohl, and Admiral Bunter.
Then there are books where the machine likely isn't sapient at all but it can fool humans into thinking it is a human. There are some of those in the April series, but I wouldn't think of them as actual characters.
Of course we have to mention Data from Star Trek NG......
What's another one?