Robots. They have been a staple of Science Fiction for a very long time now, dating back to Karel Capek’s play R.U.R., Rossum’s Universal Robots, which was first performed in the 1920’s. I always liked Isaac Asimov’s version of these intelligent machines, along with the Three Laws of Robotics that he developed. Yes, I am aware that others have since managed to question the logic of the Three Laws, but none of those critics have contributed anything like as ground-breaking an idea as Asimov did. Robots are amongst us today, of course, although they lack the positronic brains that appeared in I Robot, both the books and the film.

Without really thinking about it, I had decided on having robots in my book, but what kind of robots would they be? I enjoyed C3PO and R2D2 from Star Wars, but I actually found Data from Star Trek more interesting. I wanted my robots to be both intelligent but also free of human control. It occurred to me that if robots did achieve artificial intelligence then the question of their oft-depicted role as little more than mechanised slaves had to be questioned. It seemed reasonable to presume that intelligent robots would eventually break from human control and that is the path that I have taken. My robots exist alongside humans. They perform certain roles, some of which are crucial, but they do so for their own reasons. Being robots, they do not need money to live, so they are not wage-slaves. Also, within the human galaxy there is a planet that is occupied entirely by robots. Humans are not forbidden, they just find the lack of others of their kind sort of off-putting, so while they may visit the robot planet they tend not to stay. One reason for this may well be that the robots do not use human-friendly architecture; why should they? The kind of shelter from the elements that machines require is very different to that of us.

How the robots achieved their (mostly) bloodless revolution is going to be one of the themes of the book, along with the human-robot relationship that has since developed. I have also revisited Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws and applied my own version, which is much less anthropocentric. I think that it is going to be interesting writing about a genderless form of artificial life that has quite a complex relationship with its creator with whom it shares the galaxy.