Half Čapek, half Rabbi Leow, part Shelley, and a smidgen of Stoker

kw: book reviews, science fiction, fantasy, robots, golems, automata

Since history began people have dreamed of creating beings like ourselves but from inanimate materials. Equally, myths such as Atlantis, drawn upon by Plato among others, belong to a genre of "The First Men", godlike beings that preceded humanity, or were perhaps our ancestors. Putting all these strains together in one well-written narrative is no mean feat, but in The Clockwork Dynasty, Daniel H. Wilson has pulled it off. The slipcover of the book indicates a Steampunk fantasy, but this is much more.

Peter, or Pyotr, is not a man; his sister Elena is no woman. They are Avtomat, automatons, built long ago and restored by a Russian mechanician. Much of the book follows them in chapters alternating between the 1900's and the 1700's, when they were (re)activated. Later in the book, the flashback chapters land us in about 3,000 BC, when an Avtomat was sheathed in articulated porcelain, much like a golem. Also like a golem, their motivating core, called an anima, embodies a Word; Peter's is pravda (justice), though it eventually turns out to be a much older word of the same meaning. Since that early period, they have taken advantage of improved technology to house their machinery in better "shells".

An Avtomat is faster and stronger than a human—otherwise, what's the use of their production?—and roughly equally intelligent, though perhaps not any wiser. The word "anima" is Latin for "soul", also "breath" or "breeze", and "animal" is derived from Latin for "that which breathes". In The Clockwork Dynasty, though, the anima is much more. It contains the Word and is also the power source of the entire mechanism.

So I'll leave the plot of the story—including wars between rival Avtomat factions over a 5,000-year time span—for the reader to enjoy. In fact, I suggest you read the book first, before reading further in this, because the rest isn't really about the book at all. It's a wonderful book, but it prompted a riff on my part about the energy that is needed by a self-contained robot or Avtomat.

The power needed to run a human body

The "standard" dietary requirement found on most food packaging refers to a 2,000 calorie-per-day diet. Digging around in various resources about basal metabolism, we find that people in the ordinary range of weights need from 1,700 to 2,400 cal/day. At any weight, men need a little more than women. These "calories" are, to a physicist, kilocalories (kCal). The key conversion factor needed is that 1 watt = 860 cal/hr = 0.86 kCal/hr. Over a day this comes to 20,640 cal or 20.64 kCal. Thus 2,000 kCal/day = 97 watts. The day's energy expenditure is thus above 2,300 watt-hours.

This is the standby energy we use because we are warm-blooded. This heat is generated by subtle twitching of all our skeletal muscles all the time, something termed "muscle tone". Animals that aren't warm-blooded, such as reptiles, have much lower energy needs, about 1/5 of what a mammal of similar size might need. And still, much of that is respiration of the living cells in the animal's body. What of a creature that doesn't respire, one that doesn't need to consume oxygen at all?

We may consider an Avtomat is akin to a laptop computer housed in a strong body, and lacking the energy-gobbling screen. Such a being, at rest, may consume no more than a watt or even a fraction of a watt. Of course, that is assuming the memory circuits use similar refreshing technology to that in a cell phone. Perhaps the "First Men" who devised these prehistoric robots had something better.

The energy of work

But when an Avtomat needs to walk, run, work, or fight, it will consume a great deal of energy. A mile walk consumes more than 80 kCal or almost 95 watt-hours. Running the same mile takes about 40% more energy. I remember the fad of the 50-mile hike of the 1960's. Such a hike takes roughly 4,000 kCal, tripling your dietary need that day. If you want to lose weight and be fit, that is a good beginning!

A friend who is a retired lumberjack told me that he and the men he worked with had to eat 8,000 calories daily (8,000 kCal). Subtract resting metabolism, and you find the work consumed about 6,000 kCal, or roughly 7,000 watt-hours. I don't know how much of that energy is consumed regenerating worn tissues, but we can figure that a robot lumberjack that operates similarly to a man will need about a one-horsepower power plant running during working hours.

That may not seem like much, until you consider holding such energy in a battery. Some of the most efficient electrical batteries currently in use are those in laptops and cell phones. A laptop battery weighing a few ounces can deliver about 65 watt-hours. You'd need more than 100 of them to run your robot lumberjack! And they would need recharging every day.

OK, now posit an Avtomat that began with a full charge in about 1700 AD and is still running today, over 300 years later. The anima is described as a device smaller than your hand. Even assuming such a robot isn't hard at work all the day, we're still looking at something over 100,000 days, at a few thousand watt-hours daily. "Only" one kWh/day means the anima has a capacity of at least 100 megawatt-hours. Let's move to physics momentarily: that comes to about a third of a trillion joules (0.36 trillion). Total annihilation of one gram of mass, according to Einstein's equation releases 90 trillion joules. So perhaps the anima begins as a container holding several milligrams of antimatter, plus machinery to meter it out in very tiny doses, and conversion of that energy to mechanical work at great efficiency so that poor Peter and Elena don't burn up during a hard run.

In case you'd rather consider chemical energy release, burning 1 liter of gasoline releases about 7,600 kCal, but only 1/3 of that is usable by the best "heat engines" we have been able to devise. So a liter of gasoline would be needed to run an Avtomat for a day or two, more if it was a lumberjack.

I think that has taken us far enough for now. I hope you read the book before reading this. Such thoughts might ruin the enjoyment of a well-written, page-turner of a narrative about ancient robots.

On the boundary between cyborg and human

kw: book reviews, science fiction, far future fiction, space opera, cyborgs, golems, androids, terraforming

Chris Moriarty is prone to leaving as much as he can to a reader's imagination and inference. For me, it is on the boundary between refreshing and irritating. Usually, when I can't figure out what his novel's characters just figured out, I get it within a page or two, sometimes because Moriarty explains, sometimes because my slow brain catches on.

Spin Control follows his successful novel "Spin State" with an equally readable, even more idea-packed story. The genre is hard science, far enough in the future that it verges on fantasy, but Moriarty has done his homework, and the technicalities are not-too-wild extrapolations of current trends and speculations.

Some four centuries hence, the human race has taken charge of its own evolution, and taken computing close to quantum limits, to produce a number of "near relatives" with various amounts of integrated machinery, from AIs of several kinds, to Golems (cyborgs with no childhood), to the all-biological but engineered products of several "syndicates", and at least one "Emergent AI" who has "lived" on the delicate edge of growth and destruction for a few centuries, partly due to its being "shunted" to a series of rented human bodies. Other AIs, that control groups of shunted human "volunteers" such as military squads, are found to be most stable when kept ignorant of what they are really doing, by being deceived that they are playing an elaborate game with really good virtuality; once one of these figures out what it is really doing, it promptly suicides...or is that self-destructs?

While many recent books have scene shifts nearly every page, thus resembling episodes of modern TV soap operas, each chapter in Spin Control has a venue and a cast, usually all centered on Arkady, the protagonist here. The chapters' scenes hang together better than those in most novels. Arkady is an A-level clone produced by the Rostov Syndicate. He is more victim than protagonist, only finding out what he was really sent to do in the closing pages of the novel.

Arkady begins by defecting from the Ring (space colonies in the synchronous orbit) to Earth. He'd previously been on a terraforming team to the well-kept-secret planet Novalis. Early survey and seeding probes had visited, and ten clones form four syndicates were sent to see how well the process is going. Seems it was going much too well, and some trouble ensued that Arkady doesn't know how to parse...yet. One result was a new kind of virus that enhances fertility, if that's all it does. Earth really needs that, because the population has crashed to the point that most people are walking ghosts—infertile and unlikely ever to reproduce.

Of course, there is more to it than that, and Arkady becomes a much coveted, much abused pawn in a high-stakes bidding war. It takes the long-lived Emergent AI Cohen and an old memory in a young commando to bring about the denouement: one really nasty character is eliminated, and the long-deceived military AIs learn not only what they are doing, but enough of what has kept Cohen alive, to take appropriate control of their own fates.

I like a hopeful ending...even if it is a setup for more sequels!