Last month I published a few pages of an early draft of my novel The Robot And The Fall of Evelon. My novel is about a man called David Taylor from Chicago who wakes up on a distant planet as a robot.

It’s about David’s journey in a robot body, which sets in motion a chain of events and a landscape in which to discuss what it means to be human.

Writing about robots is rewarding and tricky. Rewarding because our modern-day relationship with robots is close and universal. Even if we seldom use a computer or smart phone, car, microwave oven, television, toaster, refrigerator or electric heater, very few of us will not be touched by machine interaction somewhere. Most of us will cross the road when the lights change (as determined by robots), arrange our lives according to time (recorded and displayed by robots), or opt for some kind of medical assistance when required (often involving machines and robots).

Robots are a mirror for humanity. In The Robot And The Fall of Evelon I explore our human ability to love with a robot’s inability to love. I compare our human social pressure to conform with a robot’s inescapable programming to conform. And I delicately contrast our comfort in routine with a robot’s unconsidered and inevitable execution of (code) routines.

We humans have the ability to reflect on our experiences, choices and behaviours, but robots do not.

Writing about robots comes with responsibility, and that’s the tricky part. There are robots we’ve cheered for like R2-D2 and C-3PO from Star Wars, robots we’ve learned to fear like the T-800 from The Terminator or HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and robots we’ve belly-laughed at like Bender from Futurama.

Then there’s a long list of robots in our television, cinematic and literary history we’ve come to love as warmly as any flesh-and-blood human character. We’ve cheered for the triumphs of Wall-E and his girlfriend Eve in Wall-E, we’ve shed tears for David the robot-boy in the Kubrick-Spielberg movie AI, and we’ve laughed hard, during tense moments, at the dry comedy of Rogue One‘s droid K-2S0.  

Yes, we’ve anthropomorphised machines. We watch how they try to understand us. They show us to ourselves.

A few published pages of my novel-in-progress The Robot And The Fall of Evelon can be found here.