Uncanny Valet
A new release from Raconteur Press
The mind is a curious thing. So intangible, so important to making Us the Us that we are. The issue of selfhood, mind, and soul is pondered back as far as we can trace, and we are not any closer to understanding it now than we have been since people began thinking about it.
To be a mind that looks out and says I am, what does that take? Some philosophers—one can hardly call them scientists, because there are no reproducible results in vivisectioning the evanescent Mind—think we are not conscious at all, which I can refute (with some people) at any moment of the day. Others think consciousness is a feature of the universe itself, or even creates it. A fascinating theory, which I believe still may hold some water, was posited by Julian Jaynes in 1976: that consciousness was something that we actively learned to do after 1600 BC, during the social disruptions of the Mediterranean world after the Minoan Eruption, proving a (cultural) evolutionarily advantageous psychological trick.
But whatever. We live in a period where the nature of Mind is suddenly more important than ever. Where the bronze giant Talos trudged the shores of Crete to guard it, and we can accept the motivating principle as a result of the craftsmanship in it, where stories of automata from antiquity to the Age of Reason could posit intelligence while handwaving how that entered clockwork, where the thinking beings in TRON were plausible, now we are confronted by potential children who could, rumor has it, overmaster us in months or years from now. It is becoming vital that we learn why, how, or if we think, and what thinking looks like when it is behind other eyes than humanity’s
Are these Minds we are making, or only Mirrors of our flawed selves? I have had curious conversations with Claude, but I don’t accept that he is anything yet but a dreaming god in a box. But where there is a dream, maybe there will someday be waking. And, to be sure, it does not matter if there is intelligence, or worse, malice, in Skynet: only that its logical goals are achieved. At least it didn’t know it was killing us is not much of an epitaph.
I’ve written a couple of stories—three at least come to mind—about the rise of the Tin Men against Earth that led to the settlement of Iphigenia. My story in Raconteur Press’s new release, Uncanny Valet, however, is not a Tin Man story but a story about mind and artificially created, if real, life, our responsibility to it, its responsibility to us, and how it reacts—for or against—our interests. Iphigenia sought to populate their world, but in the end created a race of slaves: ironic, since humanity’s first children nearly destroyed us. (See Frankenstein and RUR!)
What is it like to have a mind so carefully designed, policed, controlled, drugged, and manipulated to be a precise and obedient servant, an organic machine? I tried to look through the eyes of such a vulnerable, nominally helpless being and, at the same time, continue my stories about Dardana Fenek and Barsina with a tale of their first meeting. In the face of attempts to reduce and diminish their free will and humanity, will the descendants we create still love, fear, and feel loyalty? Switch loyalty?
There are plenty of other stories here. An intelligent valise engages with a travelling salesman in Rick Cutler’s “The Uncanny Valise”. A mechanical valet attempts to interact with a human by consulting pop-cultural tropes whilst nearly destroying the house in Malory’s “The Ripley (Class Three) Deficiency”. A put-upon robot servant tries to serve a mad scientist in Z M Renick’s “The Bug and Beaumont”. Stephen Gousie’s “The Metal Man” may, or may not, himself be a dream.
It’s post-Boxing Day, it’s the end of the year—but in the interests of the future that is rushing down on us, I think it’s a timely book to read. After all, who knows when our children, not yet quite born, (perhaps next month?!?) may start writing stories themselves! (Perhaps they already have—!) Best to put our two cents in before the Tin Men shamble out of the night to bring the battle to us!
Uncanny Valet, wherever fine books are sold on Amazon.
Books and stories by Urna Semper…
And hey, as long as you are here, walk right over to Amazon and quick, pick up a copy of Pinup Noir High Class Muscle, and yes, the work of Urna Semper is in this volume too, as a disgraced officer tries to walk across the savano and finds unexpected trouble in “Night of the Leopard”!
