Leseprobe
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Sex Education for Young Robots
Paolo Euron
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Belletristik/Erzählende Literatur
Beschreibung
The novel
Jessica is a synthetic girl produced by Venus. Her education as a sex robot is cut short due to the war with China and she, who has Asian features, is taken off the market. Her destination has changed and Jessica, during the long war, has to look after the children, then the dogs, and finally teach students. Her life expectancy is unlimited and she, in a profoundly changed world, bears witness to humans who created her. At the end of the conflict, after centuries, Venus assigns her a mission to Asia, where she can resume her function as a sex robot and where she meets Yaya, a synthetic girl who has created a gynecocratic society of artificial women in the jungle between Thailand and Cambodia. Yaya wants to restore the world to a natural state. Bangkok is a lagoon and the big cities on the coast are or are about to be submerged by the sea. Jessica, in an underwater Hong Kong, meets a Japanese who takes her with him and has her embarked on the spaceship Eden, destined to colonize the outer planets. After centuries of traveling off course and establishing an ephemeral colony on a planet, Eden goes adrift with a crew of synthetic girls who bear witness to the achievements of humanity who created them and eventually became extinct. First contact with advanced extraterrestrial life, the Sirians, will allow the synthetic beings to preserve and exhibit the legacy of humanity now vanished in this part of the universe.
About the book
Sex Education for Young Robots is linked to other works, above all to the novels
The Venus’ Formula (Delos Digital: Milan 2017) and
The Venus’ Trap (Delos Digital: Milan 2021), of which it continues not so much a story as an idea, developing it from a different point of view. These three novels belong to the same narrative universe but they are fully independent. The attentive reader will not fail to identify in these pages more or less direct references to great works, as always happens. However, the most obvious debt is to two philosophical essays I wrote for academic journals. The first one is
Uncanny Beauty. Aesthetics of Companionship, Love and Sex Robots published by the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology («Artificial Life»
M.I.T. 2022), the second one is
Uncanny Attraction. Intercultural Remarks on the Aesthetics of Gynoids and Sexbots in Pop Culture, published by «Popular Inquiry» (Aalto University 2023). Both articles deal with the issues of sex robots from a strictly academic perspective. That philosophy and technology can meet in science fiction, as well as in technological research and practice, is a formidable event that forty years ago, as a young reader of science fiction novels, I would never have imagined in this form, nor would I have ever dreamed of being a part of it.
