WRITING DOCTOR'S BLOG by NYHWRITER.COM

BRAVE NEW WORLD? Maybe: LOVE & SEX WITH ROBOTS: THE EVOLUTION OF HUMAN-ROBOT RELATIONSHIPS

DAVID LEVY: LOVE & SEX WITH ROBOTS: THE EVOLUTION OF HUMAN-ROBOT RELATIONSHIPS (Harper-Collins, Nov 2007)

Review by Nancy Yanes Hoffman, THE WRITING DOCTOR, www.writingdoctor.typepad.com, nywriter@rochester.rr.com, 585-385-1515

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        David Levy is sure that androids, which are robots appearing in human form, may someday reproduce other humanoid robots, who will live and love and be loved by human beings. Proving his thesis, the androids from his earlier user-friendly primer for the uninitiated, ROBOTS UNLIMITED: LIFE IN A VIRTUAL AGE, have—with an assist from their creator-- begotten his controversial new book, LOVE & SEX WITH ROBOTS: THE EVOLUTION OF HUMAN-ROBOT RELATIONSHIPS (Harper-Collins, November, 2007).

        When Levy, a much-lauded chess master and specialist in Artificial Intelligence (AI), finished writing ROBOTS UNLIMITED, he believed he had only scratched the surface. Although ROBOTS UNLIMITED predicted that by mid-century, the intellectual and creative powers of robots would be boundless—or at least, unrestricted, Levy assumed much more needed to be said about the how and why of the expected sexual interactions between humans (that’s us) and androids.

          Building on his well-researched and carefully presented history of the variety of human sexual proclivities through the ages, Levy’s new book imagines a world where robots who look like humans will become sexual—and even marital –partners of those of us who believe we are human (whatever that means). Levy is convinced that “humans falling in love with robots are a natural extension of more conventional human feelings of love and…that sex with robots is a natural extension of human sexuality.”

          By mid-century (that’s SOON), he predicts, “our grandchildren’s generation will embrace robots…as their companions, friends, and lovers.” Robots, he says,  will be programmed to return their love and “maximize the satisfaction and enjoyment of their human partners.”

          Whether readers are willing or able to make what Levy calls “The mental leap to sex with robots” remains to be seen. Questions explode from every page. Will robots programmed to be interacting human sexual beings make our lives—or those of our grandchildren—better and if so, how and why? Levy asserts that robotic sex will reduce teenage pregnancies, abortions, sexually transmitted diseases, and even pedophilia.

          Possibly. For humanoid robots will carry their own as-yet-unidentified baggage. The widowed, aged, lonely, sick, and disabled may find once-lost gratification with their robotic sexual partners but will these humanoid robots be any more available physically and emotionally to "sexually marginalized” individuals than human partners might be?

        The philosophical problems of "Roboethics" in this world-to-come are many. Since Levy sees robots anthropomorphically, he worries how humans will treat robots’ feelings and how humans will try to control robotic behavior. On the other side of the fence are the issues of robotic sex for humans. For example, how will a spouse or partner react to robotic sex. Will it be considered infidelity? Will robot swapping be equated with spouse swapping?

         Levy only perfunctorily addresses the social problems inherent in developing a population of humanoid robots who are, he anticipates, quicker, smarter, more skillful, and more sexually proficient than humans. Will creating a master race of robots result in Nazi-like attempts to control the humanly inferior, non-robotic populace? Will these idealized robots become an immigration problem as they take over from humans? If they are “all but indistinguishable to the vast majority of the human population,” how will humans deal with them?

         On the sexual level, if robots develop more satisfying sexual techniques, will humans be jealous and destroy them? If robots become “surrogate humans,” will actual humans be so threatened that they  war with the robots? If robots can choose between good and evil, which will they choose, and who says they will choose us—or we will choose them?

        Agree or disagree with Levy’s contentions, his books should make you think. His books should make you reread Aldous Huxley’s 1920s prophesies in BRAVE NEW WORLD. They’ll even remind you of the old song, “Paper Doll,” which demonstrated the intensity of wartime longing for substitute sexual objects.

         Most of all, Levy will make you look differently at what’s happening in our world. Levy’s picture of the future should awaken you to the truths in inherent in our present-day "technological revolution," where 20% of us prefer our computers to conversations with real people. And think differently about what might be coming down the pike while we wait for the light to change.

        As for me, after looking into Levy’s crystal ball, I’m not sure about the sexual blandishments of robotic relationships. Certainly,I’d welcome what he calls “user-robots” who would vacuum, cut grass, do dishes, clean my basement, organize my messy desk, give Martha Stewartish dinner parties. Welcome them with open arms.

         But as far as sex is concerned, I’ll stick with the human variety. It’s all I know. For now, it’s all I care to know.

News to Know About--The Future of Books vs Digital Devices

The New York Times published an article entitled, "Are Books Passe?" on September 6th, 2007 in its Business section. Amazon and Google are both introducing a digital reader. Barnes & Noble is planning an electronic book reader in the future--b ut only when they can lower the price significantly. All this raises the question whether books, newspapers, and magazines will be the purvieew of a digital device--and what the effect will be on the declining readership of books and other forms of the printed word. Dig up the article and see what you think. As for me, I'm still praying that my stake in the buggy whip manufacturing business, which is what book reviewing has become, will still be alive--and moderately well.

SPARKS DOESN'T SPARKLE: THE CHOICE as FRAUD

SPARKS DOESN'T SPARKLE: THE CHOICE as FRAUD

THE CHOICE by Nicholas Sparks (Grand Central, Sept 2007)

By Nancy Yanes Hoffman, THE WRITING DOCTOR, www.writingdoctor.typepad.com
NYH Communications Group, 16 San Rafael Dr., Rochester, NY 14618
nywriter@rochester.rr.com, 585-385-1515

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So much for promises and vows. I promised myself that I would only review books that I liked. My blog would be limited to books I really liked.

But like Nicholas Sparks’s Travis Parker, small-town vet in Sparks’s THE CHOICE, his adolescently maudlin latest offering of the anatomy of love, marriage, and what to do about promises when the chips are down,  I, too, have to break my word.

THE CHOICE  is a tripartite story of the romance between Parker and his next-door neighbor Gabby Holland, their eleven-year marriage, and the choice Parker must make after Gabby’s head injury in an automobile accident. The first part focuses on the off-again, on-again pas de deux between two empty-headed Boomers in a small Carolina town. Written like a Freshman English paper, this section reveals nothing about the characters and what makes them tick.

To concentrate on this non-page-turner, I began counting the grammatical errors. Even that palled. I stopped at the 11th “like I said.”

The second part about their marriage is blessedly briefer and more readable.  In the final section, where Parker struggles with his choice—ostensibly the point of this pointless exercise in best-sellerdom, Sparks settles for Terri Schiavo with a happy ending.

In Nicholas Sparks’s essay, "Four Basic Elements of Any Novel" (www.nicholassparks.com), he outlines rules for budding writers.

But Sparks ignores his own advice. One problem: Sparks tries too hard to keep his characters as pure as the driven snow. Yet snow sparkles in the sun. Sparks’s people lack their creator’s spark (forgive me).  They don’t “all go to church” or eschew “premarital sex,” virtues he claimed for his oeuvre. They do commit one cardinal sin: they’re boring.

Sparks’s successes reveal something about red and blue states and the American mind. Fifty million copies of Nicholas Sparks’s books are in print. Seven of his 13 books have been #1 New York Times bestsellers. And I thought readers were more judicious.

The best I can say for THE CHOICE is-- don’t bother. Let someone else make Sparks rich. Or richer.

Editors Aren't Always Right: Rejections of Stellar Books

      So you want to be a writer? Advice from one who knows: Don't. There are better, more satisfying ways to make a living. Even to express yourself.

      If you actually finish your masterpiece (a tall order, that), briers and bristles clog the road to getting published, let alone having enough people buy your book once it gets on bookseller' shelves.

        David Oshinsky's "No, Thanks, Mr Nabakov" tells you about rejection in the NY Times's book review section of September 9th, 2007. In reviewing Alfred A. Knopf's rejections of books that went on to win glowing reviews and prizes when resurrected by other publishers, Oshinsky understandingly maintains that "a rejected manuscript usually appeared to deserve its fate."

         But the operative word is "usually," which means Knopf turned down some big winners. One was Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl, which their readers considered dreary, dull, and adolescent. Rejected by 15 other publishers, Doubleday finally took a chance on it in 1952, despite some misgivings, the Diary has sold more than 30 million copies, an all-time best-selling record.

         In Knopf's rejection archives from the 1940s to the 1970s are such winners with other publishers as Jorge Luis Borges, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anais Nin, Jean-Paul Sartre,  and Barbara Tuchman. Two of my favorites, Mordecai Richler and Vladimir Nabokov also got thumbs down.

         Even such well-known scholars as John Hope Franklin and T. Harry Williams, whom Knopf had published previously, had to go elsewhere for publication.  Proving their assiduity, these scholars later published successes with Knopf.

         Getting past readers--and agents--is a tough ballgame. Before sitting down to write--and submitting a manuscript, make up your mind whether your skin is thick enough. Mine isn't any more. But if you're brave, try keeping an album of your rejection slips. Who knows? It might make a good article some day.

The War that History Forgot: David Halberstam's THE COLDEST WINTER: AMERICA AND THE KOREAN WAR

The War that History Forgot: David Halberstam's THE COLDEST WINTER: AMERICA AND THE KOREAN WAR (Hyperion, Sept 25th, 2007)

by Nancy Yanes-Hoffman, www.writingdoctor.typepad.com. nywriter@rochester.rr.com.

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          The year was 1955. The Korean War, then called “conflict” to prevent Congress from actually declaring War, was ostensibly over. David Halberstam was just graduated from Harvard.

           My husband, a Board-certified internist, caught in the net of the little-remembered “Doctor Draft” was sent to the 39th parallel in Korea, a bleak spot where the ostensible marker, the 38th parallel, bumps up past the demilitarized zone (DMZ). The war was over. The doctor draft was not.

           With my husband in Korea, I returned to Rochester from Fort Dix with our two-year-old son.

          “Where’s Marvin?” people asked, silently wondering if something had happened to our marriage.

          “In Korea,” I’d reply knowing in advance that they’d ask, “What’s he doing there?”

          Although historians have called the Korean War “the century’s nastiest little war,” everyday Americans knew little and paid less attention to what was happening in that faraway place. Only the nearly seven million Americans fighting and shivering on active duty and the families of the 41,000 service people killed or dead while missing in action cared about the prices paid, the cost of that "police action."

           Now, half a century later, David Halberstam’s brilliant tour de force, THE COLDEST WINTER: AMERICA AND THE KOREAN WAR, rescues the soldiers and the battles, the courage and defeats of “the forgotten war” from “the black hole of modern American history” from the anomie of being the war that “sometimes seemed orphaned by history.”  For ten years, Halberstam worked on this, his last, best book, which is a monument to a war few know and a perspective as current as tomorrow morning's news of the Iraqi quagmire where we are mired.

          People and places, battles, traumas and injuries, mud and cold crowd Halberstam’s canvas. The powerful are front and center with Truman, North Korea’s Kim Il Sung, China’s Mao, and most of all, the self-involved, self-aggrandizing General MacArthur dictating the war, speaking only of himself with "I shall return." The decisions were theirs.

           But it is Halberstam’s interviews with GIs and marines, bitterly remembering what they went through, that make THE COLDEST WINTER so unforgettable. The fighting, the wounds, the loneliness, the impossible battles were all theirs. Most of all, MacArthur is the evil genius who looks upon this war as his last hurrah, believing in his monarchy over Truman, and ignoring the suffering and losses of soldiers forced to act upon his egotistical miscalculations.

           Neither the war nor the book had a happy ending. Wars never do.  Halberstam’s death in a car accident wrote a tragic postscript to THE COLDEST WINTER, which he rightly believed was the capstone to his career as our foremost historian-journalist. Yet even though he died with his boots on at the height of his powers, killed on his way to an interview for a new football book about Y.A. Tittle, the old-time quarterback, there is something peculiarly fitting about Halberstam’s death at this moment. It is as though that forgotten war is exacting revenge on its history and on the man who reasserts its importance in our lives today.

          My mother used to say, “Cast your bread upon the waters and it comes back-- buttered.” So it is with Halberstam. In 1997, after J. Anthony Lukas committed suicide,  Halberstam went on a book tour to promote  Lukas’s last work, BIG TROUBLE.  Today, such laureates as Joan Didion, Seymour Hersh, Carl Woodward, Anna Quindlen, and Doris Kearns Goodwin (among a host of other famous names) have banded together for a book tour promoting THE COLDEST WINTER. It is an appropriate memento mori for a man whose life and work personified understanding and knowledge of our times and the times which have forged us.

          If you can read only one book this year, be sure it is Halberstam's THE COLDEST WINTER. It will give you needed insights into an old war—and our not-so-new, unending struggles in Iraq.