{"id":3522,"date":"2022-04-14T11:45:29","date_gmt":"2022-04-14T11:45:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=3522"},"modified":"2022-04-15T13:41:11","modified_gmt":"2022-04-15T13:41:11","slug":"sentient-being-blues-by-christopher-mark-rose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=3522","title":{"rendered":"Sentient Being Blues by Christopher Mark Rose"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Sentient Being Blues<\/em><\/strong> by Christopher Mark Rose (Asimov\u2019s SF<\/em>, March-April 2021) opens with \u201cAsimov was a Bigot\u201d graffiti, as seen by an A&R man called Thom on his way to see a blues-playing mining robot in deepest Siberia. We learn that the robot, XJB, was involved in an underground mining incident:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are robots that sing and play instruments. There are robots that dance, paint, sculpt. They do it because they were programmed to. What made XJB special, maybe even unique, is that it made its art spontaneously, as a consolation for dying men. It\u2019d never been taught; it taught itself, out of desperation, to give the last moments of those men\u2019s lives some scrap of kindness. It knew that it couldn\u2019t dig an escape before their time ran out.  p. 152<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

One wonders why, if robots can do all those things, there is still a requirement for human miners.
Moving swiftly onwards, XJB breaks out of the manager\u2019s office after talking to Thom (who has told it that a bootleg of its songs has gone viral). Soon XJB is on tour performing to mixed human and robot audiences. However, when a pair of active shooters start killing robots in the audience, XJB intervenes and kills one of them.
The next part of the story is about XJB\u2019s trial and how, even though robots are sentient, they don\u2019t have the same rights as humans (more story illogic\u2014if they are only machines, why is XJB being tried in court?). Then, after XJB is sentenced to deactivation, Thom visits and we get some melodramatic and contrived bonding between the two (Thom\u2019s daughter died when he refused to have her transferred to a cyborg, \u201cWhat you do in life can be undone, but what you sing can never be unsung\u201d).
The final section (spoiler) sees Thom and his boss Freddie ambush the police convoy taking XJB to be deactivated. However, just as it seems that they are on the cusp of freeing XJB, they are intercepted by police drones which cut its head off. All ends well when we find that XJB\u2019s brain isn\u2019t in its head but its hind quarters. XJB\u2019s consciousness is later hidden in a railroad engine. The music company continue to receive and promote its new music.
This story is something of a kitchen-sink piece (blues-playing robot, a future where sentient robots don\u2019t have the same rights as humans, the court case, the future-tech prison break, etc.), and the internal logic of the story is non-existent in places (see above and below). I also didn\u2019t care much for the affected, musically-referenced writing style. Or the derogatory cracks made at Isaac Asimov\u2019s expense:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If there were a residue of human decency left, wraithlike, drifting in the oily substance of the U.S. legal system, it never caressed the aghast faces of the robots drowned in it.
XJB was a dead bot walking. It had killed a human, in a concert hall filled with witnesses, recorded by thousands of its own assaulted fans.
The law had grown new limbs to reach bots, but grown them only from the diseased stumps of Asimov\u2019s original, arbitrary, uncaring three rules. More evil had been done in this century with his \u201claws of robotics\u201d that that scrofulous sci-fi writer could have ever imagined. They are explicit that robots\u2014if confronted with such a choice\u2014must sacrifice themselves, to save humans. As if human lives were somehow more important.  p. 156<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Apart from wraiths drifting in oil, and the personal comments (\u201cscrofulous\u201d), what we have here is more story illogic. If XJB has killed a human then how are human lives more important than those of robots? The three laws obviously don\u2019t apply here or, perhaps, as anyone who has any familiarity with Asimov\u2019s Laws of Robotics might suspect, they have metamorphosed to the point where robots now consider themselves \u201chuman\u201d. (The goalposts were always moving in Asimov\u2019s robot stories\u2014didn\u2019t The Bicentennial Man<\/em> become human?)
A complete muddle of a story, in multiple ways.
* (Mediocre). 6,950 words. Story link<\/a>.

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sentient Being Blues by Christopher Mark Rose (Asimov\u2019s SF, March-April 2021) opens with \u201cAsimov was a Bigot\u201d graffiti, as seen by an A&R man called Thom on his way to see a blues-playing mining robot in deepest Siberia. We learn that the robot, XJB, was involved in an underground mining incident: There are robots that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[705],"tags":[21,50,4,846,706,847,537,12],"class_list":["post-3522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christopher-mark-rose","tag-21","tag-50","tag-asimovs-sf","tag-blues","tag-christopher-mark-rose","tag-civil-rights","tag-robots","tag-short-story"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3522"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3522\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3572,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3522\/revisions\/3572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}