Androids & Cyborgs

<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Writers have interpreted androids and cyborgs very differently over the years. Science fiction stories include a wide variety of nonhuman intelligences, from robots to aliens, artificial intelligences resident in machines to gestalt minds spread across multiple bodies. Usually there is a consensus about what each individual term means, but androids and cyborgs are both differentiated from robots, which are purely mechanical creatures, although they may function in much the same fashion.

Androids have largely been replaced in contemporary science fiction by clones. The term was generally applied to an organic being created through some artificial process, often designed as menial workers or soldiers, sometimes with the implication that they lacked a soul. In some cases, androids were created by revivifying dead bodies or parts salvaged from corpses. Frankenstein's monster could technically be classified as an android, for example. Although Karel Čapek invented the term "robot" in his play R.U.R., the creatures he describes are androids because they are created from living material. Probably the best-known android story is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, filmed as Bladerunner, but androids also have prominent roles in Into the Slave Nebula by John Brunner, Tower of Glass by Robert Silverberg, and Looking for the Mahdi by N. Lee Wood.

Cyborgs are organic beings whose bodies have been enhanced by mechanical appliances. Technically speaking, all of us who wear eyeglasses are rudimentary cyborgs. The best-known cyborg is probably Steve Austin in The Six Million Dollar Man, a television series based on the original novel Cyborg by Martin Caidin. Other cyborgs were created so that humans could live in an environment that would otherwise be intolerable. Frederik Pohl suggested cyborgs as colonists of Mars in Man Plus, for example. One of the most evocative versions of the cyborg appeared in a series of short pieces by David R. Bunch, later collected as Moderan, set on a future Earth where the degree to which one's organic body has been replaced becomes a class distinction.

Often these enhancements are designed to serve military purposes. In its most extreme case, human brains are physically relocated into mechanical bodies. Keith Laumer's Bolo series suggests that this would be an efficient way to direct the actions of complex war machines. Cyborg starships with disembodied human brains as their pilots are another alternative, most notably in Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang and its various sequels by McCaffrey and others.

The most subtle but also the most extreme type of cyborg is a human whose body is infused with nanomachines, microscopic devices designed to function as antibodies or perform other beneficial services. As biotechnology advances in the real world, it is likely that interest in both cyborgs and androids will increase, in one form or another, in the years to come.

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