Astro Boy, science-fictionality and Japanese robotics

Over the last few decades, special effects and technological creations generated in the name of entertainment have given rise to a ‘science-fictionality’ that brings the technologies that have been imaged and imagined by science fiction films closer to our everyday reality. Above all, it is the robot and cyborg – the former being a mechanical being endowed with artificial intelligence, and the latter a synthesis of human and machine – that have been the most iconic technological effects of science fiction cinema, and it is the robot beyond the screen that this essay focuses on. In Robots: the Quest for Living Machines (1994) Geoff Simons states that the robot dream has existed in the human mind from antiquity to the present day. Simons understands these ‘robot dreams’ as reflecting the way human beings struggle “to cope with an incomprehensible universe” (1992, p.12). From the ancient Greek legends of Pygmalion who breathed life into a statue Galatea to Dr. Victor Frankenstein who animated the flesh of human corpses with electricity to create his monster, the myths and legends that deal with the creation of artificial life are as old as human history. As Simons suggests, creation myths are not only common in most cultures, they “often have an interest in robotics” (1992, p.16). We have come a long way since the myths of Pygmalion and the Frankenstein monster. Emerging media mark a radical turning point not only in our ways of perceiving entertainment and science fiction cinema as one such form of entertainment, but life itself.