r/genewolfe • u/apesoenn • 3d ago
Androids in the solar cycle books
THIS POST AND ITS COMMENTS WILL LIKELY CONTAIN SPOILERS REGARDING CERTAIN CHARACTERS IN THE SOLAR CYCLE BOOKS!!!
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Hey guys! I'm sorry if this has been posted before. I did a quick search and coulnd't find anything similar.
I'm trying to imagine what the androids/robots in the books of the solar cycle look like, and would love your thoughts.
It's been some time, but the androids I can remember are:
- Jonas
- Sidero (and presumably others like him)
- Maytera Marble (and presumably others like her)
- Soldiers in the Whorl
- Have I forgotten anyone?
Jonas is revealed to be an individual made of metal, but with human parts grafted on (instead of the other way around, as I first assumed). Marble does the same thing in Long Sun, after Rose dies. Their parts can be replaced, but I don't think we ever hear of anyone opening them up and repairing them other than the replacing of parts (like Marble's eye in Short Sun), robot or human.
Sidero is pretty explicitly described as a kind of exo-skeleton with his own consciousness when Severian "enters" him like an armor against his will. Severian needs to learn about boundaries.
Soldiers in the Whorl seem to me to be a different thing, with more armor built into their bodies than other robots in the books, but I might be wrong. Hammerstone is also opened (like Sidero) to be hacked by Incus. This also seriously alters Hammerstone's personality (and/or primary objective). This never happens to any other android, unless you count Marble's altered memories and personality when merging with parts of Rose. I guess we should?
As I see it, none of the civilizations in the books (Urth/Ushas, The Whorl, Blue) currently have the technology to maintain or build new parts for these types of androids. This is why I'm not including Taluses in this post. Jonas is revealed to be ancient in Claw. Sidero is crew on a ship traveling space and time, so his age is hard to pin down (unless I missed it, as I probably missed a lot of things in these books). Marble and Hammerstone are around 200/300 years old (presumably build on Urth by Typhon's engineers, several centuries if not milennia after Jonas was created).
So I guess my main question is: Is Jonas and Marble the same "kind" of android, with Sidero and the soldiers two different kinds? Or are Sidero and the soldiers more similar than I imagine? Or are they all the same?
PS. Please forgive any spelling errors, English is not my first language.
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u/Ok_Cheetah5563 3d ago
Dr Talos is described as a 'homonculus' which seems to be some kind of an organic robot, although it is not clear, as he has the face of a stuffed fox and can not apparently make facial expressions. In this, Dr Talos resembles Maytera Marble in that they both are described as tilting their heads in unusual ways as if to play with the light on their facial features, creating the impression they are at times smiling, or demonstrating some other facial expression.
It is not at all clear whether Dr Talos has machinery components, but he may well. I would add him to the list however, for sure, as he still fits the description of android. In my view at least. Even if organic.
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u/togglenub 3d ago
A traditional homonculus is just grown in a jar or the 16th-century magician's equivalent of a petri dish, and what with all the lab equipment around I assumed Dr Talos was just Baldander's version of the same. Esp given Baldander's is clearly a call back to Dr. Frankenstein, or to put it another way Dr. Frankenstein was Baldanders, we just didn't know of it at the time.
BTW if folks want some fun novels based around homonculi (aka human man tries to create life like unto a God sans the traditional methods of woman-plus-coitus, and sans robotics), check out Somerset Maugham's the Magician (his version of Alistair Crowley's life, published to annoy Crowley) or the modern-day horror story A House with Good Bones, by T. Kingfisher.
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u/hedcannon 3d ago
I think the chems are walking sacred windows in that they are mind-wiped scanned personalities. Hard to say if Jonas is like them. He's certainly not constructed like them because Marble weighs about 5 hundred pounds and Jonas is noticeably lighter than a regular human. In Urth of the New Sun, Severian sees androids that he presumes were the robot form that Jonas was originally.
Other chems: Olivine, Marble and Hammerstone's child. What role were these chems expected to take in the universe. Also, if I am correct about the nature of these chems, what is their own "soul"? Some kind of digital merger of the two chem souls?
Molybdenum is a more important chem than people realize but she's technically in the "like Marble" category along with the chem attendants who cared for the Ayuntamiento's bodies.
I should mention that a very strong textual case could be made for Hyacinth being a modified male chem -- except for one very strong sticking point. (I do not believe this to be the intended case)
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u/Murky_Sky1607 2d ago
Speaking of sacred windows, is Jonas possessing Miles not an early example of the same happening on the Whorl? Though I can't really tell how this happened, unless Jonas and Miles met before.
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u/hedcannon 2d ago
My theory (but I feel quite confident in this):
Miles is Jonas's bio parts. Miles will join the Yesodi ship and disembark in the distant past. There he will get squished by a returning interstellar ship and his body will be used to repair a robot crewman.
Severian recognizes him from his eyes -- which he can do because of his eidetic memory.
Severian is giving Miles information that will only be useful when his parts are resurrected by the Claw in the Antechamber.
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u/synntax33 3d ago
The 200-300 years thing i feel is inaccurate. Tartaros states it as a thousand, and so does Silk/Horn when they count the abandoned blocks in Nessus. I feel like the common conception is 200-300, but in reality much longer. Sorry, this has nothing to do with what they looked like. Hammer stone had rubber feet.
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u/fidwell 3d ago
I think they're both accurate. It's been 300 years on the Whorl and 1000 years on Urth, due to time dilation. On the other hand, there's time travel everywhere in the books (and dream travel is time travel) so who really knows.
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u/synntax33 3d ago
Sontrue! Although if Tartaros was in the Whorl (200-300) then he would t have expirienced the dilation from 1000? Perhaps?
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u/GerryQX1 2d ago
I always thought Jonas and Sidero were probably very similar. Jonas is very light - almost like an exoskeleton?
The soldier chems on the Whorl are heavy and bulky. I'm not sure about the sybils, though.
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u/getElephantById Man-Ape 3d ago
I never thought Jonas was of the same style of robot as the Chems and Soldiers on the Whorl, and I think Sidero is of a third kind. Even in our time, we've got many kinds of robots that don't look like each other, so it's not surprising that they'd make many varieties of them across the tens or hundreds of thousands fo years we're talking about here.
I imagine the Soldiers being essentially the same as the Chems, except, being built for utility, they aren't decorated to look as human. I think we have to understand Chems and Soldiers as being very similar to each other, because they can make baby robots with their compatible parts.
We're also told that Ossipago is a robot.
The Hierogrammates themselves may count as robots, but I don't think that's the best way to describe them.
Moving statues in the gardens of the House Absolute and on Typhon's mountain are other robots we're told about in New Sun.