Rabbit and Robot

A robotic giraffe named Maurice is eating the mechanical  innards of a robotic tiger.

Maurice ate and ate as the tiger cried and cried.
Maurice burbled, "Cette viande de tigre est délicieux!"
And the tiger wailed, "Sartre was right -- I cannot escape anguish because I am anguish."
"Mmmmph mmmph mmmh!" went Maurice.

If this dialogue from the first chapter of Andrew Smith's recent novel, Rabbit and Robot, leaves you cold, stop right here.  This is not the book for you.

Similarly, if my February 2014 discussion of the same Andrew Smith's Grasshopper Jungle -- a novel wherein the narrator is one of a few survivors of an infestation of mutant insects that have devoured all of humanity -- left you wondering what was wrong with Mr. Smith (and what was wrong with me for finding the book both funny and profound), then run for the nearest exit.

Rabbit reminds one of Grasshopper, so maybe Andrew Smith -- one of our best Young Adult novelists -- is moving away from the typical teenager "coming of age" YA genre and slipping ever deeper into the dangerous swamp of fantasy.  I love it.

Which is not to say that Rabbit and Robot is perfectly satisfying. 

Cager and Billy are the 16-year-old sons of the two richest men on earth, some half century in the future.  It's a world that seems strangely plausible. For those who aren't sons of the "one percent" -- to use our own time's term for it -- there are only two vocations left -- "bonk" (pejorative slang "rabbit") (meaning a soldier) or "coder" (meaning what it sounds like).  All education is designed to track all children into one of those two fields of endeavor.

Coding, because all work has been automated to the point that robots -- virtually indistinguishable from human beings -- do all the work which is rapidly drying up in our own time.  The military, because humans have little else with which to amuse themselves other than fighting.  Some thirty wars are going on simultaneously around the globe.

All students are enabled to master their studies by use of the drug Woz, which seems to combine the advantages of Ritalin with a drug that produces a feeling of happiness.  Unfortunately, it's rather addictive, and for those who can afford to purchase their own supplies, overdoses are common and fatal.

Cager's father, among his other accomplishments, has designed an enormous "cruise ship" -- the Tennessee -- that circles the moon in a low lunar orbit.  It is like a luxury planet unto itself -- like one of those huge ugly cruise ships that sail the seas in our own time, but vastly larger and more luxurious.  It hasn't yet opened for business, but it is fully staffed by "cogs" -- the vernacular for the robots who keep the economy going while humans are coding and fighting.

Cager is highly addicted to Woz, and his best friend Billy is not.  Billy essentially arranges an intervention, where Cager and Billy travel to the Tennessee, without Cager's realizing where they're going until it's too late, where Cager will essentially be detoxed.

What Billy doesn't realize is that they will be the first and last humans (aside from a couple of stowaway girls) to ever become guests of the Tennessee.  Earth has had one war too many, and is now a desolate brown ball of smoke, as viewed from space.

Just Cager and Billy (and a couple of not-yet-discovered low class girls) on a giant lunar satellite staffed by thousands of cogs.  And, so far as they (or we) know, they are the last of humanity.

Not to prolong this summary, but it should be noted that cogs, at least the earlier model cogs serving on the Tennessee, come in four basic flavors, reflecting the temperament of the human who wrote each one's code -- outraged, elated, horny, or depressed.  The cogs perform their prescribed functions while at the same time frequently offering extreme displays of their basic attitude:

"Could you please instruct our waiter to make my order to go?"
"I have no reason to live," the busboy, whose name badge identified him as Milo, said.
"Nonsense.  You aren't alive to begin with," I pointed out.  "Suck it up and make the best of it, Milo.  The future is bright, I assure you."
"We come into existence, and we float through space, doomed, until we all die horribly.  No reason to live at all."
Milo the busboy wept uncontrollably.
He probably knew more than I did, but who can say?

Confusions and adventures ensue, as you can imagine.  A coding "worm" infects the cogs, and the cogs turn on each other with hungry vengeance, seeking whomsoever's mechanics they can devour. Infected cogs, we see, are no wiser than their human builders had been on earth, and the Tennessee's luxury lies in shambles.

As the book gradually draws near its inconclusive conclusion, we the readers become increasingly aware that when a robot acts like a human, talks like a human, expresses emotions like a human, contemplates his own existence like a human -- it becomes difficult to determine -- short of slicing him open to see if he contains electronics rather than blood -- whether he is in fact a human.   In fact, Cager (and we) had no idea that his "minder" -- a sort of male nanny -- who had raised him from childhood was a cog at a high level of technological development until nearly the end of the novel.  (Well, we had clues, but Cager didn't!)

The novel has a certain level of scatological and bloodthirsty humor that appeals to adolescents, but then so does Shakespeare.  Don't be so damn stuffy.  Rabbit and Robot isn't War and Peace, but you know you're never going to read War and Peace this summer anyway.

Give it a try.