HAL, on the other hand, is complete in and of itself, requiring no human guidance after programming. However, this lack of regard for humanity is what destroys HAL, when he attempts to remove the human lives from the spaceship by killing them. These AY well represent the attitudes associated with Science Fiction: the understanding Sic-If authors, readers and believers have of the dangers of AY; that a true AY would be capable of anything a human is – deceit, murder, manipulation – but on a much larger scale.
Artificial Intelligence is also a very typical aspect of Science Fiction, occurring in other texts including l, Robot, Alien, and Wall-E. The lack of emotion throughout both Unmannered and 2001 : A Space Odyssey is another Science Fiction convention. Futuristic texts like The Book of Eli contain persona which seem completely drained of strong emotion, whether good or bad. The characters which show stronger emotion, like Julius Deane in Unmannered, and Carnegie in The Book of Eli, tend to be rich, influential people who have gained their status with underhanded methods the typical lesser evils of fiction.
The detachment of the majority of the population in Science Fiction books seems to be caused by the particularly trustful and deadly environment they live in – in 2001 : A Space Odyssey, the astronauts are trained to deal with the peculiar challenges of living completely isolated on a spaceship for months on end, and dealing with stressful problems like faulty communications and life support, by detaching themselves from their emotions to deal with the situations, and this seems to relate to the motionlessness of people living every day in the shadow of the near-omnipotent corporations of the future.
This is a common value in most futuristic Science Fiction, and it represents the well-informed population’s attitude towards the future of technology – that our technology may well be exceeding our humanity, turning us into something less than human, yet more than machine. The texts of Unmannered and 2001 : A Space Odyssey both contain characters who are constantly under the influence of the technology surrounding them.
Case, in Unmannered, is influenced most obviously by Wintertime, as the AY manipulates his feelings to better suit his purpose, but also, less immediately, by the cyberspace ‘ matrix’ he plugs into throughout the book. The matrix is an important factor to look at, as Case has been hanged by it more than once – before the start of the book, he was completely cut off from the matrix by the corporation he stole from, after being a ‘ cyber-cowboy’ since youth.
This had a severe detrimental effect on his mental wellbeing, and it pushed him to the use of alcohol, nicotine and various illegal drugs, and although Wintertime corrects his isolation, he retains his wariness of being used, as well as a nicotine addiction. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, David Bowman spends all of his time under the all-seeing eye of HAL, and cannot avoid interacting with the AY in his ‘ day-to-day’ life. He regularly plays chess with HAL, and his messages to home have to go through HAL. This interaction means Bowman must alter his understanding and knowledge of technology to fully appreciate HAL.
