The Hardyman en Español

A few weeks ago, I got an email from Felix E. Guerrero, who said he was working on a Spanish translation of a story I wrote, "The Hardyman."

It's a story about a man who finds an exoskeletal suit, restores it, and falls in love. Suffice to say, his robot suit gets in the way. The story was inspired by the Hardiman, a real 1965 exoskeleton project by GE.

Originally, I wrote the story some six years ago, but over the years I was never able to find a publisher for it. So, late last year, I published the story in full on this blog. I did so under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license and encouraged anybody who wanted to do anything with the story to do so. Matthew McClintock at Manybooks.net turned it into an ebook and made it available to cellphone readers.

In any case, Felix said he had read the story some time ago and begun working on the Spanish translation with a woman named Marisol. Previously, the two had collaborated on a Spanish translation of Cory Doctorow's "Scroogled." "She is a professional translator and I'm familiar with the sci-fi/tech jargon so that's how we work. Summing up our knowledges," he explained. Along the way, the project had gotten sidelined, but now they were back working on it. He'd let me know when they were finished.

Now, they are. If you're interested in reading "The Hardyman" in Spanish as translated by Felix and Marisol, it's here.

Thank you so much to Felix and Marisol for helping to spread the story of "The Hardyman" around the world.

Hardyman Lives!

Behold! The Hardyman lives! Well, not really. But Reverse Cowgirl reader Young Song (Hi, Young! Your name is awesome! Thank you for the cool link!) sent me this awesome video of a Hardiman-esque exoskeletal suit made by the boys at SARCOS that is like porn for people who are into robots. While the original Hardiman was rather clunky, this SARCOS designed Son of Hardiman is practically sexy in its streamlined efficiency. One cannot help but to imagine more erotic applications of said suit. I, for one, would welcome our future be-robo-cocked overlords. Possibly. In other, ah, "news," if that's what it is I'm proffering here, Boing Boing TV's latest episode features a robot who gets his heartbroken--and he doesn't get a happy ending.

Hardyman Updated

Last Friday, I published "The Hardyman," a short story I wrote about a man, his robot suit, and what happens when he meets the girl of his dreams, under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Now, the very generous Matthew McClintock at manybooks.net has made "The Hardyman" available in a wide variety of cellphone-friendly formats. Thank you very much, Matthew. Also, thanks to Creative Commons and The Hermenautic Circle for mentioning the project. As ever, if you are a creative type interested in remixing "Hardyman," let me know.

Of course, human beings themselves lie at the final goal of robotics, which is why we make an effort to build humanlike robots. For example, a robot's arms may be composed of a metal cylinder with many bolts, but to achieve a more humanlike appearance, we paint over the metal in skin tones. These cosmetic efforts cause a resultant increase in our sense of the robot's familiarity. Some readers may have felt sympathy for handicapped people they have seen who attach a prosthetic arm or leg to replace a missing limb. But recently prosthetic hands have improved greatly, and we cannot distinguish them from real hands at a glance. Some prosthetic hands attempt to simulate veins, muscles, tendons, finger nails, and finger prints, and their color resembles human pigmentation. So maybe the prosthetic arm has achieved a degree of human verisimilitude on par with false teeth. But this kind of prosthetic hand is too real and when we notice it is prosthetic, we have a sense of strangeness. So if we shake the hand, we are surprised by the lack of soft tissue and cold temperature. In this case, there is no longer a sense of familiarity. It is uncanny. In mathematical terms, strangeness can be represented by negative familiarity, so the prosthetic hand is at the bottom of the valley. So in this case, the appearance is quite human like, but the familiarity is negative. This is the uncanny valley.

Hardyman Heads Overseas

On Friday, I posted a short story, "The Hardyman," on this blog. It's the story of a man, a robot suit he finds, and what happens when he meets the girl of his dreams and the suit stands between them. Thus far, I'd yet to find a publisher for the story. So, I decided to self-publish the story online under a very liberal Creative Commons license and encourage other creative types (artists, comics-makers, filmmakers, musicians, performance artists) to re-envision, remix, and/or remake the work as they liked. This morning, I got an email from Johannes Grenzfurthner of the Viennese arts collective monochrom. Earlier this year, monochrom had decided to publish a strange review I wrote of a Human E-Collar in the next issue of their magazine. Johannes liked "The Hardyman" very much, he said, and it looks like the story may appear in that issue, as well. In the meantime, Project Hardyman continues. Special thanks to Ed Champion, Corazón de Látex, and J. Orlin Grabbe for mentioning the project. And if you're interested in adapting "The Harydman" for your own creative project, let me know. If you want to get inspired about why information, and robots, should be free, I'd suggest Jonathan Lethem's "The Ecstasy of Influence."

A few years ago someone brought me a strange gift, purchased at MoMA's downtown design store: a copy of my own first novel, Gun, With Occasional Music, expertly cut into the contours of a pistol. The object was the work of Robert The, an artist whose specialty is the reincarnation of everyday materials. I regard my first book as an old friend, one who never fails to remind me of the spirit with which I entered into this game of art and commerce—that to be allowed to insert the materials of my imagination onto the shelves of bookstores and into the minds of readers (if only a handful) was a wild privilege. I was paid $6,000 for three years of writing, but at the time I'd have happily published the results for nothing. Now my old friend had come home in a new form, one I was unlikely to have imagined for it myself. The gun-book wasn't readable, exactly, but I couldn't take offense at that. The fertile spirit of stray connection this appropriated object conveyed back to me—the strange beauty of its second use—was a reward for being a published writer I could never have fathomed in advance. And the world makes room for both my novel and Robert The's gun-book. There's no need to choose between the two.

The Hardyman

Several years ago, I started writing a short story that was called "The Hardyman." It was inspired by the Hardiman, a robotic exoskeleton designed by GE in the mid-60s. The story is about a man who finds a Hardiman, restores it, and falls in love. I finished the story a couple years ago. I've yet to find a home for it. I've been sending it out again as of late. The story starts with a scene involving Transformers, but the transformation of the main character takes places on July 4th.

Jack knew the Hardyman would drive itself between them, that it had the capacity to crush her completely, that it could break her in two if it so desired. And a part of him had grown used to its superhuman strength. Indeed, it was a dangerous system, created to control hazardous environments, and, once installed in it, one grew to rely on the way it fulfilled a certain human desire for personal amplification. That the relationship between the outer skeleton and the inner skeleton took the man out of the loop was what made it an impractical tool. There was no articulation of the self. The machine had the power, the man had the control, but a microprocessor did not have a soul.

Jack could claim thirty degrees of freedom.

How many degrees of freedom could he feel?