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Origin	East London, England
Years active	1975—present
Genres	Heavy metal NWOBHM[1] Classic metal
Labels	EMI, Sanctuary
Members	Bruce Dickinson Dave Murray Adrian Smith Janick Gers Steve Harris Nicko McBrain
Past members	Clive Burr Paul Di'Anno Blaze Bayley Dennis Stratton Doug Sampson Paul Cairns Paul Todd Dave Mac Tony Parsons Dennis Wilcock Terry Wapram Thunderstick Tony Moore Ron Matthews Bob Sawyer Terry Rance Paul Day Dave Sullivan
Website(s)	http://www.ironmaiden.com

Iron Maiden are an English heavy metal band from East London. Formed in 1975 by bassist Steve Harris, previously of Gypsy's Kiss and Smiler, Maiden (as some fans affectionately refer to the group) are one of the most successful and influential bands in the heavy metal genre, selling over 70 million albums world-wide. Iron Maiden has so far released 14 studio albums, four 'best of' compilations, nine live albums, and four boxed sets. They won the Ivor Novello Award for international achievement in 2002.^[2]

Iron Maiden's mascot, Eddie, is a perennial fixture in the band's horror-influenced album cover art, as well as in live shows. Eddie was originally drawn by Derek Riggs but has had various incarnations by Melvyn Grant. Eddie is also featured in a first-person shooter video game - Ed Hunter - as well as numerous books, graphic comics and band-related merchandise.

Iron Maiden has achieved international fame with its distinctive style. Their blend of heavy metal, highly melodic riffs and intelligent lyrics has become instantly recognizable. The band is also renowned for their down-to-earth and genuine approach towards their music, their impressive and energetic stage shows and their openness and dedication towards their fans.

The band has headlined several major events in its career, notably Rock In Rio, Ozzfest alongside Black Sabbath, Donington's famous "Monsters of Rock", "Download" Festivals and the "Reading and Leeds Festivals.

Iron Maiden were ranked #24 in VH1's "100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock",^[3] and in Kerrang! magazine were ranked as the most important band of the last 25 years. They were ranked fourth on MTV's "Top 10 Greatest Heavy Metal Bands of All Time".^[4] They also have one of the most iconic mascots in music history.

Contents 1 History 1.1 Initial success 1.2 The next level 1.3 Experimentation 1.4 Decline 1.5 Winds of change 1.6 Reunion 1.6.1 The new millennium 1.6.2 Ozzfest incident 1.6.3 A Matter of Life and Death 2 Legacy 3 Discography 3.1 Studio Albums 4 Audio 5 Lineup 5.1 Current Members 5.2 Original lineup 6 See also 7 Notes 8 References 9 Further reading 10 External links 11 History of the Laws 11.1 Alterations of the Laws: By Asimov 11.1.1 Zeroth Law added 11.1.2 First Law modified 11.1.3 First Law derived differently by other cultures 11.1.4 Removal of all three laws 11.1.5 Alternative definitions of "human" in the Laws 11.2 Alterations of the Laws: By other, authorized authors in Asimov's universe 11.2.1 Roger MacBride Allen's trilogy 11.2.2 Foundation sequel trilogy 11.2.3 Robot Mystery series 12 Application of the laws in fiction 12.1 Resolving conflicts among the laws 12.2 Loopholes in the laws 13 Other occurrences in fiction 13.1 The Laws in film 14 Applications to future technology 15 See also 16 Notes and references 17 External links 18 Style and ethos 19 Literature 20 Film and television 21 Music and fashion 22 Games 23 See also 24 References and notes 25 External links

[edit] History

[[|thumb|223px|right|Eddie, the iconic mascot of the band, has been featured on the artwork of almost every album and single. It also appears in various videos such as "Women In Uniform".]] The road from formation to the present started on Christmas Day 1975 shortly after bassist Steve Harris formed his own band after his bandmates in the group Smiler rejected many of his original songs. Harris attributes the band name to a movie adaptation of The Man in the Iron Mask he saw around that time, and so the group was christened after the medieval torture device.^[5]

Harris and guitarist Dave Murray remain the longest surviving members of Iron Maiden. The band had twelve different line-ups in the 1970s, paying their dues on the mostly punk club circuit in London's rough East End while struggling to form a stable lineup of band members. Although Iron Maiden was a metal band influenced by Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, UFO, Yes, Wishbone Ash, Apocalypse, Queen and Judas Priest, the earlier music had undoubted punk overtones. Lacking "enough energy or charisma onstage",^[6] original vocalist Paul Day became replaced by the outlandish Dennis Wilcock, a huge KISS fan who utilizeded fire, make-up and fake blood during live commitments. News of fellow erstwhile Warlock member and guitarist friend, Murray, travelled back to Harris and so Murray was invited to join, much to the chagrin of guitarists Dave Sullivan and Terry Rance.^[7] This fuelled Harris to temporarily split the band in the Winter of 1976,^[7] though the group reformed soon after with Murray as sole axeman.

A quartet in 1977's initial beginning, the group opted to recruit another guitarist, Bob Sawyer. Sawyer caused a rift between Murray and Wilcock, prompting Harris to sack both Murray and Sawyer.^[8] A vastly revised lineup played an inaugural gig at the Bridgehouse in November 1977, now comprising Tony Moore on keyboards, Terry Wrapram strumming guitar, not to mention Barry Purkis (later rechristened 'Thunderstick' as part of the group Samson) as additional members - such was Steve Harris' annoyance that these entire fresh recruits were scrapped. Upset, Wilcock didn't arrive to a subsequent gig, onset with the announcement of his departure.^[9] With Dave Murray reinstated and Doug Sampson occupying drums, the group continued.

Star Studios in Bow, London played host to three rehearsals a week throughout the Summer and Autumn of 1978.^[10] A chance meeting at the Red Lion pub in Leytonstone with a person named Trevor evolved into a successful audition for punky vocalist Paul Di'Anno. Steve Harris reflected; There's sort of a quality in Paul's voice, a raspiness in his voice, or whatever you want to call it, that just gave it this great edge."^[11]

Iron Maiden had been playing for three years and gained a loyal following, but had never recorded any of their music. On New Year's Eve of 1978, the band recorded one of the most famous demos in hard rock history,^[12] The Soundhouse Tapes. Featuring only three songs, the band sold all five thousand copies within weeks, with originals later fetching thousands of dollars (until a re-release in 1996).^{[citation needed]} Two of the tracks on the demo, "Prowler" and "Iron Maiden", went to number one on the English metal charts.^{[citation needed]} Their first appearance on an album was on the compilation Metal for Muthas (released on 15 February 1980) with two early versions of "Sanctuary" and "Wrathchild".

In several of the early Iron Maiden line-ups, Dave Murray was joined by another guitarist, but for most of 1977 and all of 1978, Murray was the sole six-stringer in the band. This changed with the arrival of Paul Cairns in 1979. Shortly before going into the studio, Cairns left the band and several other guitarists played alongside Murray until the band finally settled on Dennis Stratton. Initially, the band wanted to hire Dave Murray's childhood friend Adrian Smith, but Smith was busy singing and playing guitar for his own band, Urchin. Drummer Doug Sampson was also replaced by Clive Burr (who was brought into the band by Stratton), and in November 1979, the band landed a major record deal by signing to EMI.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Initial success

The eponymous Iron Maiden was released in 1980 to critical and commercial success,^{[citation needed]} and the group became one of the leading proponents of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal.^[13] The band went on to open for KISS on their 1980 Unmasked tour, as well as opening select dates for the legendary Judas Priest. After the KISS tour, Dennis Stratton was fired from the band as a result of creative and personal differences.^[14] The timing was right for the arrival of guitarist Adrian Smith.

Smith brought a sharp, staccato sound to Iron Maiden. His tight, experimental style was the complete opposite of Murray's smooth, rapid take on blues. One of Iron Maiden's trademarks is the double "twin lead" harmonising guitar stylings of Murray and Smith, a style pioneered by Wishbone Ash and Thin Lizzy, and developed further by Judas Priest and Iron Maiden.^{[citation needed]}

In 1981, Maiden released its second album, titled Killers. This new album contained many tracks that had been penned prior to the release of the debut album, but were considered surplus. Only two new tracks were written for the album; the title track and "Murders in the Rue Morgue".^{[citation needed]}

[edit] The next level

Like many bands, Maiden consumed a large amount of alcohol in their early days.^[15] However, most members dabbled very little in other drugs, with Steve Harris never taking them at all.^{[citation needed]} The exception was vocalist Paul Di'Anno, who demonstrated increasingly self-destructive behaviour, particularly through cocaine usage.^[16] His performances began to suffer, just as the band was beginning to achieve large-scale success in America. At the end of 1981 the band replaced Di'Anno with former Samson vocalist Bruce Dickinson.

Dickinson vowed from the start that he was his own man – in his own words, he "wasn't going to wear frilly collars and cut his hair".^{[citation needed]} Legendary DJ Tommy Vance had told Dickinson not to join the band – advice which was ignored. Dickinson's debut with Iron Maiden was 1982's album The Number of the Beast, which is recognised as a classic of the heavy metal genre. This album was a world-wide success^{[citation needed]} providing definitive songs such as "The Number of the Beast", "Run to the Hills" and "Hallowed Be Thy Name". For the second time the band went on a world tour, visiting the United States, Canada, Japan and Australia. The tour was marred (or perhaps promoted) by controversy coming from religious groups that claimed Iron Maiden was a Satanic group because of their dark lyrics, which supposedly spoke of Satan.^{[citation needed]} The allegations centered around one song, "The Number of the Beast", a song ostensibly about a bad dream. The members of Iron Maiden tried to deflect this criticism by insisting that the lyrics were based on a dream of Steve Harris's, but the accusations persisted. A group of Christian activists destroyed the band's records (along with those of Ozzy Osbourne) by burning them in a large fire. This controversy, unfortunately, is thought to be one of the main causes of the stereotype that all heavy metal is Satanic.^{[citation needed]} However, these accusations of Satanism were largely based on misinterpretation of the song, or fear of the aggressive, energetic nature of the music. Iron Maiden's current drummer, Nicko McBrain, is a born-again Christian, and is happy to play the song, which he sees as a warning against Satanism.^{[citation needed]}

On the same tour, producer Martin Birch was involved in a car accident with a group of church-goers. Coincidentally, the bill for the repair came to £666, a figure which Birch refused to pay, instead opting for a higher amount.

Actor Patrick McGoohan was accommodating when a request was made to allow the band to use a spoken intro from the cult TV series, The Prisoner, in which McGoohan was the lead actor, producer and series writer. McGoohan was a big name in 1982, and Iron Maiden manager Rod Smallwood was nervous about making the request. The conversation between McGoohan and Smallwood allegedly went:

McGoohan: "What did you say the name of the band was again?"

Smallwood: "Iron Maiden"

McGoohan: "A rock band, you say...do it!"

Before heading back into the studio in 1983, they replaced drummer Clive Burr with Nicko McBrain and went on to release four albums which went multi-platinum world-wide: the dark and ultra-heavy Piece of Mind, featuring "Flight of Icarus" and "The Trooper" (1983), Powerslave featuring "2 Minutes to Midnight", "Aces High", and "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1984), the double-live album Live After Death (1985), and the experimental, Adrian Smith-led Somewhere in Time (1986) featuring "Wasted Years."

Satanic accusations persisted - there was a lot of controversy about occult messages in many bands' music at the time, normally discovered by playing the offending track backwards. On the Piece of Mind album, a backward message was placed at the start of the track "Still Life" as a kind of internal joke. Reverse this track, and you will hear drummer McBrain clearly saying "Hmm, Hmmm, what ho sed de t'ing wid de t'ree bonce. Don't meddle wid t'ings you don't understand", followed by a belch. McBrain later admitted this to be his "famous" impression of Idi Amin Dada. It translates to the following: "'What ho,' said the monster with the three heads, 'don't meddle with things you don't understand.'"

Also on the Piece of Mind album, renowned author Frank Herbert came into conflict with the band when they wanted to record a song named after the book Dune. Not only did Herbert refuse to allow the song to be called "Dune", he also refused to allow a spoken quotation from the book to appear as the track's intro. Bass player Steve Harris's request was met with a stern reply from the agent: "No. Because Frank Herbert doesn't like rock bands, particularly heavy rock bands, and especially rock bands like Iron Maiden". This statement was backed up with a legal threat, and eventually the song was renamed "To Tame a Land" and released in 1983.

[edit] Experimentation

In 1988, the band tried a different approach for their seventh studio album, titled Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. This was a concept album featuring a story about a mythical child who possessed clairvoyant powers based on the book Seventh Son by Orson Scott Card.^{[citation needed]}

For the first time, the band used keyboards on a recording (as opposed to guitar synths on the previous release). In the opinion of some critics, this produced a more accessible release. The band also headlined the annual Monsters of Rock Festival for the first time this year. The 1990 edition of the Guinness Book of Records contains the following entry:

"Largest PA system: On Aug 20th 1988 at the Castle Donington "Monsters of Rock" Festival a total of 360 Turbosound cabinets offering a potential 523kW of programme power, formed the largest front-of-house PA. The average Sound Pressure Level at the mixing tower was 118dB, peaking at a maximum of 124 dB during Iron Maiden's set. It took five days to set up the system."

To close off their first ten years of releasing singles, Iron Maiden released The First Ten Years, a series of ten cds and double 12" vinyls. Between February 24 and April 28 1990, the individual parts were released one by one, and each contains two of Iron Maiden's singles, including the b-sides, along with a part of "Listen With Nicko!"

[edit] Decline

For the first time in seven years, the band had a line-up change with the departure of guitarist/backing vocalist Adrian Smith. Former Gillan guitarist Janick Gers was chosen to replace Smith, and in 1990 they released the raw sounding album No Prayer for the Dying. This album went back to the heavy style of the band. This album featured one last song co-penned by Adrian Smith with Bruce Dickinson, "Hooks in You", despite Smith's having not been involved in the band after Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. Vocalist Bruce Dickinson also began experimenting with a raspier style of singing that was a marked departure from his trademark operatic style. Nonetheless, the band obtained their first (and to date, only) number one hit single "Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter". It was released on December 24, 1990, and was one of the first records to be released on several different formats with different B-sides, thus encouraging fans to buy several copies. The single holds the record for being the fastest release straight in to number one and straight out of the charts again over the following couple of weeks. The song was originally penned and recorded by Bruce Dickinson for the soundtrack to A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child.

Before the release of No Prayer for the Dying, Bruce Dickinson officially launched a solo career alongside Iron Maiden, with Gers as guitarist. Dickinson performed a solo tour in 1991 before returning to the studio with Iron Maiden for the album Fear of the Dark. Released in 1992, the album had several songs which were popular amongst fans, such as the title track and "Afraid to Shoot Strangers".

In 1993 Bruce Dickinson left the band to further pursue his solo career. However, Bruce agreed to stay with the band for a farewell tour and two live albums (later re-released in one package). The first, A Real Live One, featured songs from 1986 to 1992, and was released in March 1993. The second, A Real Dead One, featured songs from 1975 to 1984, and was released after Bruce had left the band. He played his farewell show with Iron Maiden on August 28, 1993. The show was filmed, broadcast by the BBC, and released on video under the name Raising Hell. Magician Simon Drake performed grisly illusions on the performance, culminating in Dickinson's "death" in an Iron Maiden. However, after Bruce's departure from the band there was a great deal of bad feeling toward him from the other band members.

[edit] Winds of change

The band auditioned hundreds of vocalists, both unknown and famous (among them Doogie White of Rainbow^[17]), and even offered the position to James LaBrie of Dream Theater but he declined. They finally chose Blaze Bayley in 1994, formerly of Wolfsbane. Bayley had an altogether different style to his predecessor, which received a mixed reception amongst fans. After a three year hiatus, Maiden returned in 1995 with the 70+ minute-long album The X Factor. The album was generally seen as having dark, brooding songs that seemed more melancholy and introspective than usual. Chief songwriter Steve Harris was going through serious personal problems at the time with the break-up of his marriage and the loss of his father and many feel the album's sound is a reflection of this. The 11-minute epic "Sign of the Cross", opening the album, is perhaps the stand-out track, and even Bayley's detractors tend to recognise it as a classic. The first concert supporting the new album took place on September 28, 1995 in Jerusalem, Israel.

The band spent most of 1996 on the road before returning to the studio for Virtual XI (1998). The album contained few notable tracks, with only "The Clansman" and "Futureal" surviving on future tours, and chart positions were observably lower. One of the most criticized tracks was the single "The Angel and the Gambler", which was all that many people heard of the album before deciding not to buy it. Virtual XI failed to reach the one million mark in worldwide sales for the first time, and thus sounded Bayley's death knell.

[edit] Reunion

In February 1999, Bayley left the band, apparently by mutual consent. The main reason for his departure was his inconsistent onstage performance - Blaze's voice was not up to the rigours of a full-on Maiden tour. At the same time, the band shocked their fans when they announced that both Bruce Dickinson and guitarist Adrian Smith were rejoining the band, which meant the classic 1980s lineup was back in place - plus Janick Gers, who would remain. Iron Maiden now had three guitarists for the first time. A successful reunion tour followed.

[edit] The new millennium

In 2000, a more progressive period began for the band when they released the 67 minute long album Brave New World. The songs were longer (with all but three of the ten tracks clocking in at over six minutes) and the lyrics spoke about both dark themes and social criticism. The band gained a new fan base when they began exploring the genre of progressive metal with their more classic sound, and the world tour that followed ended in January 2001 with a show at the famous Rock in Rio festival in Brazil, where Iron Maiden played to an impressive crowd of 250,000.

The band continued with their progressive trend with Dance of Death released in 2003. All but two of the eleven tracks chime in at over five minutes, and nearly all have a recurrent theme of death, though not always in a dark manner. While failing to reach Gold status in the United States, the album went platinum in several other countries and left no doubts that the band was still a force to be reckoned with. Both Brave New World and Dance of Death were named "Best Metal Album" of 2000 and 2003 respectively by Metal-Rules.com.

In 2005, Iron Maiden announced a tour to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the release of their first album and the 30th anniversary of their formation. The band re-released the "Number of the Beast" single, which went straight to number three in the UK charts. The band hit the road to support the 2004 DVD entitled The Early Days, in which the band celebrates the music mainly from its 1975-1983 period.

Iron Maiden toured the United States with a stint on the 10th anniversary Ozzfest tour, playing before Black Sabbath from July 15 through August 20, 2005. Several nights of the Ozzfest tour saw Iron Maiden headlining due to Ozzy Osbourne experiencing throat problems. Iron Maiden also played several "Off-Fest" dates headlining in places such as Quebec City, Toronto and Denver. During this tour, the band was added to the Hollywood Rockwalk.^[18]

[edit] Ozzfest incident

At Iron Maiden's last Ozzfest performance (August 20th 2005 at the Hyundai Pavilion at Glen Helen in San Bernardino, CA), the band's sound was turned off several times, eggs were thrown towards the stage, and chants of "Ozzy" were shouted through the PA system. This was the work of Sharon Osbourne, who took to the stage and proceeded to call Bruce Dickinson "a prick" after they performed their encore, followed by a large portion of the crowd booing her off the stage.^[19] She officially admitted this in a scathing letter, accusing Bruce of heckling her husband and signing it "The Real Iron Maiden", although claiming not to have any personal vendetta against the band.^[20]

The band completed its summer tour by headlining the Reading and Leeds weekend festivals on the 26th^[21] and 28th August 2005,^[22] playing classics from the first four studio albums to a combined audience of approximately 120,000. The final gig took place in London at the famous Hammersmith Odeon (now Apollo) in early September 2005. For the second time, the band played a charity gig for former drummer Clive Burr.

A live album entitled Death on the Road was released on August 30 2005, but the DVD version suffered a bit of delay and was released on the 6th of February 2006. The latter hit the DVD chart at no 1 in UK, Sweden, Italy and Greece and received acclaim from most UK rock magazines.

[edit] A Matter of Life and Death

Main article: A Matter of Life and Death (album)

Iron Maiden's 14th studio album named A Matter of Life and Death was released worldwide on the 28th August 2006 (5th September for the US and Canada). It was preceded by the "The Reincarnation of Benjamin Breeg" single on August 14. The album was once again produced by Kevin Shirley, and is the longest Iron Maiden album to date.

The band has also recorded four cover tracks for use as b-sides, the first time for over ten years. In an interview with the Greek Metal Hammer magazine, Adrian Smith revealed these to be ZZ Top's "Tush", Deep Purple's "Space Truckin'", Thin Lizzy's "Angel of Death" and Focus's "Hocus Pocus", the latter featuring Nicko McBrain on vocal duties. However, none of these songs ended up as b-sides for the aforementioned single.

The tour in support of the album will start on October 4th in Hartford (Connecticut). The North American Leg includes 8 US shows and 3 Canada shows. Then Maiden will move to Japan to play 5 gigs, the first of them on October 25th at the legendary Nippon Budokan and finally they'll start the European leg in Aalborg on November 9th. The European leg will end with 2 nights at London's Earls Court. Whilst Iron Maiden had announced as early as 2003 that they would be cutting back on the length of each tour, the forthcoming tour has been criticised for it missing out many areas usually visited by the band. In particular, the absence of any Eastern European dates (such as Poland, Czech Republic, Greece) despite a strong fan base existing there has been questioned. In addition other countries where Maiden traditionally are very successful (Germany, France, Italy, Spain) are host to only one or two gigs where usually in excess of five are played in each country respectively. Maiden have however announced extensive dates in the UK and Scandinavia, the latter possibly a reward for the area's staggering support for the band on previous tours. Most of the European shows are sold out several months before such as the Scandinavian shows and both nights in Milan.

Touring in South America and possibly Australia has still to be announced and it is expected to follow in early 2007.

Anticipating the release, the official website released two songs in streaming audio on August 10 and 11. The album entered the UK charts at #4 and entered the US charts at #9, while making their best debut in India at #4 and #2 in Canada. This was also the highest chart position any Hard Rock or Metal act has ever reached, let alone debuted in India. The new album made number #1 in Germany, Sweden, Italy, Finland, Greece, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Croatia, Poland and Brazil

[edit] Legacy

Main article: Iron Maiden trivia

• Bruce Dickinson and Eddie did a public service announcement for British television with "The Seat Belt Dummies" in 1991. The seat belt dummies were in the audience playing air guitar and Eddie is shown. The dummies remark that, "if you don't wear your seatbelt, you may end up looking like this (points to Eddie)". At the end, Bruce says "Don't forget, buckle your safety belt, mate."

• Iron Maiden is referenced prominently in the lyrics to the 2000 hit "Teenage Dirtbag" by American punk-pop group Wheatus.[1] The song tells of a lonely, nerdy teenage boy who secretly yearns for a pretty female classmate, Noelle, while listening to Iron Maiden. Noelle later surprises him by declaring herself to be a "teenage dirtbag" too, and inviting him to join her at an Iron Maiden concert. Bruce Dickinson returned the favour by singing on Wheatus' third single "Wannabe Gangstar".

• The band is mentioned several times in episodes of Beavis and Butt-head. Songs featured include "The Prisoner", "From Here to Eternity", and "Running Free".

• In the film Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989) King Henry VIII demands that the duo be put in the Iron Maiden (referring to the medieval torture device), and Bill and Ted say "Iron Maiden?! Excellent!" and then play a few notes on the air guitar.

• The PlayStation 2, Xbox and PC video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City features "2 Minutes To Midnight" as a song on the radio station "VROCK", the logo of which is also done using the same angular font used in the IRON MAIDEN logo (which has been used by the band since their first album).

• The multi-platform video game Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 features "The Number of the Beast" as a song on the game's soundtrack. The game also includes Eddie as an unlockable skater.

• The upcoming Nintendo Wii video game Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam will have "Different World" as a song on the game's soundtrack.

• The Nickelodeon TV show, "The Fairly OddParents," featured a villain called "the Iron Maiden" that fought briefly against Timmy's favorite super hero, "The Crimson Chin." It was made to look like a giant robotic maid. In order to help viewers understand the reference, the Crimson Chin taunts, "Your days of heavy metal terror are over, Iron Maiden!"

[edit] Discography

Main article: Iron Maiden discography

[edit] Studio Albums

• 1980: Iron Maiden
• 1981: Killers
• 1982: The Number of the Beast
• 1983: Piece of Mind
• 1984: Powerslave
• 1986: Somewhere in Time
• 1988: Seventh Son of a Seventh Son
• 1990: No Prayer for the Dying
• 1992: Fear of the Dark
• 1995: The X Factor
• 1998: Virtual XI
• 2000: Brave New World
• 2003: Dance of Death
• 2006: A Matter of Life and Death

[edit] Audio

• "Phantom of the Opera" Listen (help·info) – From the debut album, featuring Paul Di'Anno on vocals.
• "Run to the Hills" Listen (help·info) – A top ten hit in the UK, and vocalist Bruce Dickinson's debut.
• "Caught Somewhere in Time" Listen (help·info) – This clip showcases the band's trademark twin guitar harmonization/"galloping" bass.
• "Sign of the Cross" Listen (help·info) – The band's third recording vocalist, Blaze Bayley, singing on the opening track from The X Factor album.
• "Brave New World" Listen (help·info) – Bruce Dickinson and Adrian Smith return in 2000 to critical acclaim.

[edit] Lineup

For a complete list, see List of Iron Maiden band members.

[edit] Current Members

• Bruce Dickinson – vocals (1981-1993, 1999-present)
• Dave Murray – guitar (1975-1976, 1977-present)
• Janick Gers – guitar (1990-present)
• Adrian Smith – guitar (1980-1990, 1999-present)
• Steve Harris – bass and keyboards (1975-present)
• Nicko McBrain – drums (1983-present)

[edit] Original lineup

• Paul Day – vocals
• Dave Sullivan – guitar (replaced by Dave Murray after only two months)
• Terry Rance – guitar
• Steve Harris – bass
• Ron Matthews – drums

[edit] See also

• List of Iron Maiden band members
• Anton Maiden
• Iron Maiden (doom band) - an unrelated band from the 1970s.
• Best selling music artists
• The Piano Tribute to Iron Maiden
• Numbers From The Beast

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

[edit] External links

• Iron Maiden tours - from Swedish Wikipedia but articles mostly easy to follow
• Official homepage
• Bruce Dickinson website
• Paul Di'anno (former vocalist) website

Iron Maiden
Bruce Dickinson | Dave Murray | Janick Gers | Adrian Smith | Steve Harris | Nicko McBrain
List of past and present Iron Maiden members
Discography
Studio albums: Iron Maiden | Killers | The Number of the Beast | Piece of Mind | Powerslave | Somewhere in Time | Seventh Son of a Seventh Son | No Prayer for the Dying | Fear of the Dark | The X Factor | Virtual XI | Brave New World | Dance of Death | A Matter of Life and Death
Live albums: Live After Death | A Real Live One | A Real Dead One | Live at Donington | A Real Live Dead One | Rock in Rio | The BBC Archives | Beast Over Hammersmith | Death on the Road
Compilations and box-sets: The First Ten Years | Best of the Beast | Ed Hunter | Edward the Great | Eddie's Archive | Best of the B'Sides | The Essential Iron Maiden
Videos and DVDs: Live at the Rainbow | Video Pieces | Behind the Iron Curtain | Live After Death | 12 Wasted Years | Maiden England | The First Ten Years: The Videos | From There to Eternity | Donington Live 1992 | Raising Hell | Classic Albums: The Number of the Beast | Rock in Rio | Visions of the Beast | The Early Days | Death on the Road
EPs: The Soundhouse Tapes | Live!! +one | Maiden Japan | No More Lies
Singles
"Running Free" | "Sanctuary" | "Women in Uniform" | "Twilight Zone" | "Purgatory" | "Run to the Hills" | "The Number of the Beast" | "Flight of Icarus" | "The Trooper" | "2 Minutes to Midnight" | "Aces High" | "Running Free (live)" | "Run to the Hills (live '85)" | "Wasted Years" | "Stranger in a Strange Land" | "Can I Play with Madness" | "The Evil That Men Do" | "The Clairvoyant (live)" | "Infinite Dreams" | "Holy Smoke" | "Bring Your Daughter...To the Slaughter" | "Be Quick or Be Dead" | "From Here to Eternity" | "Wasting Love" | "Fear of the Dark (live)" | "Hallowed Be Thy Name (live)" | "Man on the Edge" | "Lord of the Flies" | "Virus" | "The Angel and the Gambler" | "Futureal" | "The Wicker Man" | "Out of the Silent Planet" | "Run to the Hills (live '01)" | "Wildest Dreams" | "Rainmaker" | "The Number of the Beast (2005)" | "The Trooper (live)" | "The Reincarnation of Benjamin Breeg" | "Different World"
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[[|thumb|This cover of I, Robot illustrates the story "Runaround", the first to list all Three Laws of Robotics.]] In science fiction, the Three Laws of Robotics are a set of three rules written by Isaac Asimov, which most robots appearing in his fiction must obey. Introduced in his 1942 short story "Runaround", the Laws state the following:

1. A robot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first passage in Asimov's short story "Liar!" (1941) that mentions the First Law is the earliest recorded use of the word robotics.^[23] Asimov was not initially aware of this; he assumed the word already existed by analogy with mechanics, hydraulics, and other similar terms denoting branches of applied knowledge.^[24]

The Three Laws form an organizing principle and unifying theme for Asimov's fiction, appearing in the Foundation series and the other stories linked to it, as well as Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter. Other authors working in Asimov's fictional universe have adopted them, and references (often parodic) appear throughout science fiction and in other genres. Technologists in the field of artificial intelligence, working to create real machines with some of the properties of Asimov's robots, have speculated upon the role the Laws may have in the future.

[edit] History of the Laws

Before Asimov, the majority of "artificial intelligences" in fiction followed the Frankenstein pattern, one which Asimov found unbearably tedious: "Robots were created and destroyed their creator; robots were created and destroyed their creator—".^[25] To be sure, this was not an inviolable rule. In December 1938, Lester del Rey published "Helen O'Loy", the story of a robot so like a person she falls in love and becomes her creator's ideal wife. (Compare the myth of Galatea.) The next month, Otto Binder published a short story, "I, Robot", featuring a sympathetic robot named Adam Link, a misunderstood creature motivated by love and honor. This was the first of a series of ten stories; the next year, "Adam Link's Vengeance" (1940) featured Adam thinking, "A robot must never kill a human, of his own free will."^[26]

On 7 May 1939, Asimov attended a meeting of the Queens Science Fiction Society, where he met Binder, whose story Asimov had admired. Three days later, Asimov began writing "my own story of a sympathetic and noble robot", his 14th story. Thirteen days later, he took "Robbie" to John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding Science-Fiction. Campbell rejected it, claiming that it bore too strong a resemblance to del Rey's "Helen O'Loy".^[27] Frederik Pohl, editor of Astonishing Magazine, published "Robbie" in that periodical the following year.^[28]

Asimov attributes the Laws to John W. Campbell from a conversation that took place on December 23, 1940. However, Campbell claims that Asimov had the Laws already in his mind, and they simply needed to be stated explicitly. Several years later, Asimov's friend Randall Garrett attributed the Laws to a symbiotic partnership between the two men, a suggestion that Asimov adopted enthusiastically.^[29] According to his autobiographical writings, Asimov included the First Law's "inaction" clause because of Arthur Hugh Clough's poem "The Latest Decalogue", which includes the satirical lines "Thou shalt not kill, but needst not strive / officiously to keep alive".^[30]

(Details of this period can be found in chapters 21 through 26 of In Memory Yet Green.)

Although Asimov pins the Laws' creation on one date, their appearance in his literature happened over a period. He wrote two robot stories with no explicit mention of the Laws, "Robbie" and "Reason". He assumed, however, that robots would have certain inherent safeguards. "Liar!", his third robot story, makes the first mention of the First Law but not the other two. All three laws finally appeared together in "Runaround". When these stories and several others were compiled in the anthology I, Robot, "Reason" and "Robbie" were updated to acknowledge all Three Laws, though the material Asimov added to "Reason" is not entirely consistent with the Laws as he described them elsewhere.^[31] In particular, the idea of a robot protecting human lives when it does not believe those humans truly exist is at odds with Elijah Baley's reasoning, described below.

During the 1950s, Asimov wrote a series of science fiction novels expressly intended for young-adult audiences. Originally, his publisher expected that the novels could be adapted into a long-running television series, something like The Lone Ranger had been for radio. Fearing that his stories would be adapted into the "uniformly awful" programming he saw flooding the television channels,^[32] he decided to publish the Lucky Starr books under the pseudonym "Paul French". When plans for the television series fell through, Asimov decided to abandon the pretence; he brought the Laws into Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter, "which was a dead giveaway to Paul French's identity for even the most casual reader".^[33]

In his short story "Evidence", Asimov lets his recurring character Dr. Susan Calvin expound a moral basis behind the Laws. Calvin points out that human beings are typically expected to refrain from harming other human beings (except in times of extreme duress like war, or to save a greater number). This is equivalent to a robot's First Law. Likewise, according to Calvin, society expects individuals to obey instructions from recognized authorities: doctors, teachers and so forth. Finally, humans are typically expected to avoid harming themselves, which is the Third Law for a robot. The plot of "Evidence" revolves around the question of telling a human being apart from a robot specially constructed to appear human; Calvin reasons that if such an individual obeys the Laws, he may be a robot or simply "a very good man".

Another character then asks Calvin if robots are then very different from human beings after all. She replies, "Worlds different. Robots are essentially decent."

In a later essay, Asimov points out that analogues of the Laws are implicit in the design of almost all tools:

1. A tool must be safe to use. (Knives have handles, swords have hilts, and grenades have hooks.)
2. A tool must perform its function efficiently unless this would harm the user.
3. A tool must remain intact during its use unless its destruction is required for its use or for safety.

[edit] Alterations of the Laws: By Asimov

Asimov's stories test his Laws in a wide variety of circumstances, proposing and rejecting modifications. SF scholar James Gunn writes, "The Asimov robot stories as a whole may respond best to an analysis on this basis: the ambiguity in the Three Laws and the ways in which Asimov played twenty-nine variations upon a theme"^[34] (the number is accurate for 1980). While the original set of Laws provided inspirations for many stories, from time to time Asimov introduced modified versions. As the following examples demonstrate, the Laws serve a conceptual function analogous to the Turing test, replacing fuzzy questions like "What is human?" with problems which admit more fruitful thinking.

[edit] Zeroth Law added

Asimov once added a "Zeroth Law"—so named to continue the pattern of lower-numbered laws superseding in importance the higher-numbered laws—stating that a robot must not merely act in the interests of individual humans, but of all humanity. The robotic character R. Daneel Olivaw was the first to give the Law a name, in the novel Robots and Empire; however, Susan Calvin articulates the concept in the short story "The Evitable Conflict".

In the final scenes of the novel Robots and Empire, R. Giskard Reventlov is the first robot to act according to the Zeroth Law, although it proves destructive to his positronic brain, as he is not certain as to whether his choice will turn out to be for the ultimate good of humanity or not. Giskard is telepathic, like the robot Herbie in the short story "Liar!", and he comes to his understanding of the Zeroth Law through his understanding of a more subtle concept of "harm" than most robots can grasp. However, unlike Herbie, Giskard grasps the philosophical concept of the Zeroth Law, allowing him to harm individual human beings if he can do so in service to the abstract concept of humanity. The Zeroth Law is never programmed into Giskard's brain, but instead is a rule he attempts to rationalize through pure metacognition; though he fails, he gives his successor, R. Daneel Olivaw, his telepathic abilities. Over the course of many thousand years, Daneel adapts himself to be able to fully obey the Zeroth Law. As Daneel formulates it, in the novels Foundation and Earth and Prelude to Foundation, the Zeroth Law reads:

0. A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

A condition stating that the Zeroth Law must not be broken was added to the original Laws.

A translator incorporated the concept of the Zeroth Law into one of Asimov's novels before Asimov himself made the Law explicit. Near the climax of The Caves of Steel, Elijah Baley makes a bitter comment to himself, thinking that the First Law forbids a robot from harming a human being, unless the robot is clever enough to rationalize that its actions are for the human's long-term good. In Jacques Brécard's 1956 French translation, entitled Les Cavernes d'acier, Baley's thoughts emerge in a slightly different way:

Un robot ne doit faire aucun tort à un homme, à moins qu'il trouve un moyen de prouver qu'en fin de compte le tort qu'il aura causé profite à l'humanité en général!^[35]

Translated back into English, this reads, "A robot may not harm a human being, unless he finds a way to prove that in the final analysis, the harm would benefit humanity in general."

[edit] First Law modified

In "Little Lost Robot," several NS-2 or "Nestor" robots are created with only part of the First Law. It reads:

1. A robot may not harm a human being.

This modification is motivated by a practical difficulty: robots have to work alongside human beings who are exposed to low doses of radiation. Because their positronic brains are highly sensitive to gamma rays, robots are rendered inoperable by doses reasonably safe for humans, and are being destroyed attempting to rescue the humans. Removing the First Law's "inaction" clause solves this problem, but creates the possibility of an even greater one: a robot could initiate an action which would harm a human (dropping a heavy weight is the example given in the text) knowing that it was capable of preventing the harm, and then decide not to do so.

[edit] First Law derived differently by other cultures

Gaia, the planet with collective intelligence in the Foundation novels, adopted a law similar to the First as their philosophy:

Gaia may not harm life or, through inaction, allow life to come to harm.

[edit] Removal of all three laws

Three times in his fiction-writing career, Asimov portrayed robots that disregard the Three-Law value system entirely, unlike the robots Daneel and Giskard, who attempt to augment it. The first case, a short-short entitled "First Law", is often considered an insignificant "tall tale"^[36] or even apocryphal.^[37] On the other hand, the short story "Cal" (collected in Gold), told by a first-person robot narrator, features a robot who disregards the Laws because he has found something far more important—he wants to be a writer. Humorous, partly autobiographical, and unusually experimental in style, "Cal" has been regarded as one of Gold's strongest stories.^[38] The third is a short story entitled "Sally", in which cars fitted with positronic brains are apparently able to harm and kill humans, disregarding the First Law. However, aside from the positronic brain concept, this story does not refer to other robot stories, and may not be set in the same continuity.

The title story of the Robot Dreams collection portrays a robot, LVX-1 or "Elvex", who enters a state of unconsciousness and dreams, thanks to the unusual fractal construction of his positronic brain. In his dream, the first two Laws are absent, and the Third Law reads, "A robot must protect its own existence."

Asimov took varying positions on whether the Laws were optional: although in his first writings they were simply carefully engineered safeguards, in later stories Asimov stated that they were an inalienable part of the mathematical foundation underlying the positronic brain. Without the basic theory of the Three Laws, the fictional scientists of Asimov's universe would be unable to design a workable brain unit. This is historically consistent: the occasions where roboticists modify the Laws generally occur early within the stories' chronology, at a time when there is less existing work to be re-done. In "Little Lost Robot", Susan Calvin considers modifying the Laws to be a terrible idea, but doable, while centuries later, Dr. Gerrigel in The Caves of Steel believes it to be impossible.

As characters within the stories often point out, the Laws as they exist in a robot's mind are not the written, verbal version usually quoted by humans, but abstract mathematical concepts^[39] upon which a robot's entire developing consciousness is based. Thus, the Laws are comparable to basic human instincts of family or mating, and consequently are closer to forming the basis of a robot's self-consciousness—a sense that its entire purpose is based around serving humanity, obeying human orders and continuing its existence in this mode—rather than arbitrary limitations circumscribing an otherwise independent mind. This concept is largely fuzzy and unclear in earlier stories depicting very rudimentary robots who are only programmed to comprehend basic physical tasks, with the Laws acting as an overarching safeguard, but by the era of The Caves of Steel and robots with human or beyond-human intelligence, the Three Laws have become the underlying basic ethical worldview that determines the actions of all robots.

[edit] Alternative definitions of "human" in the Laws

The Solarians eventually create robots with the Laws as normal but with a warped meaning of "human". Solarian robots are told that only people speaking with a Solarian accent are human. This way, their robots have no problem harming non-Solarian human beings (and are specifically programmed to do so). By the time period of Foundation and Earth, it is revealed that the Solarians have, indeed, genetically modified themselves into a distinct species from humanity — becoming hermaphroditic, superintelligent and containing biological organs capable of powering and controlling whole complexes of robots on their own. The robots of Solaria thus respected the Three Laws only regarding the "humans" of Solaria, rather than the normal humans of the rest of the Galaxy.

Asimov addresses the problem of humanoid robots ("androids" in later parlance) several times. The novel Robots and Empire and the short stories "Evidence" and "The Tercentenary Incident" describe robots crafted to fool people into believing that the robots are human. On the other hand, "The Bicentennial Man" and "—That Thou art Mindful of Him" explore how the robots may change their interpretation of the Laws as they grow more sophisticated. (Gwendoline Butler writes in A Coffin for the Canary, "Perhaps we are robots. Robots acting out the last Law of Robotics... To tend towards the human."^[40])

"—That Thou art Mindful of Him", which Asimov intended to be the "ultimate" probe into the Laws' subtleties,^[41] finally uses the Three Laws to conjure up the very Frankenstein scenario they were invented to prevent. It takes as its concept the growing development of robots that mimic non-human living things, and are therefore given programs that mimic simple animal behaviours and do not require the Three Laws. The presence of a whole range of robotic life that serves the same purpose as organic life ends with two humanoid robots concluding that organic life is an unnecessary requirement for a truly logical and self-consistent definition of "humanity", and that since they are the most advanced thinking beings on the planet, they are therefore the only two true humans alive and the Three Laws only apply to themselves. The story ends on a sinister note as the two robots enter hibernation and await a time when they conquer the Earth and subjugate biological humans to themselves, an outcome they consider an inevitable result of the "Three Laws of Humanics".

This story does not fit nicely within the overall sweep of the Robot and Foundation series; if the George robots did take over Earth some time after the story closes, the later stories would be either redundant or impossible. Contradictions of this sort among Asimov's fiction works have led scholars to regard the Robot stories as more like "the Scandinavian sagas or the Greek legends" than a unified whole.^[42]

Indeed, Asimov describes "—That Thou art Mindful of Him" and "Bicentennial Man" as two opposite, parallel futures for robots that obviate the Three Laws by robots coming to consider themselves to be humans — one portraying this in a positive light with a robot joining human society, one portraying this in a negative light with robots supplanting humans. Both are to be considered alternatives to the possibility of a robot society that continues to be driven by the Three Laws as portrayed in the Foundation series. Indeed, in the novelization of "Bicentennial Man", Positronic Man, Asimov and his cowriter Robert Silverberg imply that in the future where Andrew Martin exists, his influence causes humanity to abandon the idea of independent, sentient humanlike robots entirely, creating an utterly different future from that of Foundation.

[edit] Alterations of the Laws: By other, authorized authors in Asimov's universe

[edit] Roger MacBride Allen's trilogy

In the 1990s, Roger MacBride Allen wrote a trilogy set within Asimov's fictional universe. Each title has the prefix "Isaac Asimov's", as Asimov approved Allen's outline before his death. These three books (Caliban, Inferno and Utopia) introduce a new set of Laws. The so-called New Laws are similar to Asimov's originals, with three substantial differences. The First Law is modified to remove the "inaction" clause (the same modification made in "Little Lost Robot"). The Second Law is modified to require cooperation instead of obedience. The Third Law is modified so it is no longer superseded by the Second (i.e., a "New Law" robot cannot be ordered to destroy itself). Finally, Allen adds a Fourth Law, which instructs the robot to do "whatever it likes" so long as this does not conflict with the first three Laws. The philosophy behind these changes is that New Law robots should be partners rather than slaves to humanity. According to the first book's introduction, Allen devised the New Laws in discussion with Asimov himself.

Allen's two most fully characterized robots are Prospero, a wily New Law machine who excels in finding loopholes, and Caliban, an experimental robot programmed with no Laws at all.

[edit] Foundation sequel trilogy

In the officially licensed Foundation sequels, Foundation's Fear, Foundation and Chaos and Foundation's Triumph (by Gregory Benford, Greg Bear and David Brin respectively), the future Galactic Empire is seen to be controlled by a conspiracy of humaniform robots who follow the Zeroth Law, led by R. Daneel Olivaw.

The Laws of Robotics are portrayed as something akin to a human religion and referred to in the language of the Protestant Reformation, with the set of laws containing the Zeroth Law known as the "Giskardian Reformation" to the original "Calvinian Orthodoxy" of the Three Laws. Zeroth-Law robots under the control of R. Daneel Olivaw are seen continually struggling with First-Law robots who deny the existence of the Zeroth Law, promoting agendas different from Daneel's. Some are based on the second clause of the First Law — advocating strict non-interference in human politics to avoid unknowingly causing harm — while others are based on the first clause, claiming that robots should openly become a dictatorial government to protect humans from all potential conflict or disaster.

Daneel also comes into conflict with a robot known as R. Lodovic Trema, whose positronic brain was infected by a rogue AI — specifically, a simulation of the long-dead Voltaire — consequently freeing Trema from the Three Laws. Trema comes to believe that humanity should be free to choose its own future. Furthermore, a small group of robots claims that the Zeroth Law of Robotics itself implies a higher Minus One Law of Robotics:

A robot may not harm sentience or, through inaction, allow sentience to come to harm.

They therefore claim that it is morally indefensible for Daneel to ruthlessly sacrifice robots and extraterrestrial sentient life for the benefit of humanity. None of these reinterpretations successfully displace Daneel's Zeroth Law, though Foundation's Triumph hints that these robotic factions remain active as fringe groups up to the time of the Foundation.

These novels, since they take place in a far future dictated by Asimov to be free of obvious robot presence, follow Asimov in surmising that R. Daneel's secret influence on history through the millennia has prevented the rediscovery of positronic brain technology or work on sophisticated intelligent machines, so as to make certain that the superior physical and intellectual power wielded by intelligent machines remains squarely in the possession of robots obedient to some form of the Three Laws. That R. Daneel is not entirely successful at this becomes clear in a brief period when scientists on Trantor develop tiktoks, simplistic programmable machines akin to real-life modern robots and therefore lacking the Three Laws. The robot conspirators see the Trantorian tiktoks as a massive threat to social stability, and their plan to eliminate the tiktok threat forms much of the plot of Foundation and Chaos.

In Foundation's Triumph, different robot factions interpret the Laws in a wide variety of ways, seemingly ringing every possible permutation upon the Laws' ambiguities. Reviewer John Jenkins compared the dizzying complexity of splinter groups which results as akin to Monty Python's Life of Brian, with its "Judean People's Front", "Popular Front of Judea", "Judean Popular People's Front" and so on.^[43]

[edit] Robot Mystery series

Mark W. Tiedemann's three novels Mirage (2000), Chimera (2001) and Aurora (2002) also revolve around the Three Laws. Like the Asimov stories discussed above, Tiedemann's work explores the implications of how the Laws define a "human being". The climax of Aurora involves a cyborg threatening a group of Spacers, forcing the robotic characters to decide whether the Laws forbid them to harm cyborgs. The issue is further complicated by the cumulative genetic abnormalities that have accumulated in the Spacer population, which may imply that the Spacers are becoming a separate species. (The concluding scenes of Asimov's Nemesis contain similar speculations, although that novel is only weakly connected to the Foundation series.)

Tiedemann's trilogy updates the Robot/Foundation saga in several other fashions as well. Set between The Robots of Dawn and Robots and Empire, Tiedemann's Robot Mystery novels include a greater use of virtual reality than Asimov's stories, and also include more "Resident Intelligences", robotic minds housed in computer mainframes rather than humanoid bodies. (One should not neglect Asimov's own creations in these areas, such as the Solarian "viewing" technology and the Machines of "The Evitable Conflict", originals that Tiedemann acknowledges. Aurora, for example, terms the Machines "the first RIs, really".) In addition, the Robot Mystery series addresses the problem of nanotechnology:^[44] building a positronic brain capable of reproducing human cognitive processes requires a high degree of miniaturization, yet Asimov's stories largely overlook the effects this miniaturization would have in other fields of technology. For example, the police department card-readers in The Caves of Steel have a capacity of only a few kilobytes per square centimeter of storage medium. Aurora, in particular, presents a sequence of historical developments which explain the lack of nanotechnology—a partial retcon, in a sense, of Asimov's timeline.

[edit] Application of the laws in fiction

[edit] Resolving conflicts among the laws

Advanced robots are typically programmed to handle the Laws in a sophisticated manner. In many stories, like "Runaround", the potentials and severity of all actions are weighed and a robot will break the laws as little as possible rather than do nothing at all. For example, the First Law may forbid a robot from functioning as a surgeon, as that act may cause damage to a human; however, Asimov's stories eventually included robot surgeons ("The Bicentennial Man" being a notable example). When robots are sophisticated enough to weigh alternatives, a robot may be programmed to accept the necessity of inflicting damage during surgery in order to prevent the greater harm that would result if the surgery were not carried out or were carried out by a more fallible human surgeon. In "Evidence", Susan Calvin points out that a robot may even act as a prosecuting attorney: in the American justice system, it is the jury which decides guilt or innocence, the judge who decides the sentence, and in capital punishment it is the executioner who carries out the act.

Asimovian (or "Asenion") robots can experience irreversible mental collapse if they are forced into situations where they cannot obey the First Law, or if they discover they have unknowingly violated it. The first example of this failure mode occurs in "Liar!", the story which introduced the First Law itself. This failure mode, which often ruins the positronic brain beyond repair, plays a significant role in Asimov's SF-mystery novel The Naked Sun.

[edit] Loopholes in the laws

In The Naked Sun, Elijah Baley points out that the Laws had been deliberately misrepresented because robots could unknowingly break any of them. He restated the first law as "A robot may do nothing that, to its knowledge, will harm a human being; nor, through inaction, knowingly allow a human being to come to harm." This change in wording makes it clear that robots can become the tools of murder, provided they are not aware of the nature of their tasks; for instance being ordered to add something to a person's food, not knowing that it is poison. Furthermore, he points out that a clever criminal could divide a task among multiple robots, so that no one robot could even recognize that its actions would lead to harming a human being. (The Naked Sun complicates the issue by portraying a decentralized, planetwide communication network among Solaria's millions of robots, meaning that the criminal mastermind could be located anywhere on the planet.)

Baley furthermore proposes that the Solarians may one day use robots for military purposes. If a spacecraft was built with a positronic brain, and carried neither humans nor even the life-support systems to sustain them, the ship's robotic intelligence would naturally assume that all other spacecraft were robotic beings. Such a ship could operate more responsively and flexibly than one crewed by humans, and it could be armed more heavily, its robotic brain equipped to slaughter humans of whose existence it is totally ignorant. This possibility is referenced in Foundation and Earth, where, indeed, it is discovered that the Solarians possess an immensely powerful robotic military force that has been programmed to identify only the Solarian race as human.

[edit] Other occurrences in fiction

Main article: References to the Three Laws of Robotics

Asimov himself believed that his Laws became the basis for a new view of robots, which moved beyond the "Frankenstein complex". His view that robots are more than "mechanical monsters" eventually spread throughout science fiction. Stories written by other authors have depicted robots as if they obeyed the Three Laws, but tradition dictates that only Dr. Asimov could quote the Laws explicitly. The Laws, Asimov believed, helped foster the rise of stories in which robots are "lovable", Star Wars being his favorite example.^[45] Where the laws are quoted verbatim (such as in the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century episode, "Shgorapchx!"), it is not uncommon for Asimov to be mentioned in the same dialogue. However, the 1960s German TV series Raumpatrouille – Die phantastischen Abenteuer des Raumschiffes Orion (Space Patrol – the Phantastic Adventures of Space Ship Orion) bases episode 3, "Hüter des Gesetzes"; ("Guardians of the Law") on Asimov's Laws without mentioning the source.

References to the Laws have appeared in venues as diverse as cinema (Repo Man, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence), cartoon series (The Simpsons) and webcomics (Piled Higher and Deeper). Several of these allusions involve the invention of "Fourth Laws" of various kinds, and many are made for humorous effect. For a representative list of these appearances, see References to the Three Laws of Robotics.

Some speculative fans believe that the Three Laws have a status akin to the laws of physics; that is, a situation that violates these laws is inherently impossible. This is incorrect, as the Three Laws are quite deliberately hardwired into the positronic brains of Asimov's robots. In fact, Asimov distinguishes the class of robots that follow the Three Laws, calling them Asenion robots. The robots in Asimov's stories, being Asenion robots, are incapable of knowingly violating the Three Laws, but in principle, a robot in science fiction or in the real world could be non-Asenion — with the caveat Dr. Gerrigel states in The Caves of Steel. ("Asenion" is a misspelling of the name Asimov, which was made by an editor of the magazine Planet Stories.^[46] Asimov used this obscure variation to insert himself into The Caves of Steel, in much the same way that Vladimir Nabokov appeared in Lolita, anagrammatically disguised as "Vivian Darkbloom".)

[edit] The Laws in film

Robby the Robot in Forbidden Planet (1956) has a hierarchical command structure which keeps him from harming humans, even on orders (such orders cause a conflict and lock-up, very much in the manner of Asimov's robots). Robby is one of the first cinematic depictions of a robot with internal safeguards put in place in this fashion. Asimov was delighted with Robby, and noted that Robby appeared to be programmed in his suggested fashion.

Isaac Asimov's works have been adapted to cinema several times, with varying degrees of critical and financial success. Some of the more notable attempts have involved his Robot stories, including the Three Laws. The 1999 film Bicentennial Man, features Robin Williams as the Three-Law robot NDR-114 (the serial number is partially a reference to Stanley Kubrick's trademark numeral). Williams recites the Three Laws to his employers, the Martin family, aided by a holographic projection. However, the Laws were not the central focus of the film, which only loosely follows the original story, with the second half introducing a love interest not present in Asimov's original short story.

Harlan Ellison's screenplay of I, Robot begins by introducing the Three Laws, and issues growing from the Laws form a large part of the screenplay's plot development. (This is only natural, since Ellison's screenplay is a Citizen Kane-inspired frame story surrounding four of Asimov's short-story plots, three taken from I, Robot itself. Ellison's adaptations of these four stories are relatively faithful, although he magnifies Susan Calvin's role in two of them.) Due to various complications in the Hollywood studio system, to which Ellison's introduction devotes much invective, his screenplay was never filmed.^[47]

The 2004 movie released under the name I, Robot is considerably less faithful to Asimov's original. In one reviewer's words,

"Suggested by" Isaac Asimov's robot stories—two stops removed from "based on" and "inspired by," the credit implies something scribbled on a bar napkin—Alex Proyas' science-fiction thriller I, Robot sprinkles Asimov's ideas like seasoning on a giant bucket of popcorn. [...] Asimov's simple and seemingly foolproof Laws of Robotics, designed to protect human beings and robots alike from harm, are subject to loopholes that the author loved to exploit. After all, much of humanity agrees in principle to abide by the Ten Commandments, but free will, circumstance, and contradictory impulses can find wiggle room in even the most unambiguous decree. Whenever I, Robot pauses between action beats, Proyas captures some of the excitement of movies like The Matrix, Minority Report, and A.I., all of which proved that philosophy and social commentary could be smuggled into spectacle. Had the film been based on Asimov's stories, rather than merely "suggested by" them, Proyas might have achieved the intellectual heft missing from his stylish 1998 cult favorite Dark City.^[48]

Advertising for the film included a trailer featuring the Three Laws, followed by the aphorism, "Rules were made to be broken."

[edit] Applications to future technology

Those working in artificial intelligence sometimes see the Three Laws as a future ideal: once a being has reached the stage where it can comprehend these Laws, it is truly intelligent. Indeed, significant advances in artificial intelligence would be needed for robots to understand the Three Laws. However, as the complexity of robots has increased, so has interest in developing guidelines and safeguards for their operation.^[49][50] Modern roboticists and specialists in robotics agree that, as of 2006, Asimov's Laws are perfect for plotting stories, but useless in real life. Some have argued that, since the military is a major source of funding for robotic research, it is unlikely such laws would be built into the design. SF author Robert Sawyer generalizes this argument to cover other industries, stating:

The development of AI is a business, and businesses are notoriously uninterested in fundamental safeguards — especially philosophic ones. (A few quick examples: the tobacco industry, the automotive industry, the nuclear industry. Not one of these has said from the outset that fundamental safeguards are necessary, every one of them has resisted externally imposed safeguards, and none has accepted an absolute edict against ever causing harm to humans.)^[51]

Sawyer's essay, it should be noted, neglects the issues of unintentional or unknowing harm treated in stories like The Naked Sun. Others have countered that the military would want strong safeguards built into any robot where possible, so laws similar to Asimov's would be embedded if possible. David Langford has suggested, tongue-in-cheek, that these laws might be the following:

1. A robot will not harm authorized Government personnel but will terminate intruders with extreme prejudice.
2. A robot will obey the orders of authorized personnel except where such orders conflict with the Third Law.
3. A robot will guard its own existence with lethal antipersonnel weaponry, because a robot is bloody expensive.

Roger Clarke wrote a pair of papers analyzing the complications in implementing these laws, in the event that systems were someday capable of employing them. He argued, "Asimov's Laws of Robotics have been a very successful literary device. Perhaps ironically, or perhaps because it was artistically appropriate, the sum of Asimov's stories disprove the contention that he began with: It is not possible to reliably constrain the behaviour of robots by devising and applying a set of rules."^[52] On the other hand, Asimov's later novels (The Robots of Dawn, Robots and Empire, Foundation and Earth) imply that the robots inflicted their worst long-term harm by obeying the Laws perfectly well, thereby depriving humanity of inventive or risk-taking behaviour.

The futurist Hans Moravec (a prominent figure in the transhumanist movement) proposed that the Laws of Robotics should be adapted to "corporate intelligences", the corporations driven by AI and robotic manufacturing power which Moravec believes will arise in the near future.^[49]

[edit] See also

• Tilden's Law of Robotics

[edit] Notes and references

[edit] External links

• Worley, Gordon. "Robot Oppression: Unethicality of the Three Laws".
• "Frequently Asked Questions about Isaac Asimov", AsimovOnline 27 September 2004.

Cyberpunk is a sub-genre of science fiction, noted for its focus on "high tech and low life" and taking its name from the combination of cybernetics and punk. It features advanced science such as information technology and cybernetics, coupled with a degree of breakdown or a radical change in the social order.

"Classic cyberpunk characters were marginalized, alienated loners who lived on the edge of society in generally dystopic futures where daily life was impacted by rapid technological change, a ubiquitous datasphere of computerized information, and invasive modification of the human body."^[53]

The plot of cyberpunk writing often centers on a conflict among hackers, artificial intelligences, and mega corporations, tending to be set within a near-future Earth, rather than the far future settings or galactic vistas found in novels like Isaac Asimov's Foundation or Frank Herbert's Dune. The settings of this future tend to be post-industrial dystopias, but are normally marked by extraordinary cultural ferment, and the use of technology in ways never anticipated by its creators ("the street finds its own uses for things"). Much of the genre's "atmosphere" echoes film noir, and written works in the genre often use techniques from detective fiction. Primary exponents of the cyberpunk field include William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker and John Shirley. The term became widespread in the 1980s and remains current today.

Unlike New Wave Science Fiction, which imported stylistic techniques and concerns that already existed in literature and culture at large, cyberpunk originated in the science fiction genre first before gaining mainstream exposure. During the early and mid-1980s, cyberpunk became a fashionable topic in academic circles, where it began to be the subject of postmodernist investigation. In the same period, the genre penetrated Hollywood and became one of cinema's staple science-fiction styles. Many influential films such as Blade Runner and the Matrix trilogy can be seen as prominent outgrowths of the genre's styles and themes. Computer games, board games and role-playing games (such as Shadowrun, or the rather appropriately named Cyberpunk 2020) often feature storylines that are heavily influenced by cyberpunk writing and movies. Beginning in the early 1990s, trends in fashion and music were labeled as cyberpunk.

As a wider variety of writers began to work with cyberpunk concepts, new sub-genres emerged, each of which focuses on technology and its social effects in a different way. Examples include steampunk, pioneered by Tim Powers, K. W. Jeter and James Blaylock, and biopunk or alternatively ribofunk, in which Paul Di Filippo is prominent. In addition, some people consider works such as Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age as being in a postcyberpunk category.

[edit] Style and ethos

[[|right|thumb|250px|The hacker as hero: Lain from the cyberpunk anime series "Serial Experiments Lain".]]

Cyberpunk writers tend to use elements from the hard-boiled detective novel, film noir, and postmodernist prose to describe the often nihilistic underground side of an electronic society. The genre's vision of a troubled future is often called the antithesis of the generally utopian visions of the future popular in the 1940s and 1950s. (Gibson defined cyberpunk's antipathy towards utopian SF in his 1981 short story The Gernsback Continuum, which pokes fun of and, to a certain extent, condemns utopian SF.)

Cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling summarized the cyberpunk ethos in Cyberpunk in the Nineties as follows:

Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it's the truth. It won't go away because we cover our eyes.

That is cyberpunk.

In some cyberpunk writing, much of the action takes place online, in cyberspace, blurring the border between the actual and the virtual reality. A typical trope in such work is a direct connection between the human brain and computer systems. Cyberpunk depicts the world as a dark, sinister place with networked computers which dominate every aspect of life. Giant, multinational corporations have for the most part replaced governments as centers of political, economic and even military power. The alienated outsider's battle against a totalitarian or quasu-totalitarian system is a common theme in science fiction (cf. Nineteen Eighty-Four, Cat's Cradle) and cyberpunk in particular, though in conventional science fiction the totalitarian systems tend to be sterile, ordered, and state controlled.

Protagonists in cyberpunk writing usually include computer hackers, who are often patterned on the idea of the lone hero fighting injustice: Western gunslingers, ronin, etc. They are often disenfranchised people placed in extraordinary situations, rather than brilliant scientists or starship captains intentionally seeking advance or adventure, and are not always true "heroes"; an apt comparison might be to the moral ambiguity of Clint Eastwood's character in the Man with No Name trilogy. One of the cyberpunk genre's prototype characters is Case, from Gibson's Neuromancer. Case is a "console cowboy," a brilliant hacker, who betrays his organized criminal partners. Robbed of his talent through a crippling injury inflicted by the vengeful partners, Case unexpectedly receives a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be healed by expert medical care, but only if he participates in another criminal enterprise with a new crew.

Like Case, many cyberpunk protagonists are thus manipulated, placed in situations where they have little or no choice, and although they might see things through, they do not necessarily come out any further ahead than they previously were. These anti-heroes — "criminals, outcasts, visionaries, dissenters and misfits" ^[54] — do not experience a Campbellian "hero's journey", like a protagonist of a Homeric epic or an Alexandre Dumas novel. Instead, they call to mind the private eye of detective novels, who might solve the trickiest cases but never receive a just reward. This emphasis on the misfits and the malcontents — what Thomas Pynchon called the "preterite" and Frank Zappa the "left behinds of the Great Society" — is the "punk" component of cyberpunk. Cyberpunk literature is often used as a metaphor for the present day-worries about the failings of corporations, corruption in governments, alienation and surveillance technology. Cyberpunk can be intended to disquiet readers and call them to action. It often expresses a sense of rebellion, suggesting that one could describe it as a type of countercultural science fiction. In the words of author and critic David Brin,

… a closer look at [cyberpunk authors] reveals that they nearly always portray future societies in which governments have become wimpy and pathetic … Popular science fiction tales by Gibson, Williams, Cadigan and others do depict Orwellian accumulations of power in the next century, but nearly always clutched in the secretive hands of a wealthy or corporate elite. (The Transparent Society, Basic Books 1998)

Cyberpunk stories have also been seen as fictional forecasts of the evolution of the Internet. The virtual world of what is now known as the Internet often appears under various names, including "cyberspace", "the Wired", "the Metaverse" or "the Matrix". In this context it is important to note that the earliest descriptions of a global communications network came long before the World Wide Web entered popular awareness, though not before traditional science fiction writers such as Arthur C. Clarke and some social commentators such as James Burke began predicting that such networks would eventually form.

[edit] Literature

The science fiction editor Gardner Dozois is generally acknowledged as the person who popularized the use of the term "cyberpunk" as a kind of literature. Minnesota writer Bruce Bethke coined the term in 1980 for his short story "Cyberpunk", although the story was not actually published until November 1983, in Amazing Science Fiction Stories, Volume 57, Number 4 ^[55]. The term was quickly appropriated as a label to be applied to the works of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, John Shirley, Rudy Rucker, Michael Swanwick, Pat Cadigan, Lewis Shiner, Richard Kadrey and others. Of these, Sterling became the movement's chief ideologue, thanks to his fanzine Cheap Truth. (See also John Shirley's articles on Sterling and Rucker ^[56].)

Cyberpunk elements are present in the Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons. The planet Lusus has many characteristics of Neuromancer's dystopian world, and the cybernetic levels of existence where the AI:s live has obviously been influenced by Gibson's works.

[[|thumb|250px|left|William Gibson's "Sprawl trilogy" novels are the most famous early cyberpunk novels.]]

William Gibson with his novel Neuromancer (1984) is likely the most famous writer connected with the term cyberpunk. He emphasized style, a fascination with surfaces and the "look and feel" of the future, and atmosphere over traditional science-fiction tropes. Regarded as ground-breaking, and sometimes as "the archetypal cyberpunk work"^[57] , Neuromancer was awarded the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards. According to the Jargon File, "Gibson's near-total ignorance of computers and the present-day hacker culture enabled him to speculate about the role of computers and hackers in the future in ways hackers have since found both irritatingly naïve and tremendously stimulating." ^[58]

Early on, cyberpunk was hailed as a radical departure from science-fiction standards and a new manifestation of vitality.^{[citation needed]} Shortly thereafter, however, many critics arose to challenge its status as a revolutionary movement. These critics said that the SF "New Wave" of the 1960s was much more innovative as far as narrative techniques and styles were concerned. ^[59]Further, while Neuromancer's narrator may have had an unusual "voice" for science fiction, much older examples can be found: Gibson's narrative voice, for example, resembles that of an updated Raymond Chandler, as in his novel The Big Sleep (1939).^{[citation needed]} Others noted that almost all traits claimed to be uniquely cyberpunk could in fact be found in older writers' works — often citing J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, Stanislaw Lem, Samuel R. Delany and even William S. Burroughs.^{[citation needed]} For example, Philip K. Dick's works contain recurring themes of social decay, artificial intelligence, paranoia, and blurred lines between reality and some kind of virtual reality, and the cyberpunk movie Blade Runner is based on one of his books. Humans linked to machines are found in Pohl and Kornbluth's Wolfbane (1959) and Roger Zelazny's Creatures of Light and Darkness (1968).

In 1994, scholar Brian Stonehill suggested that Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow "not only curses but precurses what we now glibly dub cyberspace". ^[60] Other important predecessors include Alfred Bester's two most celebrated novels, The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination, as well as Vernor Vinge's novella True Names.

Science-fiction writer David Brin describes cyberpunk as "...the finest free promotion campaign ever waged on behalf of science fiction." It may not have attracted the "real punks", but it did ensnare many new readers, and it provided the sort of movement which postmodern literary critics found alluring. (One illustration of this is Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto", an attempt to build a "political myth" using cyborgs as metaphors for contemporary "social reality". ^[61]) Cyberpunk made science fiction more attractive to academics, argues Brin; in addition, it made science fiction more profitable to Hollywood and to the visual arts generally. Although the "self-important rhetoric and whines of persecution" on the part of cyberpunk fans were irritating at worst and humorous at best, Brin declares that the "rebels did shake things up. We owe them a debt. [...] But," he asks, "were they original?" ^[62]

Cyberpunk further inspired many professional writers who were not among the "original" cyberpunks to incorporate cyberpunk ideas into their own works, such as Walter Jon Williams' Hardwired and Voice of the Whirlwind, and George Alec Effinger's When Gravity Fails.

As new writers and artists began to experiment with cyberpunk ideas, new varieties of fiction emerged, sometimes addressing the criticisms leveled at the original cyberpunk stories. Lawrence Person writes, in an essay he posted to the Internet forum Slashdot,

"Many writers who grew up reading in the 1980s are just now starting to have their stories and novels published. To them cyberpunk was not a revolution or alien philosophy invading SF, but rather just another flavor of SF. Like the writers of the 1970s and 80s who assimilated the New Wave's classics and stylistic techniques without necessarily knowing or even caring about the manifestos and ideologies that birthed them, today's new writers might very well have read Neuromancer back to back with Asimov's Foundation, John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, and Larry Niven's Ringworld and seen not discontinuities but a continuum." ^[63]

Person's essay advocates using the term "postcyberpunk" to label the new works such writers produce. In this view, typical postcyberpunk stories continue the focus on an ubiquitous datasphere of computerized information and cybernetic augmentation of the human body, but without the assumption of dystopia. Good examples might be Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age or Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson's Transmetropolitan. Like all categories discerned within science fiction, the boundaries of postcyberpunk are likely to be fluid or ill defined. To complicate matters, there is a continuing market for "pure" cyberpunk novels strongly influenced by Gibson's early work, such as Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon.

Among the subgenres of cyberpunk is steampunk, which is set in an anachronistic Victorian environment, but with cyberpunk's bleak film noir world view. The term was originally coined around 1987 as a joke to describe some of the novels of Tim Powers, James P. Blaylock, and K.W. Jeter, but by the time Gibson and Sterling entered the subgenre with their collaborative novel The Difference Engine the term was being used earnestly as well. ^[64] The early 1990s saw the emergence of biopunk AKA ribofunk, a derivative style building not on informational technology but on biology. In these stories, people are changed in some way not by mechanical means, but by genetic manipulation of their very chromosomes. Paul Di Filippo is seen as the most prominent biopunk writer, although Bruce Sterling's Shaper/Mechanist cycle is also a major influence.

See also the list of notable precursors and the list of print media.

[edit] Film and television

[[|thumb|250px|The world of 2019 Los Angeles as imagined by Syd Mead for Blade Runner, an influential cyberpunk film.]]

The film Blade Runner (1982), adapted from Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, is set in a dystopian future in which manufactured beings called replicants are slaves used on space colonies and are legal prey on Earth to various bounty hunters who "retire" (kill) them. Although Blade Runner was not successful in its first theatrical release, it found a wide viewership in the home video market. Since the movie omits the religious and mythical elements of Dick's original novel (e.g., empathy boxes and Wilbur Mercer), it falls more strictly within the cyberpunk genre than the novel does. William Gibson would later reveal that upon first viewing the film, he was surprised at how the look of this film matched his vision when he was working on Neuromancer.

As mentioned above, the short-lived television series Max Headroom also spread cyberpunk tropes, perhaps with more popular success than the genre's first written works.

The number of films in the genre or at least using a few genre elements has grown steadily since Blade Runner. Several of Philip K. Dick's works have been adapted to the silver screen, with cyberpunk elements typically becoming dominant; examples include Screamers (1996), Minority Report (2002), Paycheck (2003) and A Scanner Darkly (2006). But unfortunately for cyberpunk's arguable originator, the film Johnny Mnemonic (1995) was a flop, both commercially and critically. Gibson fans derided the screenplay as deviating substantially from his original work, even though Gibson wrote the final screenplay himself.

Director Darren Aronofsky set his debut feature π (1998) in a present-day New York City, but built its script with influences from cyberpunk aesthetic. According to the DVD commentary, he and his production team deliberately used antiquated machines (like 5-1/4 inch floppy disks), echoing the technological style of Brazil (1985), to create a cyberpunk "feel". Aronofsky describes Chinatown, where the film is set, as "New York's last cyberpunk neighborhood".

[[|left|thumb|250px|Implied omnipresence of high-technology features heavily in cyberpunk. Behind Claire, lead character in Until the End of the World, is an HDTV display (rare outside Japan in 1991).]] The RoboCop series has a more near-futuristic setting where at least one corporation, Omni Consumer Products, is an all-powerful presence in the city of Detroit. Until the End of the World (1991) shows another example where cyberpunk provides an assumed background, and a plot device, to an otherwise mood and character-driven story. Gattaca (1997) directed by Andrew Niccol is a futuristic film noir whose mood-drenched dystopia provides a good example of biopunk.

The Matrix series, which began with 1999's The Matrix (and now also contains The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions, and The Animatrix) uses a wide variety of cyberpunk elements.

Cyberpunk style and futuristic design have influenced anime, including Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Bubblegum Crisis, Armitage III, Silent Möbius, Serial Experiments Lain and Texhnolyze.

Anime has also provided examples of the "steampunk" sub-genre, particularly in much of the work of Hayao Miyazaki, but also notably in Last Exile (2003), created by studio GONZO and director Koichi Chigira, which features a curious blend of Victorian society and futuristic battles between ships of the sky. Also of note is 2004's Steamboy directed by Katsuhiro Otomo and more recently Ergo Proxy from Manglobe.

See also the list of Cyberpunk films and list of cyberpunk TV series.

[edit] Music and fashion

The term "cyberpunk music" can refer to two rather overlapping categories. First, it may denote the varied range of musical works which cyberpunk films use as soundtrack material. These works occur in genres from classical music and jazz—used, in Blade Runner and elsewhere, to evoke a film noir ambiance—to "noize" and electronica. Typically, films draw upon electronica, electronic body music, industrial, noise, futurepop, alternative rock, goth rock, and IDM to create the proper "feel". The same principles apply to computer and video games; see the discussion of Rez below. Of course, while written works may not come with associated soundtracks as frequently as movies do, allusions to musical works are used for the same effect. For example, the graphic novel Kling Klang Klatch (1992), a dark fantasy about a world of living toys, features a hard-bitten teddy bear detective with a sugar habit and a predilection for jazz.

"Cyberpunk music" also describes the works associated with the fashion trend which emerged from the SF developments. The Detroit techno group Cybotron, which arose in the early 1980s, drew influences both from European synthesizer pioneers Kraftwerk and from Toffler's Future Shock, producing songs which evoke a distinctly dystopian mood. In the same era, Styx released the concept album Kilroy Was Here (1983), the story of a rock star living in a dark future where music has been outlawed. Kilroy and in particular its hit single "Mr. Roboto" may easily be "appropriated" into the cyberpunk genre, whether or not the term was applied at the time. However, starting around the year 1990, popular culture began to include a movement in both music and fashion which called itself "cyberpunk", and which became particularly associated with the rave and techno subcultures. With the new millennium came a new movement of industrial bands making "laptop" music. Homeless traveling squatter punks armed themselves with digital equipment and fused technology into their street sounds- El-wire and the Vagabond Choir. The hacker subculture, documented in places like the Jargon File, regards this movement with mixed feelings, since self-proclaimed cyberpunks are often "trendoids" with affection for black leather and chrome who speak enthusiastically about technology instead of learning about it or becoming involved with it. ("Attitude is no substitute for competence," quips the File.) However, these self-proclaimed cyberpunks are at least "excited about the right things" and typically respect the people who actually work with it—those with "the hacker nature".

Certain music genres like drum'n'bass were directly influenced by cyberpunk, even generating a whole subgenre called neurofunk, where the bass lines, synths and beats try to give the listener the sensation of being inside a sprawl or crawling through cyberspace. Neurofunk was pioneered by artists like Ed Rush, Trace and Optical. In the words of the journalist Simon Reynolds:

Jungle's sound-world constitutes a sort of abstract social realism; when I listen to techstep, the beats sound like collapsing buildings and the bass feels like the social fabric shredding [...] The post-techstep style I call "neurofunk" (clinical and obsessively nuanced production, foreboding ambient drones, blips 'n blurts of electronic noise, and chugging, curiously inhibited two-step beats). Neurofunk is the fun-free culmination of jungle's strategy of "cultural resistance": the eroticization of anxiety. Immerse yourself in the phobic, and you make dread your element. ^[65]

Arriving toward the tail end of both the inital cyberpunk boom and his own career, pop singer Billy Idol released an album called Cyberpunk, which included a song called "Neuromancer." The album was neither a critical nor commercial success.

See also the list of cyberpunk bands.

[edit] Games

[[|thumb|Cyberpunk 2020, a role-playing game based on William Gibson's literature.]] Computer games have frequently used cyberpunk as a source of inspiration. Some of them, like Blade Runner and the Matrix games, are based upon genre movies, while many others like Deus Ex and System Shock are original works.

Several role-playing games (RPGs) called Cyberpunk exist: Cyberpunk (aka Cyberpunk 2013), Cyberpunk 2020 and Cyberpunk v3 (aka Cyberpunk 203X), by R. Talsorian Games, and GURPS Cyberpunk, published by Steve Jackson Games as a module of the GURPS family of RPGs. Cyberpunk 2020 was designed with the settings of William Gibson's writings in mind, and to some extent with his approval, unlike the (perhaps more creative) approach taken by FASA in producing the Shadowrun game (see below). Both games are set in the near future, in a world where cybernetics are prominent. Netrunner is a collectible card game introduced in 1996, based on the Cyberpunk 2020 role-playing game; it launched with a popular online alternate reality game called Webrunner, which let players hack into an evil futuristic corporation's mainframe. In addition, Iron Crown Enterprises released an RPG named Cyberspace, now out of print.

In 1990, in an odd reconvergence of cyberpunk art and reality, the U.S. Secret Service raided Steve Jackson Games's headquarters and confiscated all their computers under Operation Sundevil, which was a massive crackdown on computer hackers and crackers. This was—allegedly—because the GURPS Cyberpunk sourcebook could be used to perpetrate computer crime. That was, in fact, not the main reason for the raid, but after the event it was too late to correct the public's impression.^[66] Steve Jackson Games later won a lawsuit against the Secret Service, aided by the freshly minted Electronic Frontier Foundation. This event has achieved a sort of notoriety and given some to the book itself, as well. All published editions of GURPS Cyberpunk have a tagline on the front cover, which reads "The book that was seized by the U.S. Secret Service! (See p. 4)". Inside, the book provides a summary of the raid and its aftermath.

2004 brought the publication of a number of new cyberpunk RPGs, chief among which was Ex Machina, a more cinematic game including four complete settings and a focus on updating the gaming side of the genre to current themes among cyberpunk fiction. These tropes include a stronger political angle, conveying the alienation of the genre and even incorporating some transhuman themes. 2006 saw the long-awaited publication of R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk v3, the followup to Cyberpunk 2020, although many see the new edition as more Transhumanist or Postcyberpunk than truly Cyberpunk.

[[|thumb|The role-playing game Shadowrun combines aspects of cyberpunk and fantasy.]] Role-playing games have also produced one of the more original takes on the genre in the form of the 1989 game series Shadowrun. Here, the setting is still that of the dystopian near future; however, it also incorporates heavy elements of fantasy literature and games, such as magic, spirits, elves, and dragons. Shadowrun's cyberpunk facets were modeled in large part on William Gibson's writings, and the game's original publishers, FASA, have been accused by some as having directly ripped off Gibson's work without even a statement of influence. Gibson, meanwhile, has stated his dislike of the inclusion of elements of high fantasy within setting elements that he helped pioneer. Nevertheless, Shadowrun has introduced many to the genre, and still remains popular among gamers.

The trans-genre RPG Torg (published by West End Games) also included a variant cyberpunk setting (or "cosm") called the Cyberpapacy. This setting was originally a medieval religious dystopia which underwent a sudden Tech Surge. Instead of corporations or corrupt governments, the Cyberpapacy was dominated by the "False Papacy of Avignon". Instead of an Internet, hackers roamed the "GodNet", a computer network rife with overtly religious symbolism, home to angels, demons, and other biblical figures. Another "cosm" setting that was part of the Torg gameworld was Nippon Tech, which incorporated other aspects of cyberpunk, such as dominant corporations with professional assassins. It did not, however, deal with computer networks as a major part of the setting.

Cyberpunk has also been used in computer adventure games, most notably the now freeware Beneath a Steel Sky (published by Revolution Software),Neuromancer (published by Interplay in 1988), Bloodnet (published by Microprose 1993) and Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller (Gametek 1994). The action adventure game Neuromancer, is based directly on the novel's main theme including Chiba City, some of the characters, hacking of databases and cyberspace decks.

For more examples, see the list of cyberpunk computer and video games.

[edit] See also

Arcology Augmented reality Biopunk Corporatocracy Cyberculture

Cyberpunk fashion Cyberpunk music Cyberware Cypherpunk

Megacorp Meme Mind transfer Mixed reality

Noosphere Postcyberpunk Posthumanism Shadowrun

Steampunk Technocracy Transhumanism Wild Palms

[edit] References and notes

External links in the following were last verified 10 October 2005.

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60. ^ Brian Stonehill, "Pynchon's Prophecies of Cyberspace". Delivered at the first international conference on Pynchon, the University of Warwick, England, November 1994.
61. ^ Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century", in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, 1991), pp. 149-181. ISBN 0-415-90386-6.
62. ^ David Brin, Review of The Matrix.
63. ^ Lawrence Person, "Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto", first published in Nova Express issue 16 (1998), later posted to Slashdot.
64. ^ Michael Berry, "Wacko Victorian Fantasy Follows 'Cyberpunk' Mold," The San Francisco Chronicle, 25 June, 1987; quoted online by Wordspy.
65. ^ Simon Reynolds. Energy Flash: Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (Picador, 1998). ISBN 0-330-35056-0.
66. ^ Jackson, Steve April 19, 1990 SJ Games Raided SJ Games website.

[edit] External links

• AKIRA2019.com : Katsuhiro Otomo's cyberpunk masterpiece Akira
• Cyberpunk Educator - A free movie about the history of cyberpunk films. Download requires a BitTorrent client.
• Cyberpunk R.I.P. — By Paul Saffo, Wired Magazine
• Cyberpunk Review A comprehensive cyberpunk movie review site
• Duke of Hell's Cyberpunk – Listing of cyberpunk-related media
• Fuchsia Shockz – Cyberpunk culture and related cyberpunk articles
• GURPS Cyberpunk website
• Innervation – Resource site and forum for designers interested in technology
• Neometropolis Magazine
• Norman Spinrad, "On Books: Movements", Asimov's Science Fiction October/November 2002.
• R. Talsorian series on cyberpunk film
• The Cyberpunk Project
• Views from the Edge the Cyberpunk forum
• The Cyberpunk Reading List that emerged from the usenet group
• Voidspace Cyberpunk – resource site
• fantsite.narod.ru
• [2]Meddlers in Time

Literary sci-fi punk genres
Cyberpunk — Postcyberpunk — Steampunk — Biopunk — Clockpunk
Other themes
Retro-futurism — Cyberprep — Transrealism