ABSTRACT
Science fiction is the basis in scientific experimentation and technological development that gave the genre its name and also provides its major tropes such as the robot, the android and the alien. Robots look at two key science fiction films featuring robots, Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. Like the androids of contemporary roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro, which also combine a humanoid external appearance with a mechanical infrastructure, their production raises key issues about how we perceive the nature of the human. The stories of the renegade Nexus-6 androids and of Deckard's relationship with Rachael argue against the glib binary classifications of human/artificial or human/other. Most strikingly the erotics are evident when human and robot, android, alien or technology itself comes into some form of intimate conjunction. The erotics of Alien are not the mid-town coyness of the 1950s but a full-blown fantasy of sex and death, based on Giger's biomechanoids.
