Human Stories, Life

In the second vignette of Robot Stories, "The Robot Fixer," the mother could not let go of her dead son. Such a fundamentally human trait, the inability to let go of something lost, to get over the idea that something has irrevocably changed. It even made some kind of strange sense to me - at least I did not immediately find flaw or question it - when she must go as far as to steal the female action figure for her son. She needed to do something. It makes sense. But also, it makes no sense. He is dead, the toy is a toy, it is not magic, he cannot be saved by magic.

At the same time, humans seem to have an easy time of letting go of, or forgetting entirely, some forgotten race - dead, lost souls. In Kustritz's essay on Postmodern Eugenics, she brings attention to the necessity of such historic omissions as the Holocaust or Tuskegee experiments to the concept of eugenics. Wrede's novel, Thirteenth Child, on the European colonization of a indigenous-less America is a fascinating example of how it is possible, even understandable, for people to neglect to think that the eradication, the utter non-existence, of the entire Native American race could be interpreted as offensive to some. Moreover, the fact that Wrede presupposes that the course of history would be rather unaffected by the nonexistence of Native Americans in her novel is not only naive of her but fundamentally racist:

Wrede demonstrated an at least unconscious assumption that Native Americans aren’t human, that they are racially so distinct that, as she said elsewhere, eliminating them doesn’t really alter human history.