O Master Caliban!

Gotlieb, Phyllis. O Master Caliban! (Dahlgren #1). New York City: Harper & Row, 1976.[1] New York City: Bantam, 1979. (Sequel: Heart of Red Iron.)[2] Rpt. Toronto: Seal, 1979 (the edition used by Dominick Grace (see below). For other reprints, at least one translation, and reviews, see entry in Internet Speculative Fiction Database at link, as of January 2023, here.[3]

From GoodReads on line:

It’s all-out combat, Man and Mutant vs. Machine in a gigantic battle for survival and control of GalFed’s trash planet, Barrazan Five, also known as Dahlgren’s World. Years ago, geneticist Dahlgren arrived on the planet with 100 humans and 1,000 ergs. Then the robot-ergs, their intelligence expanded by Dahlgren’s experiments, rebelled and slaughtered their masters. Now it’s a war for possession of Dahlgren’s World, a brutally hot, highly radioactive and barely habitable jungle in space. On one side of the conflict are the ergs, who have evolved into sophisticated artificial intelligences. [...]

From "Out of This World: Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy," an annotated reading list from the National Library of Canada: "[...] Machines take control of their human masters as they search for their past on a distant planet" (p. 9). The machines — ergs — are robots, designed as workers, so cf. and contrast R. U. R., which see at internal link.

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Discussed by Dominick Grace, in "Gotlieb upon Caliban," Extrapolation 52.2 (2011). Grace handles this novel's relationship to Shakespeare's Tempest and Robert Browning's "Caliban upon Setebos; or, Natural Theology in the Island" (1864); she also offers a note asserting some similarities but that "[...] there is little to suggest a direct influence of Forbidden Planet on O Master Caliban!" (201, n. 2). Grace points out:

The great difference between the ergs and Caliban in that the ergs win, "killing most of the scientists" on "the planet Barrazan IV" and "banishing Sven," Dahlgren's son, "along with Esther and Uigal, a mutated gibbon and goat — also now intelligent — to a distant corner of the settled area, separated from the base by jungle and radioactive zones. They keep Dahlgren prisoner and [keep] their rebellion a secret from the outside world of the Galactic Federation" (p. 193).

A spaceship lands on the planet with five young humans, including Shirvanian, "a genius: with "the ability to read machine minds and control them remotely." The ergs claim the ship and try to hold the kids. "The larger erg plan involves the creation of a robotic duplicate of Dahlgren" — cf. robot-Maria in METROPOLIS and impersonation in TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY, and other more modest works[4][5] — and send the robot ringer "as a representative to a scientific conference, thereby maintaining their secret and making inroads into the larger universe." The novel's plot "involves the quest of Sven and the children to free themselves of the erg threat, and the attempts of Dahlgren and ultimately his double to thwart the ergs and their leader" (p. 194). The role reversals of oppressors and oppressed with humans and robots is intentional, and follows the point in Browning's poem of Caliban's seeing God acting like Caliban would act if he, Caliban, had god-like power (and as Caliban admits to acting on a much lower level).

A game at chess, but more of the tone of Death and the Knight, as in THE SEVENTH SEAL (1957)[6] than The Tempest, with the scientist Dhalgren "playing chess for his life with a robotic mirror image of himself and under the control of the erg-Queen, Creator Matrix One, a sexless robot gendered female and" Grace thinks it probable, "a figure who is herself a hybrid of Prospero and Sycorax," with Sycorax witch-mother to Caliban in Shakespeare's play (p. 195). Expanding on this theme, Grace finds Dahlgren a Prospero-figure, "or a god" (a "little god" as he sees himself), who is "unable to save himself from his Caliban" and who has been overthrown (we'll add, cf. and contrast Theodore Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God," 1941).[7] Also reducing Dahlgren, the mirror image of him has been created by the ergs and "becomes a metaphorical brother to Dahlgren (as well as a metaphorical daughter to erg-Queen, as Caliban is to Sycorax)" (p. 196), but literal sonship with Caliban and Sycorax. (Cf. and mostly contrast Mr. Data with his android child in "The Offspring" episode of ST:NG — RDE et al.) (Grace, p. 196)

How the ergs came to consciousness is a question brought up in OMC but not resolved; there is, though, a strong suggestion of how the ergs got aggressive. Dahlgren has worked "'to produce mutated life forms capable of living in inimical environments'"; the ergs "'alongside him, building new machine forms at the same time as he built or changed life forms" could have picked up from Dahlgren "a pattern of killing living things'" (Grace p. 197, quoting OMC p. 15 — with Grace agreeing and noting this imitation theme fits well with Browning's Caliban projecting his desire for power onto his god, Setebos).

Grace, p. 199 on erg-Queen, erg-Dahlgren, the theme of Man a Machine, and the idea going back at least to René Descartes of non-human animals as machines.

Erg-Queen is unlike erg-Dahlgren, lacking personhood or body but being "a function of steel, silicon, germanium, and selenium" ([Gotlieb p.] 209): pure machine. Dahlgren himself argues that "any organic creature is a kind of machine" [...] (p. 192). Machine-like Dahlgren would of course so argue, and erg-Queen is a kind of manifestation of the implications of this stripping of humanity down to our physiological function. [...]

Erg-Dahlgren [...] functions as erg-Queen's representative in revealing ways. He is a literal image of Dahlgren, modeled exactly on Dahlgren's physiology, and also a reflection of some aspects of Dahlgren's nature. As erg-Queen note, "Dahlgren is known as a cold and uncivil man who shuns personal contacts. It is highly improbably8 that anyone who is meeting Dahlgren for the first time or has not seen him in many years will suspect he has been replaced by a machine" (80-81). Much of the action of the novel involves erg-Dahlgren's interaction with Dahlgren in order to learn how to mimic him perfectly. Confronted with this image of himself as machine, Dahlgren begins to reclaim his humanity. [...] However, erg-Dahlgren, like Caliban, ultimately turns on his own maker, erg-Queen, as he develops his own independence. [...] If Caliban's benefit from learning landuage is that he can curse, erg-Dahlgren's benefit from learning what it is to be human is that he turns on the machines. (Grace p. 199)

On AI-mind-reading Shirvanian, who "is also explicitly likened to Dahlgren, especially in his preference of machines over people; he is like machine-like Dahlgren" but as a manipulator of machines, where Dahlgren manipulates living beings. Notes Shirvanian's creation of "a mechanical bird [...,] blurring of the line between animal and machines," even as shown with Dahlgren (Grace 200).

RDE, finishing, 15Jan23.