What obvious example am I overlooking?

[james_davis_nicoll]

I'm trying to think of a good example of an SF story with a crewed exploration vehicle armed with a large flotilla of robotic probes (The idea being the meat stays where it's safe, but close enough to the remotes not to have significant time lag).

Comments

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

Possibly _A Deepness in the Sky_?

_Diaspora_ maybe, though they don't technically have meat in that one.

[chaotic-nipple.livejournal.com]

IIRC, Blindsight had such, but the crew still ended up going out when the robots proved inadequate.

[matt-ruff.livejournal.com]

Which made no sense to me, as it implied that human flesh is somehow less vulnerable to critical damage than stuff you can build with magic nanotech.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I think the implication was that meat was in fact less vulnerable, the magic nanotech wasn't magical enough, and if the objective was to get the information back to the crew, that wasn't working by remote.

[chaotic-nipple.livejournal.com]

I think the reasoning was that there was too much radiation for effective communications with the robots, the robots still weren't smart enough to make effective decisions on their own, and that they couldn't repair/replace them, whereas the human crew could be relatively easily healed by said nanotech.

[chaotic-nipple.livejournal.com]

If you want to talk about things that don't make sense in that book, how about the estivating vampires? If the modern day recreations needed IV drip rehydration to bring themselves out of torpor, then how did their primitive ancestors _ever_ wake up?

[krfsm.livejournal.com]

IIRC they used some of the vampires' adapatations, but not the entire set. I don't think we see Jukka Sarasti using a drip to revive... Been a while since I read it, though.

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

Star Trek: The Motion Picture comes to mind, though again the meat makes a break for it when the robots fail to be much use.

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

There's a few harry harrison short stories in (I think) Stainless Steel Visions where those conditions are almost met (the humans eventually have to go down themselves of course to bring the drama).

Forever Peace also jumped to mind, though it doesn't actually fit at all.

The Culture Minds tend to go this route except in situations where they can justify sending one of their many meat puppets (AKA culture citizens) to die horribly after witnessing oh-so-shocking activities by the locals.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

I had trouble thinking of any Culture citizens who die on page, let alone horribly.

Windward, the one exploring the airspheres. Pretty much independent of SC activity.
Excession, the loner in the warship haven.
Neither death was permanent, though the first took a long longer and wasn't Culture-revival.

Balveda, but that was voluntary cessation.
Guy who went native in State of the Art. That took a lot of effort on his part.

And that's it. SC may jerk people around but it also goes to a lot of effort to prevent them suffering physical harm, whether by personal armament or being guarded well. In Gurgeh's case, this was despite his own naive pacifism; Contact may let you strip down but SC won't.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Redacted for spoilery reasons because <lj-cut> doesn't work in comments.

The main character in Matter is an SC who dies in a dramatic and arguably horrible manner.

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

Not 100% sure what you will accept as being "on page", but if you'll count the brief mention of Balveda's suicide in the appendices to Consider Phlebas then you might accept some of the following deaths (spoilers, obviously):

• In Excession: Sisela Ytheleus, the unnamed Mind of Pittance and its drone, the Attitude Adjuster (described in detail), the Not Invented Here, and Scopell-Afranqui (also rather detailed).
• In Look to Windward: an unnamed lava rafter who gets crushed to death while glacier-caving, Ilom Donce (a death bed appearance only), Masaq Hub (aka Lasting Damage I), and Lasting Damage II.
• In Matter: the Liveware Problem (and its avatars), Turminder Xuss, Quitrilis Yurke, and the Now We Try It My Way. And Djan Seriy Anaplian as noted in the comment below.

And after typing all that, I have to say that Iain M. Banks sure has a tin ear for names.

[galbinus-caeli.livejournal.com]

AI (drones) and humans seem to be equally second class citizens in The Culture. And equally very difficult to completely kill.

[http://users.livejournal.com/krin_o_o_/]

You mean one without the robotic probes catching a viral alien human hating program, going insane, or attaining sentience and turning on their creators 'just because'?

Would it even be possible to write such a story and have it be 'good'.

Doesn't it violate some principle of protagonist verses "something" to do it all by proxy and have him never be in harms way?

[http://users.livejournal.com/krin_o_o_/]

oh... does David Brin's "Kiln People" count?

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

> Doesn't it violate some principle of protagonist verses "something" to do it all by proxy and have him never be in harms way?

That principle would seem to suggest that there's no story which could possibly be told about, say, attempting to guide Skylab to a safe splashdown. I think it's enough for a story to be the attempt to accomplish something even if the only antagonist is the universe.

[rwpikul.livejournal.com]

Not only is it enough, but it is one of the four basic conflicts: Man v. Nature

Indirect contact would also work for a Man v. Man story. If you move the focus to the mothership, you can also do Man v. Society and Man v. Himself, (similar to setting a military story in a headquarters).

[jeffr23.livejournal.com]

Blake's Seven used robotic probes all the time. Probably more for SFX budget than crew safety reasons, but...

[oh6.livejournal.com]

Aaron Alexovich's Kimmie66 has this, where planets discovered by robots are released to the public as virtual environments when they've been sufficiently explored. It's not really crucial to the story but the comic goes into some detail.

[oh6.livejournal.com]

GAH I'm an idiot, it has the robots, but it doesn't have crewed exploration. Sorry.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Something like that's going on in Incandescence (Greg Egan), which I'm currently reading.

The beings (one of whom has DNA ancestry) are currently exploring "in person" in very small (millimeter range, I think) avatars.

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

But the situation isn't quite the same because the (non-Arkdweller) characters in Incandescence aren't fleshers (though they may manufacture and inhabit bodies from time to time)—we'd describe them as AIs, even if some of them have DNA ancestry, and they travel as AIs do, as streams of data at the speed of light.

[tavella.livejournal.com]

I seem to recall probes/robots doing the work in another Egan short, _Wang's Carpets_. Been a long time since I read it, though.

[eyemage.livejournal.com]

how about the Rocheworld trilogy ( aka flight of the dragonfly ) by RL Forward?

its been awhile since ive read them, but i recall lots of robotic "trees" that explored ahead of the humans.

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

I'm sure I read a space opera (or maybe MilSF) where everything was drones, drones, drones. Humans crewed the ships but battles between the ships were entirely "my drone fu is stronger than yours!" Completely blanking on other details, though.

[citizenpsmith.livejournal.com]

Scott Westerfeld's The Risen Empire fits that description, from what I remember of it.

[wakboth.livejournal.com]

The space battles in Peter F. Hamilton's "Reality Dysfunction" books were fought with swarms of both offensive and defensive drones.

[alicebentley]

They are mercenaries rather than explorers, but there's the Very Dangerous Array in Schlock Mercenary.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

Aw, you beat me to it.

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

Vinge's "Marooned in Realtime". Dela Lu stays more or less safely in stasis while retaining executive control over the drones that do the real fighting. Can't be otherwise, since 'more time safely ensconced in stasis' equates to 'less time to direct operations'.

[le-trombone.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I'll have to re-read, but does Hal Clement's Close to Critical count? It may be it fails on the "flotilla" portion of your question.

[(Anonymous)]

Clement's Half Life also qualifies I think

[matt-ruff.livejournal.com]

The present-day storyline of Titanic?

Robot exploration

[(Anonymous)]

Bob Shaw's 'Ship of Strangers' had robots exploring uninhabited planets under the control of the ship's brain, called Aesop - as I remember it, the robots moved off at different angles from the landing point to cover the whole surface, and then the ship stooged round to pick them up again...

Gosh, I hadn't thought of that book for about thirty years.

[rosefox]

Just read one in The New Space Opera 2: Peter Watts's "The Island".

Dome, by Michael Reeves and Steve Perry

[disassembly_rsn]

Chapter 1 - grad student in geology sends a probe out from his sub to study an active volcano closeup. If he hadn't done something silly in an attempt to get even more impressive pictures / data for his doctoral defense, he'd have been fine.

[dsrtao]

_Aristoi_, Walter Jon Williams. The robotic probes go in first, cover a bunch of planets, and provide enough intelligence to identify a good candidate planet, do bioscans of the inhabitants, and work out a vocabulary, grammar, and cultural history. Only then do the humans come down to visit.

[ilya187.livejournal.com]

Robert Forward's "Camelot 30K". All interaction between humans and alien keracks was via kerack-shaped remote waldos. But this was to get around the huge size disparity (a human could hardly fit in any kerack building!), rather than to keep humans safe. Humans were right on the surface[1], about 30 km away.

[1]Surface of unnamed Kuiper Belt object bigger than Pluto. "Camelot 30K" was written before Eris was discovered.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Smartass answer: "Rogue Moon", except that the large flotilla of robot probes is made of cloned meat. (Actually, I've never thought of it this way, but Jack Chalker's Four Lords of the Diamond is a similar situation, in that a single brilliant agent is repeatedly cloned, sent on one-way trips into death traps, and reports back by telepathy.)

There is an armada of robot drone hunters at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back, but despite the existence of cheap human-level AI, the drones are pretty stupid.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Pohl and Williamson's Farthest Star had a similar solution: use a scanner and tachyon radio to create copies of people who stay safely at home. If the copy dies, and they generally do, run off a few more copies.

They deliberated crewed a highly radioactive ship with short-lived copies.

[yorksranter.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

John Wyndham, The Outward Urge.

US, Soviet, and British forces engage in interspace combat. Soviet spacecraft use a flotilla of small robotic missiles ("wasps") to attack (and destroy) the US military's space stations. Later, the Soviet missile base on the Moon is destroyed by a flock of US unmanned lunar vehicles, which are evidently robotic rather than teleoperated - they exhibit biomimetic swarming behaviour in manoeuvring across the lunar surface and evading defensive fire, before detonating their (tactical nuclear, IIRC) payloads as close as they can get to the base's airtight hull. There is another reason why they must be fully autonomous robots but that's a huge SPOILER.

Arguably, the aliens in The Kraken Wakes use the same strategy to explore the Earth's land mass. (they send out vehicles which may or may not be manned...ah...crewed, which themselves deploy...devices...which may be either machines or lifeforms...to carry out SPOILER missions)

[(Anonymous)]

Ken MacLeod, Learning the World.

-- Paul C.

[wakboth.livejournal.com]

I think one of Alastair Reynolds "Inhibitor" books had the incoming starship spreading out subsequent swarms of observer drones, so that by the time they had braked down from near-lightspeed, they had very good interferometry pics of the wider system, and specialized probes around the more interesting system objects.

[ilya187.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's part of "Revelation Space" novel. In general, Reynolds' books (and not just Inhibitor series) make far more extensive use of "dumb" robots than most SF.