Amazon Review
Gaby Woods'
Living Dolls is a playful exploration of the history of artificial creatures and their inventors, which starts in 17th-century France and ends in the robotics laboratories of Tokyo and Massachusetts. Ultimately the book is concerned to provide a Freudian account of "what troubles us when we are faced with certain versions of ourselves--bionic men, speaking robots, intelligent machines or even just a doll that moves". The dolls, robots and androids that Woods explores all create anxieties that offer "a fundamental challenge to our perception of what makes us human".
Woods' fascination with artificial intelligence begins in the 17th century, with Descartes' formulation of man as a machine, and Jacques de Vaucanson's flute-playing android, accompanied by an artificial duck that digested its own food, first exhibited to popular amazement in Paris in 1738. The book then tells the bizarre stories of other examples of artificial bodies, including Wolfgang von Kempelen's Automaton Chess Player, attired in the manner of a Turk, Edison's Talking Doll and John Nevill Maskelyne's 19th-century automaton, Psycho. Living Dolls is an amusing and well written story of the "uncanny" nature of artificial life, although some readers might feel that it is higher on entertainment than serious philosophical reflection, in dealing with a subject that many postmodern scholars have explored in greater depth. --Jerry Brotton
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
A haunting account of the wilder fringes of mechanical ingenuity and human self-absorption. --
Evening Standard, 25 February 2002A masterly, elegant and thoughtful cultural history of the life-imitating machine. --
Sunday Times, 24 February 2002A rigorously researched and grippingly narrated weaving of tales of the quest for mechanical life. . . A captivating read. --
Financial Times, 23 February 2002A splendid history of mechanical magic which kept me enthralled with its original research and marvellous story-telling quality. --
Roy PorterWood seems peculiarly sensitive to the fantastic flirtatiousness which envelops dolls, miniature machines, seemingly living constructs. --
Observer, 24 February 2002
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
