Word: robotical
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Part of this self-induced anxiety about German unification derives from the widespread but questionable theory that different nations have different national characters, that the Germans, because of their history or their upbringing or whatever, are both aggressive and docile, robot-like people who love order and discipline, work and war. Like the stereotypes of the snobbish English or the immoral French or the crass Americans, such caricatures are generally created by one's enemies, often in times of war. "There is such a thing as national character, but it changes," says William Manchester, a Wesleyan University adjunct professor...
From the reviews, you may think that Gremlins 2: The New Batch is about a cute creature who battles his evil brethren to save Manhattan. You may read that RoboCop 2 is about a police officer, half man, half machine, who battles his evil robot twin to save Detroit. You may have heard that Total Recall is about Arnold Schwarzenegger trying to reclaim his memory and save Mars...
...part prophecy, part satire. On future Earth the unit of money is, of course, a "credit." Folks flick on the wall-screen TV to check out ESPN's coverage of the Toronto-Tokyo game, then perfect their tennis stroke with the help of a teacher on hologram. Johnnycab, the robot taxi driver, chirps irrelevant pleasantries until passengers want to throttle him. A married couple debate whether to move to Mars -- as if it were the suburbs -- or to Saturn ("Everybody says it's gorgeous"). Perhaps they should visit Rekall Inc., a mind-travel company that offers "the memory...
Finders keepers, says the Columbus-America Discovery Group, which won exclusive salvage rights in federal court last year through the arcane principle of "tele-possession" because its unmanned robot, equipped with cameras and mechanical arms, can operate in waters too deep for divers. But ten British and American insurance companies insist that the loot is theirs since their predecessor companies paid off the loss more than a century ago. Even the Ivy League has joined the fray. Columbia University, whose researchers provided sonar maps of the ocean bottom, is also angling for a share...
Amid this typhoon of claims and counterclaims, Federal Judge Richard Kellam must decide whether the salvage rights won by the robot lead to ownership or merely a finder's fee. And perhaps a bottle...