{"id":268,"date":"2017-07-08T00:04:45","date_gmt":"2017-07-08T05:04:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lfs.org\/blog\/?p=268"},"modified":"2024-05-10T23:29:02","modified_gmt":"2024-05-11T04:29:02","slug":"review-freefall-chapter-1-by-mark-stanley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/review-freefall-chapter-1-by-mark-stanley\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Mark Stanley’s Freefall, Chapter 1 explores the rights of robots with humor"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By William Stoddard<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mark Stanley has been writing and drawing Freefall<\/em> <\/a>for nineteen years now, making it one of the longest-running Webcomics ever. He officially announced the completion of its first chapter on July 11, 2016. Stanley has just been awarded a Special Prometheus Award<\/a> for Freefall.<\/em><\/p>\n

The core of Freefall<\/em> is character-driven comedy.<\/p>\n

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Its three core characters are Sam Starfall, a ship captain; Helix, his assistant\/flunky; and Florence Ambrose, the ship\u2019s engineer. None of them is human! Sam is an intelligent alien, of a race evolved from land-dwelling cephalopod scavengers, the only member of his race on the colony planet Jean (though he wears a humanoid exoskeleton).<\/p>\n

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Helix is an Asimovian robot. Florence is an uplifted wolf with intelligence equal to that of a very bright human, but with different underlying instincts\u2014probably the only one on the planet, and one of the few in existence anywhere.<\/p>\n

Many of the secondary characters are human, but not all; Jean\u2019s robot population is vastly larger than its human (450 million vs. 40 thousand), and we\u2019ve also met Florence\u2019s designer, Dr. Bowman, an unplifted chimpanzee with rage issues. A great deal of the comedy is driven by the tension between Sam\u2019s love of chaos, rulebreaking, and petty crime, and Florence\u2019s conscientiousness and na\u00efvet\u00e9.<\/p>\n

Having made created beings a big part of the setting, Stanley follows Chekhov\u2019s advice about the gun on the mantelpiece: He makes them a major focus of his story. While a lot of it is episodic, over the course of the chapter a continuing plot emerges and becomes central, one whose focus is conflict over the rights of robots. It\u2019s to Stanley\u2019s credit that he doesn\u2019t go in for straw man villains. The immediate threat comes from a corporate executive who has come up with a way to enrich himself; but his actions aren\u2019t corporate policy, and another executive opposes his scheme.<\/p>\n

The resolution of the conflict brings in Jean\u2019s court system and planetary government, whose mayor is initially opposed to the rights of robots\u2014but other officials have different views, and the mayor\u2019s position becomes more complex over the course of the story.<\/p>\n

As a libertarian, of course I find the idea of the universal rights of sentient beings (starting perhaps in #714 with \u201cIntelligent beings should not be property!\u201d) an appealing theme, if one whose appeal isn\u2019t limited to libertarians. But Stanley also inserts a number of other comments that libertarians will applaud:<\/p>\n