Heart and Hearth: The Cyborg and Family Values

Abstract

As was noted in the previous chapter, cinematic cyborgs tend to fall into either of two categories - allies and enemies - with each stance determined by their relative familiarity and corresponding degree of threat to the values deemed most ‘human’. Yet even ostensible enemies may become humanised by conforming to an established set of behavioural parameters and ideological codes. The use of ‘family values’ is one such code that has often been utilised as a means of recuperating the ‘nonhuman’ in SF narratives and which became increasingly common in cyborg films of the 1990s. The idea itself is far from new, however. In fact, it was established by Isaac Asimov who not only developed the Three Laws of Robotics as a fictional means of rendering robots safe by programming them with a set of behavioural inhibitors, but whose very first robot story, Robbie (first published in 1940 as Strange Playfellow), explicitly proves a robot’s safety by making it family-friendly.