Ted White
The Spawn of Death Machine

The first novel written by Ted White about Bob Tanner (what Ted White himself calls 'the Bob Tanner cycle', which is essentially comprised of only two novels) was published in Italy by Urania in 1979 with the title 'Born of Man and Machine'. The original title is 'Android Avenger' and was published in the USA in 1965. It was a very experimental novel that I have always considered successful only halfway in this sense. This is because, on one hand, it is impossible not to acknowledge its richness of content and also its innovations for its time; indeed, it was 1965, and it anticipated themes that would later become central to the cyberpunk genre, as well as dystopian content that was certainly peculiar for the sixties; on the other hand, it is undeniable that the development of the plot turned out to be largely lacking in many aspects, possibly due to a cursory translation and what may have been cuts (which were not uncommon at the time) regarding the original work. I interviewed the very kind and accommodating Ted White about it, but he himself had to admit that he didn't know much about the translated versions of his works, even though he confirmed his closeness and personal friendship with William Gibson, John Shirley, and especially Philip K. Dick, whom he considers simultaneously both a friend and a source of inspiration.

There was perhaps too much on the grill in this novel, and some aspects were not finally clarified, particularly concerning the very nature of the android Bob Tanner, an antihero half-man and half-machine called, due to his special characteristics, to be a kind of messiah, a figure that must 'resolve' within a social context, that of New York in the year 2017 (practically tomorrow), as described with great mastery and richness of detail from the author's mind. A futuristic society that is a compromise between the most visionary impulses of its time and reasoning based on logic and founded on common sense rather than on special intellectual speculations. An approach that might refer to the theories of the Italian architect Paolo Soleri regarding the 'possible city' and arcologies and where instead of flying cars, gigantic skyscrapers, and mega-complexes, we find mobile streets and infinite networks of advanced subway lines, intertwining into a functional suburban labyrinth.

In this reality, Bob Tanner moved in the 2017 imagined by Ted White (among other things a great lover of progressive music and Italian art-rock in general and a music critic on the radio and in print under the alias Dr. Progresso), an author born in 1938 who became passionate about science fiction from a very young age, knowing the genre from what can be considered every possible angle. In a way a forerunner for what would then be, over the years, the development of genre fanzines, he won the Hugo Award in 1968 in the category 'Best Fan Writer', and he never abandoned science fiction nor renounced direct contact with authors and fans (being both things at once), not even when fanzines were replaced by webzines, in an immediate correspondence that perhaps has given new life to a genre, science fiction, that today does not seem to interest many. It is perhaps not coincidental if the last major success was 'The Martian' by Andy Weir, a novel born and conceived to be published (as it initially was) and spread on the web, before becoming a true literary phenomenon and later a multimillion-dollar Hollywood blockbuster directed by a great director like Sir Ridley Scott and starring the now most popular actor in the genre, Matt Damon. A novel that in any case is characterized by being particularly detailed on a technical level, and perhaps in this sense it suggests a new and very 'technical' approach to science fiction, as if today it were necessary to give it a necessarily realistic content. Whether this will become a real trend, however, it is too early to know, and we will have to wait and live in the present or near future to find out. But it is true that nowadays writing becomes a difficult exercise for many new young authors, where the critique process is amplified by the Internet and often aimed precisely at highlighting inaccuracies and technical details, which from an admirer of the genre, I believe, are not necessary to create a good work of science fiction. It does not, in fact, have to be technical, specific, documented to be such.

Bob Tanner, however, this time, in the second novel of the series, which Urania wanted to simply name as 'The Second Mission of Bob Tanner' (original title: 'The Spawn of Death Machine'), awakens, literally, hundreds of years after the events of New York in 2017 and in a world that is radically different from the one he knew and from the one we know today, which has been completely devastated by a series of indefinite upheavals generally referred to as 'Chaos', leading to radical changes in the North American continent and in what once were the United States of America.

Awakening in the midst of what was once the city of New York, now a heap of ruins inhabited by people regressed to a primitive and barbaric state, practicing cannibalism and organized into archaic social structures where only the law of the strongest prevails, in small groups, Bob Tanner remembers nothing of his past history, except for sudden flashbacks, a kind of visions between the dreamlike and what can be fleeting holographic screens (assuming an android could differentiate between the two), and does not have a precise and well-defined mission. All that was told to him at the time of his awakening was that he must undertake a journey to gather as much information as possible about the current state of humankind.

Once again absorbed into the role of what must be a 'deus ex machina', due not only this time to his special characteristics as an android but also because he holds deep in his memory the forgotten events of past history, Bob Tanner will make a journey from east to west in an ideal remaking of what the ancient American pioneers did, meeting along the way social structures that differ from each other, each in its way constituting either a degeneration of what is (was) American society in the sixties or, in other cases, a parodistic exaggeration and extremization of what were social conflicts typical of those years (and somehow still unresolved today), such as racial discrimination. Ted White, after all, wrote this novel in 1968, the same year Martin Luther King was killed. And that was the killing of Bob Kennedy. If the sixties were and have been considered by many as years of great change, they were at the same time, and particularly during that year, also a period where the world of culture and art, hence science fiction, were called to question what future the world (and the Western world, particularly the United States of America) was actually heading toward.

Ted White probably draws in this case the worst possible future, coming to the conclusion (which he had already matured in 1965 when he wrote the first novel of the series) that the society he knew was destined to end, and consequently, so was the history of mankind itself, which at that point was destined to make a spectacular backward leap in time, halting what was, up to the mid-sixties of the last century, a path toward progress that was imagined to be enlightened and hopefully resolving all the historical social and individual issues of humankind.

I am writing these lines on the eve of the new year 2017 and a few days after finishing the novel. I am not doing it deliberately, I am considering this fact only now, and I would have written this page a few days ago, right after reading the novel, but work commitments have prevented me. Yet these days have served me to reconsider in a positive and more reflective key the content of what is only apparently a simple (but engaging) adventure novel set in a science fiction context. Beyond anticipating also in this case content concerning the so-called post-apocalyptic setting novels that would later be taken up by genre authors (much more celebrated than Ted White himself) and with varying success, in what is the initial search for information on the state of human beings after the 'Chaos' and then for solutions, always in search of self-determination and independence from one's own state of 'slavery' because being man-machine, android, Ted White will make Bob Tanner find, precisely in his humanity, in his emotional and human side rather than in his potential as a superman and endowed with special powers, that force and drive that are evidently necessary for human beings to find themselves and overcome any possible state of crisis, reorganize, be again, rediscover themselves as social animals with feelings; wanting therefore to find in the solution of the internal and even Hamlet-like doubts of Bob Tanner and of what is actually his nature, a metaphor for the social and cultural contrasts of our time.

According to Ted White (who, in this work, fully redeems himself from what could have been the insufficiency in addressing some content in the first novel of the series), but also considering our society where the use of machines is increasing and where, in spite of the fear, I instead claim that human centrality in production and creation processes at all levels is always paramount; once again, it is man who wins over the machine. The victory of that complex made of emotions and at the same time primitive intuitions, innate in the human structure over a sometimes exasperated technicism that, in any case, cannot do without the human component to function. So it is.