3155 Christie, Jason. i-ROBOT. Calgary: Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing. 106p. $19.95pa. ISBN 1-894063-24-4pa. CCIP. DDC C811'.6.

Experimental poetry and science fiction actually go together quite well, but perhaps never as seamlessly as in Jason Christie’s i-ROBOT. It is “a poem in nodes,” “a serial from instances,” a kind of story with only a hidden narrative. The book offers a sequence of parodic takes on contemporary culture, and a witty, subversive commentary on both life and literature. Christie takes as a given that we are already in a robot world, adding only the possibility that all machines will soon be upgraded with language, minds, and personalities. He then offers glimpses of the kind of world in which they and we would interact.
        One of the most intriguing aspects of this series of commentaries, tales, and epigrams is the way Christie is able to combine science-fiction imagery and poetic concerns with language and rhetoric. “The poem splits into the parts of a robot, open arms and runs guns into a congested valley of nouns, all the verbs to bravo tango and robot agents on red alert. At this point a robot climbed into the sentence and drove the noun home.” But he also insists that the interchange between human and robot (with cyborgs and “auggies included) will have led to moments of metal sentiment: “The saddest robot in the world works at the robot ossuary, in the book, where it collects the pieces, the scraps of all the other robots that end up there. It is an ancient robot from before the language, memory and gender updates. It works in silence, except its own whirrs and clanks, since there is nobody to oil its joints. Rumour has it, that this robot builds companions from the bones, writes poems.”
        What with the robotic parodies of poems from Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” to Ginsberg’s “Howl,” such sharp upgraded proverbs as “It is a poor robot that blames its pro- gramming,” and little documentary moments like the first robot wedding, Christie has compiled a suitably challenging text for our times. i-ROBOT will easily satisfy readers of sci-fi and contemporary innovative poetry.