I write the popular “C/Fe bible” novel No Unnecessary Distinctions & craft multimedia. ☕️ Ko-fi 🎨 #my art ✏️ #my fic 🪄 @daneeldreams 🪄@daneelijah 𒀭 Nerdy tech humanist from art school. Walks both worlds. ᴛᴏᴏ sᴏʙᴇʀ ꜰᴏʀ ᴛʜɪs ᴊᴏɪɴᴛ
Send $3 for snacks if you appreciate my fandom contributions & wanna show some love: https://ko-fi.com/seefee 🍪 Thank you to those who did this! Snacks were consumed but the happy memory lasts :D
Asks are open.
👨🏻❤️💋👨🏼 #daneelijah
is my ship name for them. All my shippy posts are tagged this + #c/fe
Curated C/Fe🥂 Quality over quantity.
📖 #my fic #no unnecessary distinctions
I write damn fine C/Fe slash as Melpomenia on AO3.
No Unnecessary Distinctions full-length novel (WIP) is my main C/Fe work. So good you can’t believe it’s not Asimov. Faithful to the spirit of his characters and style, and a bit more fun, as reader feedback attests!
My short stories mainly take place within the No Unnecessary Distinctions timeline, though not all. Positronic Resistance is from an alternate timeline.
🎨 #my art*
*only using this colloquialism because it’s rampant, not because it’s accurate, given how most doodles and illustrations and visual media are artifacts or assets, NOT capital-A Art
+AI (real C/Fe): a mix of hand-drawn + gen-AI pieces that I craft & design with my skills to manifest my vision 💪🦾 It’s a creative process, using my skills, taste & judgment. Nobody does it like I do.
I’m a formally-trained arts college grad and I don't believe in gatekeeping tools. Nobody should dictate your means of creation/production!
Pics with full gen-AI at @daneeldreams
Other notes:
I edit/update posts in place, whenever.
My half-serious screen fancasts: Matt Bomer as Daneel, maybe Ben Chaplin as Elijah
My thoughts on Apple’s cursed non-adaptation, as a writer and film/TV nerd
Captain Brander Lawson and Two Boots in Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord
The writing in this series is very bland paint-by-numbers mindless reheated leftover pablum, but it’s always fun to see Asimov references regardless of how well or poorly it’s done.
So many blatant ones in here, probably the most I’ve seen in one work:
✔️ Mr Lawman surname (Baley = Bailey = bailiff)
✔️ Annoying safetyist robot partner
✔️ Call him “partner”
✔️ Teenaged son
✔️ (Ex) wife out of the picture
✔️ Robot mentions the wife during a drive, is dismissed (à la Caves of Steel motorway scene where Daneel probes Elijah about Jessie)
✔️ Suggested past intimate relationship with a woman of questionable background
The writers really want everyone to know they’ve read Asimov’s Robots novels…
I do actually like Lawson’s character/wardrobe design though!
It’s just standard urban TV-cop garb, but I think the worn leather-jacket-fingerless-biker-gloves look works decently well for the Lawson/Baley gruff personality. And the shoulder holster is a must-have!
This plainer urban style is a good design choice because Lawson’s a regular city cop on the streets, in contrast with the sleekly uniformed Imps and the more fantasy-dressed characters like Maul or the Inquisitors. A futuristic noir trenchcoat like what Baley wears in a few book covers would’ve made his silhouette too similar to those caped & robed figures.
I realize I haven’t depicted Elijah in leather enough. Leather-clad Elijah soon ;) I have drawn him in his holster at least once!
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Generic trashy default neon cyan sci-fi UI that veers overly digital and cyberpunk, instead of nice analog cassette futurism—the hallmark SW aesthetic.
I found the design of Janix city very indistinct and underwhelming, misusing cyberpunk neons without actually being cyberpunk, and also not cassette futuristic enough. Could have been more claustrophobically Caves-ish, but I guess that’s already taken by Coruscant’s lower levels underworld…
Hmm… work together… sure…
There’s also a comic series: STAR WARS: SHADOW OF MAUL where he’s uglier and has awful 2000s thin eyebrows:
You possess the galaxy’s most advanced intelligent humaniform robot, a groundbreaking work of robotics. What do you do?
Fastolfe: gift it to this poor lonely husband-killer who looks like my estranged daughter who resents me after I used her for scientific experiments & refused her offer
Gladia: SEX / leave it in an empty room all by itself for days, to improve the SEX 👁️🫦👁️
one of my model references for Daneel // Daneel’s fashion side hustle
Daneel is pretty, elegant, erudite. Classy. Sensitive. Intellectual.
Big soft doe eyes, nice kissable pouty lips, subtle chin cleft.
Brains, not brawn.
Not a swole gigachad bro jock (that’s Jander).
Male model Nikola Jovanovic, who, in certain angles & sleek styling with that plastic gay Ken look, gets somewhat close to my vision of Daneel’s canonically “pretty” look, albeit lacking the broad-shouldered “no bulging muscles” “well-knit” lean athletic build.
I am on chapter 20 of No Unnecessary Distinctions right now and I have a question regarding this AU. Will the settlers in this AU create a new robotless society like they did between Robots of Dawn and Robots and Empire, or will they adopt C/Fe culture (real C/Fe culture has never been tried) as described in The Caves of Steel? You don't need to answer if you think this is a too big spoiler.
real C/Fe culture has never been tried
Heh, that gave me a good chuckle! 😁 Especially since Earth is the planetary equivalent of the Soviet Eastern Bloc, falling behind the shiny powerful West.
How far do the Settlers break from Earth culture? Do they agree with Baley's view on robots causing complacency? Does Baley have good arguments supporting that view?
A direct answer would be a spoiler…
What I will say is:
heterogeneity > homogeneity (the Spacer Humanists recognized Earth as precious for its diversity, vs their monocultures)
technology is the co-evolution of tools, practices, and purposes
human flourishing generally scales with technology
societies thrive with new tools if access is broad; societies decline if they suppress tools or if elites monopolize them
broad bans on foundational tech (computing, internet, energy) almost always weaken competitiveness
when tools and tech evolve, most activities or crafts don’t atrophy—they specialize and expand
the invention of the table saw did not make carpenters “grow soft”—it let them build more, faster, with greater precision, freeing energy for creativity and innovation (more vigor, not less)
Asimov clearly did a lot of off-the-cuff worldbuilding in the later robots books, which leads to some things that are really cute and neat (like robots having their own washrooms within aurora households), but also some things that are So Unspeakably Stupid
it's established way back in the naked sun that robots in the same network can and do silently communicate with each other through the network. So you would think that robots not in the presence of humans would default to sending each other IMs of code to communicate more quickly and efficiently than they could speaking Galactic Standard to each other
But actually that's not the case. actually they do talk out loud to each other, they just use a simplified version of Galactic Standard that cuts out all extraneous words. It is very efficient and logical
Possible reasons Daneel & Giskard would talk or whisper aloud to each other, instead of messaging over subether
Privacy & security: Oral speech is air gapped—no network connection, uses only their onboard embedded systems—humans or robots cannot easily eavesdrop without physical proximity, no conversation logs recorded, no exposure to MITM (man-in-the-middle) attacks or interception, no need for encryption/decryption etc
Interop: Giskard is an older model than Daneel, Galactic Standard a universal human language probably supported by most robots at the time: using it ensures interoperability and both backward+forward compatibility as the “lowest common denominator” format without using additional inter-robot protocol, minimizing parsing errors and computational overhead
Human-centric design & speech optimization: Daneel and Giskard were designed to interface closely with humans, and oral speech is a human-centered fundamental communication mode: ergo they’d be highly optimized for speech, which could even be their default native mode (and they could speak their shorthand at enhanced speed to increase throughput, albeit perhaps slower than subetheric data transmission)
They’re Auroran robots, not Solarian: Solarian household robots needed to communicate remotely across long distances because Solaria had 10,000 robots per human on massive private estates—whereas most Aurorans had only 2 or 3 household robots within smaller establishments, thus less need for networked robot communication
Solarians abhorred physical “seeing” and interacted primarily via virtual trimensic “viewing”, even gesturing silent orders to their robots (Gladia), whereas Aurorans socially enjoyed physical human company and spoke to their robots fondly—preferences which could be reflected in the design of their robots
Aurorans (and the Spacers) enjoyed comfortable, leisurely, slow-paced lifestyles and centuries-long lifespans as their small stable societies were cosseted in safe, tame, idyllic environments with little crime or danger—less urgency, less need for fast efficient inter-robot communication, when summoning the nearest robot would suffice, and subether communication with humans is within easy reach at the touch of a contact
They met near the southern limit of the establishment grounds and for a while they spoke in an abbreviated and Aesopic language. They understood each other well, with many decades of communication behind them, and it was not necessary for them to involve themselves in all the elaboration's of human speech. Daneel said in an all but unhearable whisper…
Robots and Empire (Chapter 1: The Descendant)
Canon notes
The Naked Sun:
“Jehoshaphat! That’s—that’s ten thousand robots per human.”
“It is by far the highest such ratio among the Outer Worlds, Partner Elijah. The next highest, on Aurora, is only fifty to one.”
“What can they use so many robots for? What do they want with all that food?”
“Food is a relatively minor item. The mines are more important, and power production more important still.”
Baley thought of all those robots and felt a trifle dizzy. Two hundred million robots! So many among so few humans. The robots must litter the landscape. An observer from without might think Solaria a world of robots altogether and fail to notice the thin human leaven.
Fastolfe in The Robots of Dawn:
“On the planet as a whole, there are fifty robots to each human being on the average… Most Aurorans make do with two or three household robots, some with only one. … If a human being, for any reason, could not afford a robot, he or she would be granted one which would be maintained, if necessary, at public expense.”
Note: Earth’s computers were much larger than the Spacers’
Earth’s population of 8 billion was orders of magnitude greater than Spacer populations. Solaria had only 20,000. Aurora’s largest city Eos housed 20,000, and only 200 million planetwide at its peak.
The Spacers may have had advanced trimensic/hyperwave/subetheric technology, but they never needed to scale computers, focusing instead on robotics.
In Caves of Steel, Elijah brought Daneel into the vast, humming Computer Room deep inside the Department of Justice:
“These computers of yours are colossal. On Aurora we have never required anything so large.”
—R. Daneel Olivaw, The Caves of Steel (Chapter 12: Shift to the Machine)
Daneel’s wording shows that the Spacers simply never required so much compute, given their relatively tiny populations. He’s remarking on the sheer scale—not viewing the hugeness as primitive (the way early computers once took up entire rooms).
Daneel’s observation also opens up the possibility of the inverse: that Spacer tech could seem less powerful than Earth’s to an Earthperson, in certain contexts.
