DON'T LOSE YOUR HEAD...
WE, ROBOT
It can’t be much fun lopping off peoples’ heads for a living, can it? Executioners, one imagines, must sometimes have lost their taste for such bloody work, and surely even the most fanatical jihadi must have days when decapitating another infidel seems like a bit of a drag. Thank goodness, then, for Dr Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, whose egalitarian spirit and Gallic good sense led him to propose a single form of capital punishment for aristocrats (formerly despatched with swords or axes) and commoners (ignobly hanged) alike: a simple decapitation machine that took the bother out of beheading. As Jan Bondeson explains (pp3643), the very efficiency of the device named (against his wishes) after Dr Guillotin seemed to give birth to new fears: what if the severed head of a guillotined person lived on following its separation from the body? What nightmarish thoughts and visions consumed it in its final moments? It was a question that haunted both physicians and artists through the 19th century, none more than the eccentric Belgian painter Antone Wiertz.
Countless labour-saving devices, usually more benign than the guillotine, have been transforming our world since the Industrial Revolution, performing many tasks once done by humans; but the new revolution in robotics will certainly accelerate the pace of change. As David Hambling’s article suggests (pp30-35), the rise of the robots (not just those of the killer variety) is going to pose huge socio-economic and ethical challenges, as well as legal and philosophical questions, for humankind in the near future as autonomous machines oust us from our workplaces, care for us in our homes and even come to resemble us in appearance and behaviour.
PUBLICITY TO DIE FOR
Publicising your latest book, as any author knows, can be a tricky business: unless you’ve got the marketing resources of a major publisher behind you, how do you get your putative masterpiece out there to
the massive audience you know your work deserves? Things have perhaps become a bit easier in the age of the Internet and social media, Kickstarter and Patreon, but the market remains crowded with literary efforts good, bad and indifferent, all jostling for the attention of potential readers. Spare a thought, then, for Nora Hollis, who having penned and printed her bizarre religious tract The Living God of the Bible is Satan,
the Evil One in 1923 (price 15 cents) despaired of its vital message reaching its intended audience. On the first anniversary of the pamphlet’s publication, Nora was desperately thinking up new ways to publicise her work; after contemplating suicide, she decided that shooting her landlady dead was perhaps a more effective PR stunt. Turn to page 44, where Robert Damon Schneck tells the whole strange, sad story. Perhaps with a good crowdfunding campaign and an effective use of Facebook and Twitter, Nora would never have been driven to homicide...
Speaking of publicity gone wrong, we’d like to apologise for any distress caused by the back cover of our May issue (FT366). It carried a full-page ad for Scream magazine, a title devoted to horror in its many forms and undoubtedly of interest to many FT readers, which perhaps went a little too far in its depiction of “Blood, guts, gore & more”, featuring a blood-covered zombie chowing down on his meal of human flesh. A number of readers with children got in touch to complain that the image was too upsetting for youngsters, a sentiment with which we concur. Unfortunately, due to a lapse in communication with our publisher, we did not see the ad in question until the issue came back from the printer – when we too got a bit of a shock. We have passed on your comments and have been assured that in future any potentially controversial adverts will be run past the editorial team prior to an issue going to press.