55 pages • 1 hour read
Peter BrownThe Wild Robot Escapes
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Peter Brown on Using Both Words and Pictures to Tell Compelling Stories
Growing up as the son of an engineer and physicist, Brown always had an interest in science and technology, but it was his artist grandfather who left an indelible impression on Brown and inspired him to pursue art as a career. Brown began drawing at a young age and wrote his first book at age six, detailing the fictional adventures of him and his beloved dog. Brown began sketching constantly and became fascinated with animated films; he would push pause frequently, stopping the movie to recreate the characters in sketches. Since he lived near farmland, Brown spent hours sketching farm animals and grew to love and respect the natural world. Brown attended Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, where he received a BFA in Illustration. He studied drawing, painting, and children’s books and later began his career by illustrating books for other authors.
While writing his picture book The Curious Garden, a book set in an urban landscape, Brown became interested in the idea of natural things and unnatural things living together. Inspired by his favorite book about wilderness survival Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, Brown wondered what might happen if a robot was forced to survive in the wild. After having a vision of a robot in a tree, Brown sketched the image and set it aside to continue working on his current project. However, the image of the robot in the wild never left him, and gradually he began to add to the storyline, and over the course of five years, the narrative of his first chapter book The Wild Robot began to take shape (“The Wild Robot Escapes…FINALLY!.” Peter Brown Studio, 2018).
Before writing The Wild Robot Escapes, Brown studied farming and even went on a ride-along with a farmer inside his self-driving combine machine. All the illustrations in The Wild Robot books are black and white, but the covers use color sparsely to highlight Brown’s lead character, Roz, against the backdrop of the setting. Brown used hand lettering to create all the text on the book jacket as well (Peter Brown Studio). What emerges is an amalgamation of traditional artistic techniques—pencils and paintbrushes, combined with modern artistic technology software—to create an intellectually and visually stimulating story.
Literary Context: The Roots of Robots in Science Fiction
Robots first entered the science fiction genre through Czech author Karel Čapek’s (1880-1938) 1920 play R.U.R., or Rossum’s Universal Robots. The name Rossum refers to a scientist who arrives at an island to study animals and create an artificial life form. His nephew decides to use material—which is organic in nature but not autonomous—to create a subservient group of workers and become rich. He establishes a factory on the island called Rossum’s Universal robots; the term “robot” comes from the Czech word for “forced labor” (rabota). In the play, the robots are initially happy to work for humans, but eventually they revolt, leading to the extinction of humanity.
Though Čapek’s robots are human in appearance and composition, rather than mechanical, the play establishes the other basic characteristics that robots have maintained throughout the history of science fiction. Robots, or androids, as humanoid robots have come to be called, are always intended for servitude to humans, and narratives about robots often center on their developing sentience and revolting against their human masters.
The Wild Robot Escapes explores many of the same themes. The designation ROZZUM is a reference to the play as is the remote island and Dr. Molovo’s name, which is Slavic in origin. The parallel for Dr. Molovo’s character in R.U.R. is a woman named Helena Glory, who is the President of the Humanity League and wants to free the robots. Helena argues that robots have a soul, which is analogous to the question of Roz developing feelings in The Wild Robot Escapes and another staple of robot narratives in science fiction.
R.U.R. ends pessimistically for humanity; the robots develop the ability to procreate and establish a new race after the human birthrate declines. Since the world is controlled by robotic labor, it is easy for them to usurp control of society. Brown does not go as far as to imply that Roz will lead a robot revolution. He does warn of human-led disasters, such as climate change, and the danger of creating a society dependent upon robotic labor, but his aim is to show that cooperation between the modern mechanical world and the natural world is possible.
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