I'll go on record as being one of the few people who liked Alex Proyas' 2004 attempt at I, Robot, in which the Fresh Prince did his best to navigate Isaac Asimov's landmark classic of science-fiction. Nerds, because they are nerds, almost immediately turned against the film, but if I'm remembering right, it actually did a pretty decent job hewing to the general themes of Asimov's short story collection from 1950. Or maybe I'm remembering wrong and it was just a lot of punch robots? I like movies when that happens, too.

With Automata, though—hitting theaters and VOD in October—it looks like Asimov's ideas are getting brushed off again, this time with Antonio Banderas (who apparently is great in the new Expendables? this is a thing I keep hearing?) dealing with some goddamn robots that're refusing to know their place. METAPHOR ALERT!

Robot and cyborg stuff seems to be a bit of a trend lately, at least in the corner of my existence that's dominated by sci-fi: I'm currently reading (and quite enjoying) John Scalzi's latest, Lock In; next up is the anthology Upgraded, from the same editor behind the great digital genre fiction magazine Clarkesworld; I'm already looking forward to Neill Blomkamp's latest, Chappie; every night I have horrible, horrible nightmares that the new Terminator movie will have a really fucking stupid name. I'm also pretty sure Clive Owen's character on The Knick is also a replicant who runs on cocaine? Maybe he is! You don't know!