 |
Robotworld
Lost in Space: The New Journeys Book 1
Written by J.J. Gardner
(Page numbers come from the 1st printing, July
1998) |
The Jupiter 2 discovers a world of
cities uninhabited except by robots.
Story Summary
In their continuing search for Earth, the crew of the
Jupiter 2 passes another world and receives a signal
from it which seems to take control of the Robot, who programs a
course to the planet.
Scanning the planet, the crew finds several intact and
functional cities, all uninhabited except for robots. Once
landed, the ship is greeted by a swarm of said robots and the
Robinsons' Robot is taken away with them. John and Don take the
chariot into the closest city in an attempt to retrieve the
Robot but are
themselves
abducted. Will, Dr. Smith, Penny, and Blarp then sneak away
in a native transport in an attempt to negotiate the freedom of
the entire crew away from the planet; they too are captured in
the city, by the Robot, who has been
reprogrammed to work for the master of this planet. They
discover that John and Don have had their memories wiped from
their brains and are now mindless automatons of the city's
System Prime, a computer that runs everything.
Maureen and Judy arrive in jet packs but are also captured and
turned into automatons. One robot in the city, Glimbus Two,
seems to have a modicum of free will against the System Prime
and leads Will, Penny, Blarp, and Dr. Smith to a vast computer
library where they may be able to learn how to free the humans
and restore their memories. Before this can happen, System Prime
realizes what is happening and stops them. Taken before System
Prime by the other robots, Dr. Smith is wiped and Will is about
to follow. But he is able to make a friendship connection with
the Robot thanks to his own personality engrams imprinted in it
and the Robot intercepts the control plate intended for the boy.
The Robot sends a reverse command to the System Prime and the
master computer self-destructs. But this causes all the
controlled robots to start attacking each other. The Robot,
Will, Penny, and Blarp, along with Glimbus Two, race back to the
library, only to find it nearly destroyed in the robot battles.
The Robot detects an immense chamber beneath the library but
don't know how to get into it. Suddenly, a panel opens on
Glimbus Two's body, with a diskette key inside. They find that
the diskette opens a door on the central obelisk of the library
and they enter. There, they find thousands and thousands of aliens in
suspended animation; they look just like the form of Glimbus
Two. The Robot's scans suggest they've been in stasis for close
to 5,000 years. They are able to awaken the aliens and one of
the beings is found to be Glimbus the First, the creator of the
android Glimbus Two. He reveals that the surviving members of
his civilization, the Dolians, went underground and into
suspended animation in order to escape and outlast a deadly
virus that came to the planet by contact with other visiting
aliens. They were supposed to emerge after only five years, not
five thousand and Glimbus Two had been programmed to awaken them
at that time. But something had apparently gone wrong with the
master computer, which had become System Prime and blindly
turned the world into a planet of robots that simply maintained
the cities and mimicked the actions of the Dolians and must have
wiped out Glimbus Two's programming to awaken the people.
The Robot gives Glimbus Two the ability to interface with the
remains of System Prime and the android is able to restore the
memories of the captured members of the
Jupiter 2 crew.
Notes from the Lost in Space chronology
On page 2, the book seems to contradict itself a bit in stating how
long the
Jupiter 2 has been away from Earth, first stating it
had been only a few months, then twice stating a year. The book
also depicts the Robot maneuvering on treads. In
The
Vault,
Will has replaced the treads with
three multijointed,
gyrostabilized legs; this suggests that Robotworld takes
place sometime before.
Page 1 suggests that the next time the crew of the Jupiter 2
finds an environmentally friendly planet to set down, they
would try to spend a few months of food
harvesting and fuel
regeneration.
Page 2 also has Will musing that they had had a number of false
alarms about a possible hospitable planet they could stop at to
replenish food and fuel.
On page 6, Maureen uses a thermowave heater to heat a glass of milk.
Presumably, "thermowave heater" is just meant to be a futuristic
name for a microwave oven.
Penny's pet space monkey is referred to as Blawp, not Blarp as in
Lost in Space. "Blawp" was
a name used for the creature in the screenplay.
Page 11 reveals that the Robinsons have the Robot monitoring the helm
while they sleep. The Robot will wake them up if a threat or planet
of interest should be detected.
On page 12, the Robot says, "Warning! Warning! Danger! Danger!"
while waving its arms. This was a common behavior of the Robot on
the original Lost in Space TV series.
Page 14 mentions that the Robot was almost completely destroyed
while protecting the crew from giant alien spiders. This is a
reference to events in
Lost in Space.
On page 15, Don climbs up to the bridge deck from a ladder.
The
Vault suggests there is also an
elevator and stairway that go to the various levels of the ship.
On page 17, the crew detects a number of cities on the planet they
are approaching, but no people in them. This is similar to the
opening approach to Rellka in
The
Vault.
Page 20 states that the ship has visited a number of worlds in the
past.
Page 22 reveals that the
Jupiter 2 has a protective force field that can be
activated in dangerous situations.
Page 30 reveals that Maureen tutors Will daily on his scholastic
studies.
On page 35, John and Don take the chariot out to the uninhabited
city. But in
Lost in Space, Don stated
that the chariot was pretty much scrap metal after the Jupiter 2
crash landing.
After Blarp's careless pressing of buttons inside the so-called
monster machine causes it to lift off with her, Penny, Will, and Dr.
Smith aboard, Penny decides to access the machine's video systems to
find out where they're heading.
Promised Land
reveals that Penny's assigned station on the
Jupiter 2 is Video Mechanics.
On page 45, Dr. Smith grabs the laser pistol away from Will and
fires at one of the robots, destroying it. What happened to the
safeguards programmed into the
Jupiter 2's weapons to prevent Smith from using them as
seen in Lost in Space?
On page 52, Will sees a number of holographic symbols inside one of
the city's buildings. One is described as the symbol for the
"subatomic atom." Uh, if it's subatomic, then it's not an atom. The
author must have meant a "subatomic particle".
Page 56 reveals that the Robinsons have jet packs on board the
Jupiter 2 which allow them to travel through the air
individually over a planet's surface. Jet packs were
occasionally seen in the original TV series.
Page 70 mentions a library disk on Robotworld displaying a
holographic readout of plant and mineral life. Uh, minerals aren't
alive.
The planet is never actually called Robotworld in the story. It's
name is not revealed at all, though it may be Dolia since the aliens
found in hibernation underground are learned to be called the
Dolians.
Back to Lost in Space Episode
Studies
