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🇸🇪 Sweden /Culture & Society

The Robot That Just Wants to Be Taken Seriously

From Svenska Dagbladet · () Swedish

Translated from Swedish and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

News Named sources Context piece
  • Swedish author Klas Östergren's novella "Inkokt ruda" opens with an unusual robot drama involving a love robot and an apparent miracle captured on video.
  • The story projects a bleak future marked by dried-up rivers, species extinction and the concentration of shared resources in the hands of large corporations.

A robot drama that smells of Strindberg's pungent aftershave? A love robot with a finely tuned penis? Why not? Houssin Vennberg Sninate is amused by Klas Östergren's new chamber piece.

"Inkokt ruda" needs only its title to signal that readers are entering unusual territory. The introduction is just as efficient. Somewhere in "the cloud," a video file records a "miracle." That recording is what readers of the book are shown.

A few highly recognizable and plausible visions of the future place the story in an unexplored tomorrow: dried-up rivers, mass extinction and the total concentration of common resources in the hands of major corporations. This is unmistakably hell.

About this summary

Originally published by Svenska Dagbladet in Swedish. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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