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New York Times

My Teacher Is a Robot. Wait Till You Meet My Mom.

Two new graphic novels for kids feature alien beings that aren't what they seem. One is a monster disguised as a helper. The other is a monster that turns out not to be monstrous after all. In SCHOOLBOT 9000 (Dial, 288 pp., $14.99, ages 9 to 12), the first-time graphic novelist Sam Hepburn skewers artificial intelligence and the people hustling to sell it to us. Hepburn, a former tech writer, has built a near-future world full of robotic helpers that include taxi drivers, public safety officers, companions and pets. Just about everybody is awed by this shiny technology, burnished with retro design to appear friendly. But James, an 11-year-old with an artistic bent, prefers a more natural world. He got his skepticism from his father, who once told him that robots aren't 'just cold metal. They're cold — here,' and touched his heart. Dad has since died, and Mom has bought a HOMEBOT 3000 to help her manage the house and her busy career. As if a nattering robot at home weren't bad enough, James's school is taking part in a pilot program to introduce A.I. education via the SCHOOLBOT 9000. (Science-fiction-inclined parents will recognize the reference to HAL 9000, the murderous computer in '2001: A Space Odyssey.') Hepburn devotes loving attention to the ways in which human teachers connect with their students and give them confidence. By contrast, the A.I. educators ridicule the kids' artwork and music practice, even breaking one child's violin. 'Studies show that exposure to poor quality music is detrimental to brain structure, and may lead to cognitive and behavioral problems,' the SCHOOLBOT spouts. Cold indeed. They excel at some things. A lesson on Mesopotamia delivered by a human substitute teacher falls flat, so a SCHOOLBOT steps in with an impromptu rap: 'Stories and laws, math and much more, they inscribed it all, yeah, they built the core, in cuneiform script, forever they store! … Mesopotamia-mania! Feel the knowledge rain-ia!' The kids are entertained, but did they learn anything? Bit by bit, the budget-squeezed school kicks out the human teachers, which was the plan all along. The robots' big, evil manufacturer, Bux Global, is in cahoots with the paid-off mayor to make sure the pilot program succeeds at any cost. But the robots are glitchy, and the company's prejudices play out in the lessons. The arts and humanities are useless, one SCHOOLBOT contends: 'I am unable to find job descriptions that require specific knowledge of literary works such as 'Romeo and Juliet.'' They sort the kids into binary categories of tech work: 'creation' or 'maintenance.' The first group will be the programmers and designers; the others will keep the creations running. No reason to think about other professions, the robot sniffs: 'By the time you leave school, it is highly probable that your preferred job will already be performed by A.I.' Gee, it's almost as if Sam Altman were in the room. The students rebel. They enlist their parents. The SCHOOLBOT program is suspended. Freethinkers, rebels and techno-skeptics will find a lot to love here. Others might consider the book preachy and didactic. But tension builds again at the end as Bux Global performs an automatic software update on all its homebots: James's family's HOMEBOT 3000 suddenly reboots as the SCHOOLBOT Homeschooling System. Will the evil corporation take over education after all? And maybe the planet? Stay tuned: This is the first installment of a promised series. In DEEPLY DAVE (Holt, 240 pp., $14.99, ages 8 to 12), Michael Grover gives us a weird treat. Dave is a young explorer who's looking for his mother, an astronaut whose spaceship has gone missing in the depths of the ocean. (OK, that part doesn't really make sense. Keep going.) The delight of this book — a vertical rectangle bound at the top — is its format: Each flipped page takes you deeper, as if you're scrolling down a screen. That unusual design mimics the story's origins in the unfolding episodes of a webcomic (which in this case blinks and jitters, thanks to Grover's animation wizardry). Undersea creatures warn Dave that he's about to encounter 'the Big Doom.' He doesn't know what they're talking about, except that it's gigantic and powerful. But Dave isn't powerless. He's brought a pocketknife (which he shows to everyone he meets) and he makes friends along the way, including Amos, a shrimplike 'scavenger and entre-pruner' who's willing to help, in return for the quality seating inside Dave's mother's spaceship. (He craves a commode.) In a wry Freudian twist, the monster turns out to be … dun, dun, dun … Dave's mother, possessed by an alien creature she was studying — whom she inadvertently enraged by being callous about its egg. So the rescue mission gets a bit complicated, especially after an octopus, which used to be human, body-swaps with Dave to get its humanity back. Minds are melded. Bodies re-swap. The power of love saves the day. Ultimately, Dave's mother re-emerges, still gigantic but demonstrating a new empathy for the alien creature, with whom she's now fully symbiotic: 'She might be a cosmic being from another galaxy, and I might be an accomplished human astronaut … but at the end of the day we're just a couple of moms, trying to do right by our kids.'