Evil Robot Monkey Summary

Assignment 3: Analyzing and Interpreting Texts

For this assignment we read the stories Evil Robot Monkey (Kowal, Mary Robinette, Evil Robot Monkey), and The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees (Yu, E. Lily, The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees). These stories use animals as the main characters and they show a piece of the human psyche, that would change if the stories used humans instead of the animals.
While Evil Robot Monkey is as close to using human characters as The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees does. For this assignment we will start with an analysis of Evil Robot Monkey. This story revolves around Sly, a chimpanzee with a metal plate in his head. The story starts out as Sly is using a pottery wheel to make a vase and children on field trip interrupt him. Sly being a chimp has a streak of rage and uses this to scare the children. Vern, who is Sly’s handler, comes to talk to him and take his clay away as a punishment for his outburst.
While this story could have used humans throughout the story, it would have changed the dynamic of the story.
The use of the chimp as the main character makes us wonder what goes through the mind of a chimp in a zoo. When you see them in the enclosure and, they make their faces that we people laugh at, or smile at; what does it mean to the chimp. Sly with his human traits in the story, gives us a little glimpse of what we think. In the story Mary Robinette Kowal writes, “Sly bared his teeth, knowing these people would take it as a grin, but he meant it as a threat.” This one sentence makes you wonder, is this really what they
mean.
The next story The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees is a story about human nature, using bees and wasps to tell it. This story is about bullying, and relates to modern day. Throughout history this topic has been seen and felt by many. From the Saxon’s in history, to the children of today.
This story starts out like you would suspect. The wasps, have a rough truce with the people of the village and one day, a child has enough. As the story progresses, the wasps, move to new land where they bully the bee’s and while trying to make them feel free, they are in fact slaves to the wasps.
How does this relate to modern days, all’s you must do is look in the news and you will generally find a story that is similar. The only difference is that instead of being enslaved to another, the children of this torture are enslaved to fear. They feel that there is no end and eventually start to conform to the torture, until one day they are saved by an outside source or they give up.
The use of the bees and the wasps is an interesting concept; as one would believe that these two species would live in harmony with each other. In my travels I have found that Asian cultures like to use animals to tell a story and they effectively use the story to deliver a vital message.
I enjoyed this story and will tell this story to my children, so that one day they will see that they are not helpless in the face of bullying, and that one day they may be able to help another.