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.
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