Robot stories by Aldiss, Brown, Anderson, Budrys and Miller

Alright, more anthologized short stories (just what you wanted!)  Today we are tackling five stories I have selected from a 1968 anthology edited by Damon Knight and published by our friends at Belmont: The Metal Smile.  I was raking poor Damon over the coals just a few days ago, saying he had the absolute worst story in Tom Boardman's anthology of 26 stories, An ABC of Science Fiction, so today we have a chance to see Knight in a better light, as an editor instead of as a writer.  Another flip of the script: I often praise Belmont for their terrific covers (check out this one and this one and this one) but I own the 1974 edition of The Metal Smile and its cover is absolute garbage!  The colors are foul, the fonts are irritating, and the image is mind-bogglingly bad.  Even the composition of the cover, with the tutti frutti authors' names at the top, the title in the center, and the embarrassing illustration on the bottom, is terrible.  Perhaps most galling of all, the 1968 edition of The Metal Smile has a great cover!  When I saw the original cover on twitter, I was filled with envy! 

I have already read one of the stories in The Metal Smile, "Two-Handed Engine" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, and it is a good one that I recommend.  Hopefully I will be able to recommend the five stories I read today!

"The New Father Christmas" by Brian W. Aldiss (1958)

Brian Aldiss is on my good side today, having written one of the top three stories in An ABC of Science Fiction.  Let's hope he can stay there!

It is the year 2388!  Robin has been caretaker of an automatic factory for 35 years—he and his wife Roberta are the only humans authorized to live in the factory.  Robin is decrepit-- bedridden--and Roberta is an absent-minded softie who is letting three homeless bums live in the factory. These tramps have figured out a way to escape being thrown out with the trash by the robot who cleans up the factory every day.

In An ABC of Science Fiction we saw some relatively benign robots (in Daniel F. Galouye's "A Homey Atmosphere") and even robots who are nicer than people (in Robert F. Young's "Thirty Days Had September") but the cover text of The Metal Smile ("MAN VS. MACHINE") suggests that we can expect some scary robots today, and Aldiss here sets us off to a good start on our journey through mechanized mayhem.

Our story takes place on Christmas Day; Robin even receives a Christmas card in the mail from the Minister of Automatic Factories, possible evidence that there are other human beings alive beyond the factory—R and R never leave the factory themselves and sometimes suspect there are no people left alive out there.  (We are given some reason to believe that the robots consider humans obsolete and have been replacing them.)  One of the tramps decides that the factory owes them a Christmas present, setting off a course of events which results in all five characters coming to the unwelcome attention of the robotic security apparatus.

An entertaining little story, written in a fun jocular style that does not prevent it from feeling real or from generating a sense of menace.  Short and satisfying.  "The New Father Christmas" first saw print in F&SF and has since appeared in numerous anthologies and Aldiss collections.

I really like the Powers cover on No Time Like Tomorrow; it looks like a fungoid
Manhattan, and achieves a strong sense of size and depth

"Answer" by Fredric Brown (1954)

This is one of those short-shorts--one page long!

The story of "Answer" is that a society which has colonized many star systems and built many computers decides to network all the computers in the galaxy together to create what amounts to a single super powerful computer.  Once connected this computer is essentially a god, and not perhaps a kindly one!

I feel like I've already read a story with this exact plot--connecting a bunch of computers creates a dangerous deity--in the last few years, but I'll be damned if I can remember the author or title, and I guess I haven't been cataloging and labeling these blog posts efficiently enough for me to find any clues.  Frustrating!  Maybe I actually read this story long ago--"Answer," after first appearing in Brown's hardcover collection Angels and Spaceships, has been anthologized many times.  [UPDATE SEPTEMBER 23, 2018: The story that "Answer" reminded me of is probably Arthur C. Clarke's "Dial 'F' for Frankenstein.")

"Quixote and the Windmill" by Poul Anderson (1950)

Well, here's a story that has not been anthologized widely.  "Quixote and the Windmill" was first published by legendary editor John W. Campbell, Jr. in Astounding, and, excepting Damon Knight's The Metal Smile, has never appeared in an anthology, though it has been printed in five or six different Anderson collections, including two different German ones.  Did Campbell and Knight see something in the story other editors didn't?

Anderson starts his story off at a high literary pitch, with powerful metaphors (the robot has "the brutal maleness of a naval rifle or a blast furnace") and a brief sort of history of the philosophy of the robot that mentions "the Golem, Bacon's brazen head" and "Frankenstein's monster" and ends by telling us that the people of the utopian future of government handouts and copious leisure time in which Anderson has set his story are a little uneasy about the recently constructed super-strong, all-seeing prototype robot, equipped with the first artificial "volitional, non-specialized brain" that for the last year has been wandering around among them.

After the literary prologue we move to the down-to-earth primary scene of the story, a bar where two drunks complain that they don't fit into this utopia.  One is a technician who was smart enough to find his job so boringly routine that he quit, but not smart enough or creative enough to find a job among the elite planners and artists of this society.  The other is a laborer who can't find work because the machines do all the labor; his wife left him because she wanted a man who would amount to something other than a recipient of the "basic citizen's allowance."  With nothing to do these guys have become dedicated drinkers.

The robot walks by the bar, and the two drunks, seeing it as emblematic of their plight and a harbinger of a future with no humans, only efficient robots, rush outside to violently confront it.  The robot calmly explains that 1) even if the drunks are ill-suited to current society there will always be men with ability ("who think and dream and sing") who will carry on the human race and keep its glory alive and 2) that the robot itself is useless like the drunks are.  What need is there for a humanoid self-aware robot when we already have self-aware humans and a vast array of mindless automatic machines that can build things and grow food and accomplish menial tasks?  The reason this robot is just walking around is that its builders have no use for it!  SF is full of self-aware humanoid robots who do ordinary jobs, robot maids and so forth, so I thought this was an interesting tack for Anderson to take, proclaiming that humanoid robots are pointless.

If you read classic science fiction you encounter quite a few of these stories about how utopia is a bore because man needs challenges and accomplishments, and this one is hardly groundbreaking, which is perhaps why "Quixote and the Windmill" hasn't been anthologized much.  On the other hand it is entertaining and it is fun to see Anderson whip out all the literary and historical references (showing off that he is a member of the cognitive elite who need not fear being rendered obsolete by a machine!)  The problem of what role unskilled workers can play in an advanced society is of course an interesting topic, and Anderson doesn't offer any comfortable solution to this quandary--a certain percentage of people are just going to be unhappy and/or decadent parasites, and this percentage is going to go up as technology and the economy get more efficient.

For a second opinion, check out Thomas Anderson's review of "Quixote and the Windmill" at Schlock Value.

"First to Serve" by Algis Budrys (1954)

Another piece from Astounding.  Budrys is an unusual person with a strange biography and career, and I certainly want to like his work, but he doesn't always cooperate and produce stories that I think are good.  I was unhappy with his famous novel Rogue Moon, for example, though I thought Man of Earth a success.  Let's see what we've got this time.

"First to Serve" comes to us as a bunch of government records, mostly the diary of a robot who has been programmed with so much intelligence it has achieved self-awareness!  Rogue Moon and Man of Earth explore the question of "what is a man?", and "First to Serve" touches on the same topic; on the second page the robot writes "I'm still having trouble defining 'man.'  Apparently, even the men can't do a very satisfactory job of that."

Why has a robot with such intelligence been created?  It is the high tech future of the 1970s, and the armed services are looking for the perfect soldier in the form of a robot.  The scientists in the story have come up with the diarist, a prototype that fits the bill--the perfect soldier needs to be able to think independently and to improvise when confronted with unexpected obstacles or conditions, so such a robot soldier needs human-level intelligence.  But there is a problem--nobody really wants a robot that can think like a human because such a robot would be superior to a human; after all, it lacks a human's frailty and biological needs.  Such a superior being would threaten to replace humanity--one scientist, actually a spy who has been assigned to the project by one of the armed services, asks, "Suppose they decide they're better fit to run the world than we are?"

The climax of the story is when the aforementioned spy, drunk, tells the robot that the head of the project (whom the robot sees as a friend) has been neutralized and that the robot itself is slated for some unspecified grim fate.  We learn the aftermath in some letters and memos written by government officials.  In response to the spy's taunting the robot killed the spy and wrecked the lab; the authorities have encased it in concrete and sunk it in the Patuxent River.  The head of the project is on trial, but will probably be acquitted based on the evidence in the robot's diary.

This story is OK.  Perhaps because of the voices it employs, that of a robot and government employees speaking officially, it lacks the style and characterizations that enliven the Aldiss and Anderson stories.  Budrys flings a literary reference at us (Trilby) that flew over my head, so maybe there is more I'm missing?  "First to Serve" was reprinted in some Budrys collections and some anthologies with Isaac Asimov's name on them.

"I Made You" by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1954)

Astounding strikes again!  I liked Miller's "No Moon For Me," a story about a guy who tricks the human race into exploring outer space that had adventure and hard SF elements as well as Malzbergian components, so I am looking forward to this one.

Whoa, this is a great military SF story, full of futuristic but believable equipment and weapons; it is also a good tense action story in which guys match wits with an alien "other" in a fight conducted under all kinds of restrictions--in some ways it reminded me of Fredric Brown's "Arena" and A. E. van Vogt's "The Rull."

A huge robot tank with an array of weapons is guarding a piece of territory on the moon.  The tank is damaged, so technicians drive over to fix it.  Unfortunately, the thing's IFF system is among the malfunctioning components, so it thinks every vehicle and person it detects is an enemy, and blasts the technicians.  Only one tech survives by hiding in a cave.  When more personnel arrive to help him out he struggles to figure out a way to defeat the tank in a short period of time (he is low on oxygen!) without blowing up the stuff the tank is guarding.

One of the cool things about the story is that it is largely told (though in the third person) from the tank's point of view; this kind of reminded me of van Vogt's "Black Destroyer." At the same time the humies are trying to figure out how to solve their problem, the robot tank is using logic and engineering knowledge to achieve its own goals!

Very good, an entertaining example of this type of SF--space suits and other futuristic gear, people puttering about on the moon, a life or death struggle, and engineering-based problem solving.

Thomas Anderson, a big fan of Miller's famous A Canticle for Leibowitz, has also written about "I Made You."  The story has deservedly been reprinted quite a lot, including in Joe Haldeman's Supertanks and Brian Aldiss's Introducing SF, both of which have striking covers that I love even though they exhibit very different cover design philosophies.

Car 54, where are you?

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Five worthwhile stories, all of them sort of pessimistic; though Anderson is confident that the gifted and talented among us will be fine, all the stories suggest that computers and robots will be a threat to the position or even lives of many of us.

More short SF stories written in the 1950s from the anthology shelf of the MPorcius Library in our next episode!