Adventures involving a giant robot, a big hit, and a great ship await us in this week’s birthday stories. Coincidentally, all the authors represented were born on the same day and two of the three stories were published in essentially the same month. However, I’m also remembering the birthday of Frank Herbert (1920-10-08–1986-02-11), author of The Dragon in the Sea (oh, and of Dune and others), though I can’t recall a short work of his that’s really done it for me.
Harry Bates (1900-10-09/1981-09-??)
“Farewell to the Master” (Astounding, October 1940)
“Farewell to the Master” is the basis for The Day the Earth Stood Still in a technical, legal sense but, by comparison, “Who Goes There?” was perfectly faithfully adapted into The Thing from Outer Space. In the story, Klaatu and a robot (here called “Gnut”) have arrived on Earth and Klaatu has been killed by a madman. To demonstrate how sorry humanity is, Gnut is subjected to all sorts of ray-guns, acids, and more, and is now in a museum along with the impenetrable spaceship. The story begins when a reporter is looking over a couple of photos he’s taken and realizes Gnut is not in exactly the same place it was before. He spends a night at the museum on stakeout with his camera and is so unnerved when Gnut actually begins moving about – and towards him! – that he’s only able to get a couple of pictures of the spaceship port Gnut eventually opens and enters. Crazy things go on that night, including a fight between an alien robot and a gorilla but things come to make sense after additional stakeouts and more interactions between the reporter and the metal man.
This story has several weaknesses, mostly in logical plot details including how an alien robot is feared mightily but, when evidence that something has disturbed the museum it is in is found, no standing watch is put on the museum the next night, so the reporter can sneak in again. Still, the strange doings in the museum and the reporter’s fears and thrills have a good effect, some pathos is achieved near the end, and the very end could be a great twist depending on whether the reader foresees it. It’s also interesting that this was written by the first editor of Astounding and published by its third.
The next two comments are lightly revised from a 2013-08-14 review at my previous site.
Steven Popkes (1952-10-09)
“Sudden, Broken, and Unexpected” (Asimov’s, December 2012)
“Sudden, Broken, and Unexpected” is about AI and music in a non-dystopian near future. I often don’t like rock’n’roll stories because they frequently fail to translate basically incompatible media (a story is not a song) and can be embarrassingly juvenile. For me, this story works well because it creates an ambiguous protagonist who is interesting and real, and manages to avoid the pitfalls of music-in-story while also being a good exploration of AI and, not incidentally, of humanity. This isn’t a particularly original story conceptually, but it’s one of the best examples of it – such that it basically becomes original by the mix of ingredients and the execution. However, if someone didn’t like a long novella filled with dialog about AI like “an anomalous non-deterministic emergent event deriving from conflicting algorithms” or about music like “that triple beat arpeggio driven square into a four by four rhythm…a long glissando across three octaves back to hold the new key into the final chorus,” I could certainly understand.
Robert Reed (1956-10-09)
“Katabasis” (F&SF, November/December 2012)
“Katabasis” puts me in mind of Cordwainer Smith’s “A Planet Named Shayol” as its almost immortal people undergo a horrific endurance test in a weird section of the Great Ship. The protagonist who was almost destroyed in a terrible fire and wasn’t entirely put back together is compelling, as is his relationship to the viewpoint character. That character and her species is exceptionally imaginatively conceived and what they go through to get to the Great Ship is yet another horror of an endurance test. I can’t at all say I love this but it is reasonably well done and powerful.
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