A warning to the reader: This first one's intense . . .
"Hero at Work."
First appearance: Venture Science Fiction, January 1957.
Short story (10 pages).
Online at SFFAudio (HERE).
(Parental caution: Adult language and themes.)
"Put me through that thing or by God I'll blow your liver out."
Some days you just can't get rid of a spouse . . .
Principal characters:
~ Martin Boone ("in a drunken all-fours animal posture he stared at the heat-cracked, dust-stuffed cobbles"), Hedda ("She will never leave you"), Stickney ("Never saw anything like it"), Rakejian ("you fool, you don't know what you're doing!"), the Martian girl ("she had been kind, careful of him"), and a man in white ("You're a hero, Martin").
References and resources:
- "the lousy arid dustbowl of a planet":
Our author opts for Mars as one giant Sahara:
"Although most stories by the middle of the 1900s acknowledged that advances in planetary science had rendered previous notions about the conditions of Mars obsolete and portrayed the planet accordingly, some continued to depict a romantic version of Mars rather than a realistic one. Besides the stories of Ray Bradbury's 1950 fix-up novel The Martian Chronicles, another early example of this was Robert A. Heinlein's 1949 novel Red Planet where Mars has a breathable (albeit thin) atmosphere, a diverse ecosystem including sentient Martians, and Lowellian canals. Martian canals remained a prominent symbol of this more traditional vision of Mars, appearing both in lighthearted works like the 1954 novel Martians, Go Home by Fredric Brown and more serious ones like the 1963 novel The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis and the 1964 novel Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick. Some works attempted to reconcile both visions of Mars, one example being the 1952 novel Marooned on Mars by Lester del Rey where the presumed canals turn out to be rows of vegetables and the only animal life is primitive.
"As the Space Age commenced the divide between portraying Mars as it was and as it had previously been imagined deepened, and the discoveries made by Mariner 4 in 1965 solidified it." (Wikipedia HERE).
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| (Click on image to enlarge.) |
- "crouched like a lard billiken":
"The Billiken is a charm doll created by an American art teacher and illustrator, Florence Pretz of Kansas City, Missouri, who is said to have seen the mysterious figure in a dream. It is believed that Pretz found the name Billiken in Bliss Carman's 1896 poem 'Mr. Moon: A Song of The Little People'. In 1908, she obtained a design patent on the ornamental design of the Billiken, which she sold to the Billiken Company of Chicago. The Billiken was monkey-like with pointed ears, a mischievous smile and a tuft of hair on his pointed head. His arms were short and he was generally sitting with his legs stretched out in front of him." (Wikipedia HERE).
- "the early seventies":
A bit optimistic about when humans would colonize Mars:
"The colonization of Mars became a major theme in science fiction in the 1950s.
"There are also several allusions to the European colonization of the Americas: the first few missions to Mars in the book encounter Martians, with direct references to both Hernán Cortés and the Trail of Tears, but the indigenous population soon goes extinct due to chickenpox in a parallel to the virgin soil epidemics that devastated Native American populations as a result of the Columbian exchange." (Wikipedia HERE).
- "the pit miners on Titan":
Wonder what they're mining on Titan, Saturn's largest moon:
"Several hundred lakes and seas have been observed [on Titan], with several dozen estimated to contain more hydrocarbon liquid than Earth's oil and gas reserves. The dark dunes that run along the equator contain a volume of organics several hundred times larger than Earth's coal reserves.
"The American aerospace engineer and author Robert Zubrin identified Saturn as the most important and valuable of the four gas giants in the Solar System, because of its relative proximity, low radiation, and excellent system of moons. He also named Titan as the most important moon on which to establish a base to develop the resources of the Saturn system." (Wikipedia HERE.)
"As a comparatively Earth-like world, Titan has attracted attention from writers as a place that could be colonized by humans and inhabited by extraterrestrial life.
"Titan became more popular as a setting for science fiction stories in the 1950s as advances in planetary science revealed the harsh conditions of Mars and Venus." (Wikipedia HERE).
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| "Golden City of Titan" by Frank R. Paul (1941) |
- "the mobs at the Bastille":
"Bastille Day is the common name given in English-speaking countries to the national day of France, which is celebrated on 14 July each year.
"Early on 14 July [1789], a crowd besieged the Hôtel des Invalides for firearms, muskets, and cannons stored in its cellars. That same day, another crowd stormed the Bastille, a fortress-prison in Paris that had historically held people jailed on the basis of lettres de cachet (literally 'signet letters'), arbitrary royal indictments that could not be appealed and did not indicate the reason for the imprisonment and was believed to hold a cache of ammunition and gunpowder. As it happened, at the time of the attack, the Bastille held only seven inmates, none of great political significance." (Wikipedia HERE).
- "the teleporter":
"Teleportation is the theoretical transfer of matter and/or energy from one point to another without traversing the physical space between them. It is a common subject in science fiction and fantasy literature, film, video games, and television. In some situations, teleporting is presented as time traveling across space.
"The use of matter transmitters in science fiction originated at least as early as the 19th century. An early example of scientific teleportation (as opposed to magical or spiritual teleportation) is found in the 1897 novel To Venus in Five Seconds by Fred T. Jane. Jane's protagonist is transported from a strange-machinery-containing gazebo on Earth to planet Venus.
"A common fictional device for teleportation is a 'wormhole'. In video games, the instant teleportation of a player character may be referred to as a warp." (Wikipedia HERE).
- ONTOS has encountered teleportation on occasion:
~ Ford Smith's "I Get Off Here" (HERE)
~ Ralph Burke's "The Incomplete Theft" (HERE)
~ Larry Niven's "The Alibi Machine" (HERE)
~ Milton Lesser's "Wild Talents, Inc." (HERE)
~ Wendy Nikel's "Glitch" (HERE)
~ Stephen Marlowe's "The Cosmic Snare" (HERE).
. . . and don't overlook "Matter Transmitter" on Atomic Rockets (HERE).
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"There may be thousands by now."
"Night of the Robots."
By John Jakes (1932-2023) (as by Allen Wilder).
First appearance: The Original Science Fiction Stories, July 1959.
Illustrated by Emsh (Ed Emshwiller, 1925-90; ISFDb HERE).
Short story (15 pages).
Online at SFFAudio (HERE).
"Force beams began to snap and buzz around him."
Rand has a problem, the same one that Lije Baley, Sarah Connor, Rick Deckard, Ellen Ripley, and William Adama had. Sure, it's a problem that could get him killed, but at least Rand's in good company . . .
Principal characters:
~ Rand ("There were two emotions in Rand's mind"), Marius Hove ("Don't keep running, Rand"), Claudie Gray ("The Island of Amusement? Could the lab be there . . .?"), Van Daam ("One of the units has broken down"), and Krelig ("held a force beam in his webbed hand").
References and resources:
- A relatively obscure comic book superhero shares the same problem with Rand:
"Magnus, Robot Fighter is a fictional superhero who battles rogue robots in the year 4000, appearing in comic books created by writer/artist Russ Manning in 1963.
"By the year 4000, humanity has become dependent on robots. H8, the Robot Police chief of the civic sector of North Am, a continent-spanning mega-city, is damaged in a radiation accident. It seeks to promote the human dependency on robots and gradually impose totalitarian rule in the area under its control." (Wikipedia HERE).
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- "the pedestrian lift tube":
Just the thing for personal injury lawyers.
- "the pedestrian endless belt":
What goes for the lift tube goes double for this.
- "re-shaping robots into perfect exterior duplicates":
"A Humanoid Robot is a robot with all or part of it designed to resemble a human body, say to study bipedal locomotion. Robotnaut is a humanoid robot only designed to resemble the upper half of a human.
"If the humanoid robot has all of it built to resemble a human for strictly aesthetic reasons, then it is technically an android. Typically these are easy to distinguish from real humans even if you cannot tell by sight: they sometimes look like animated medieval armor, cut them and they bleed machine oil, an x-ray will reveal a mess of gears and electronics, or something simple like that (this is called a Robotic Reveal). Humanoid-robot androids with perfect exteriors but imperfect AIs are only marginally more difficult to detect. They can only fool you as long as they are silent and stationary, otherwise you can tell that obviously something is wrong." ("Man Amplifiers and Robots" on Atomic Rockets HERE).
- "The orange-haired mechanical thing":
"A humanoid robot is a robot resembling the human body in shape. The design may be for functional purposes, such as interacting with human tools and environments, for experimental purposes, such as the study of bipedal locomotion, or for other purposes. In general, humanoid robots have a torso, a head, two arms, and two legs, though some humanoid robots may replicate only part of the body. Androids are humanoid robots built to aesthetically resemble humans.
"A common theme for the depiction of humanoid robots in science fiction pertains to how they can help humans in society or serve as threats to humanity. This theme essentially questions whether artificial intelligence is a force of good or bad for mankind. Humanoid robots that are depicted as good for society and benefit humans are Commander Data in Star Trek and C-3PO in Star Wars. Opposite portrayals where humanoid robots are shown as scary and threatening to humans are the T-800 in Terminator and Megatron in Transformers." (Wikipedia HERE).
- A time traveler with a pronounced English accent has had a few run-ins with robots: Wikipedia (HERE) and ONTOS (HERE).
- "The Freud Fun House":
"Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) is considered to be the founder of the psychodynamic approach to psychology, which looks to unconscious drives to explain human behavior. Freud believed that the mind is responsible for both conscious and unconscious decisions that it makes on the basis of psychological drives. The id, ego, and super-ego are three aspects of the mind Freud believed to comprise a person's personality. Freud believed people are 'simply actors in the drama of [their] own minds, pushed by desire, pulled by coincidence. Underneath the surface, our personalities represent the power struggle going on deep within us'." (Wikipedia HERE).
- "Oedipus":
"In classical psychoanalytic theory, the Oedipus complex (also spelled Œdipus complex) refers to a son's sexual attitude towards his mother and concomitant hostility toward his father, first formed during the phallic stage of psychosexual development. A daughter's attitude of desire for her father and hostility toward her mother is referred to as the feminine Oedipus complex. The general concept was considered by Sigmund Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), although the term itself was introduced in his paper A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men (1910)." (Wikipedia HERE).
- "Krafft-Ebbing [sic]":
"Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902) was a German psychiatrist and author of the foundational work Psychopathia Sexualis (1886).
"A part of his research was focused on examining the relationships between psychiatry and criminal law. Already during his time in Strasbourg, he published his Fundamentals of Criminal Psychology, followed in 1875 by his first major work, Textbook of Forensic Psychopathology." (Wikipedia HERE).
- Robots have shown up on ONTOS many times, one of which is Allen Kim Lang's "I, Gardener" (HERE).
- John Jakes was most famous for his Civil War fiction, appearing as TV miniseries in the '70s, '80s, and '90s; see IMDb (HERE).
- Other Jakes stories, these being science fictional, which caught our notice are:
~ "Coffins to Mars" (HERE)
~ "With Intent to Kill" (HERE)
~ "Half-Past Fear" (HERE).
The bottom line:
"Yet you haven’t really investigated the problem, Mr. Baley,” said Fastolfe. “To differentiate a robot, even a very humanoid robot, from a human being, it isn’t necessary to make elaborate-ly shaky deductions from little things he says and does. For instance, have you tried sticking a pin into R. Daneel?”
Unless otherwise noted, all bibliographical data are derived from The FictionMags Index created by William G. Contento & edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne.
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