The trouble with capitalism – the trouble that keeps even dyed-in-the-wool capitalists up at night – is that it’s an engine without brakes. Running out of fuel doesn’t stop it. It simply starts digesting its own muscle. It’s a monstrous positive-feedback loop in which even the robots aren’t safe, as Rachael K. Jones, a relative newcomer to the field, makes clear in "The Greatest One-Star Restaurant in the Whole Quadrant", one of the funniest (and nastiest) stories in this anthology.
In Romie Stott’s "A Robot Walks into A Bar", a robot and a human are both trying to navigate the same (sexual) economy. It’s quite understated, and also, for my money, an essential read. What kind of relationship will we develop with our robots, if both they and we are in hock to "the System"?
NIGHTMARE NUMBER THREE
Stephen Vincent Benét
Between the years 1928 and 1943, Stephen Vincent Benét was one of the best-known living American poets, whose books sold in the tens of thousands. Today no-one knows who he is. Experiences of the Great Depression drew from Benét, a normally gentle, rather sentimental writer, a series of angry, sometimes apocalyptic poems. Nightmare Number Three is fairly representative of a sequence that also includes "Metropolitan Nightmare", a futuristic story of climate change in which newly evolved steel-eating termites infest New York. With the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe, Benét threw himself unsparingly into propaganda work, driving himself brutally until, in 1943, his fragile health gave way and he died in his wife’s arms.
We had expected everything but revolt
And I kind of wonder myself when they started thinking—
But there’s no dice in that, now.
I’ve heard fellows say
They must have planned it for years and maybe they did.
Looking back, you can find little incidents here and there,
Like the concrete-mixer in Jersey eating the Wop
Or the roto press that printed "Johnson for President!"
In a three-color process all over Huey Long,
Just as he was making a speech. The thing about that
Was, how could it get upstairs? But it was upstairs,
Clicking and mumbling in the Senate Chamber.
They had to knock out the wall to take it away
And the wrecking crew said it grinned.
It was only the best
Machines, of course, the superhuman machines,
The ones we’d built to be better than humankind,
But, naturally, all the cars…
and they hunted us
Like rabbits through the cramped streets on the Bloody Monday,
The Madison Avenue buses leading the charge.
The buses, they were the worst—but I’ll not forget
The smash of glass when the Duesenberg left the showroom
And pinned three brokers to the Racquet Club steps.
I guess they were tired of being ridden in
And used and handled by pygmies for silly ends,
Of wrapping cheap cigarettes and bad chocolate bars
Collecting nickels and waving platinum hair,
And letting six million people live in a town.
I guess it was that. I guess they got tired of us
And the whole smell of human hands.
But it was a shock
To climb sixteen flights of stairs to Art Zuckow’s office
(Noboby took the elevators twice)
And find him strangled to death in a nest of telephones,
The octopus tendrils waving over his head.
Do they eat?… There was red… But I did not stop to look.
I don’t know yet how I got to the roof in time,
And it’s lonely, here on the roof.
For a while, I thought
That window-cleaner would make it, and keep me company.
But they got him with his own hoist at the sixteenth floor
And dragged him in, with a squeal.
You see, they coöperate. Well, we taught them that
And it’s fair enough, I suppose. You see, we built them.
We taught them to think for themselves. It was bound to come.
And it won’t be so bad, in the country.
I hate to think
Of the reapers, running wild in the Kansas fields.
They’ll be pretty rough—but the horses might even help.
We could promise the horses things.
And they need us, too.
They’re bound to realize that when they once calm down.
They’ll need oil and spare parts and adjustments and lots of service.
Slaves? Well, in a way, you know, we were slaves before.
There won’t be so much real difference—honest, there won’t.
(I wish I hadn’t looked into the beauty shop
And seen what was happening there.
But they’re female machines, of course, and a bit high-strung.)
Oh, we’ll settle down. We’ll arrange it. We’ll compromise.
It wouldn’t make sense to wipe out the human race.
Why, I bet if I went to my old Plymouth now
(Of course you’d have to do it kind of respectful),
And said, "Look here! Who got you the swell French horn?"
He wouldn’t turn me over to those police cars;
At least I don’t think he would.
Oh, it’s going to be jake.
There won’t be so much real difference—honest, there won’t—
And I’d go down in a minute and take my chance—
I’m a good American and I always liked them—
Except for one (small) detail that bothers me,
And that’s the food proposition. Because, you see,
The concrete-mixer may have made a mistake,
And it looks like just high spirits.
But, if they’ve gotten to like the flavor… well…
(1935)
WITH FOLDED HANDS
Jack Williamson
John Stewart Williamson (1908–2006) was born in Arizona and raised on an isolated New Mexico homestead. He spent his last decades in New Mexico, too. He sold his first story, "The Metal Man", to Amazing in 1928, and by the early 1950s was embarking on a second career as an academic. Published as H. G. Wells: Critic of Progress (1973), his PhD thesis is a useful exploration of Wells’s complex relationship to the idea of progress and the notion of a World State. Williamson taught the modern novel and literary criticism until his retirement in 1977, and continued to write science fiction, often in collaboration with Frederik Pohl. He died at the age of 98, an sf writer of substance for over seventy years.
* * *
Underhill was walking home from the office, because his wife had the car, the afternoon he first met the new mechanicals. His feet were following his usual diagonal path across a weedy vacant block—his wife usually had the car—and his preoccupied mind was rejecting various impossible ways to meet his notes at the Two Rivers bank, when a new wall stopped him.
The wall wasn’t any common brick or stone, but something sleek and bright and strange.
Underhill stared up at a long new building. He felt vaguely annoyed and surprised at this glittering obstruction—it certainly hadn’t been here last week.