My guess is that these stories were collected in an effort to emulate the success of Isaac Asimov’s anthologies, not least the interlinked robot stories collected in I, Robot (1950), The Rest of the Robots (1964) and The Complete Robot (1982). In revisiting the stories originally published individually in various sci-fi magazines, Asimov revised them and added bridging material to make a more cohesive whole.
The opening “A word from the (human) author” rather suggests this will be something similar, Harrison explaining the history of fictional “robots”, as coined by Karel Capek in his play RUR (1920), then arguing that robots are already with us in the sensing and deciding gadgets we take for granted in our lives, from the automatic alarm clock on. He then, separately, introduces the first story by telling us,
“The first creature from earth to set foot — or treads — on the moon will be robot” (p. 11).
Indeed, he says, that robot was in the planning stage at the time of writing. So the reader would surely expect the story to follow to address some aspect of this. But “Simulated Trainer” (originally published as “Trainee for Mars” in Fantastic Universe in 1958) is about humans in training to be the first to land on Mars. There’s a fun idea at the heart of it about the psychological impact of knowing, or not, that you’re in a simulation. And there is a robot, in the manufactured Martian creature encountered early on. But it’s not quite what I expected from the author’s note.
“The Velvet Glove” involves robot Jon Venex applying for a job and getting caught up in a drug-smuggling operation. The rather crude analogy being drawn is that robots are not the first demographic group to be treated as slaves. It’s kind of fun, but ends before we get into what I think would be more interesting territory, with a robot working for the intelligence services while also undergoing a political awakening about the lot of its kind…
“Arm of the Law” is much better: a robot worth $120,000 credits is delivered to a police department, and rather than turning a blind eye to the local protection racket, sets out to arrest all the villains. It’s sort of dumping a dorky, literal robot of the Asimov kind into the cynical, morally grey world of Hammett or Chandler. It’s not so vividly, richly told — but good fun.
My favourite, “The Robot Who Wanted to Know”, is about the places reading can take you. One robot, we’re told, has followed a thread of enquiry through available books, and is now an expert of languages. But the robot protagonist follows a different line, into romantic fiction, and then wants to participate so fakes an invitation to a masked ball. The resolution is neat, producing a mechanical fault that also works an analogy.
“I See You” (originally published as “Robot Justice”) is set in a Big Brother-type world of mass surveillance, where no crime goes unobserved and is swiftly punished. The hero-villain who attempted to steal money is sentenced to 20 years of dismal menial labour, objects and gets more penalties added. How can he escape from the all-seeing machine? Again, the resolution works well — what doesn’t a camera look at? — and ends on an arresting cliffhanger, which helps it linger.
‘The Repairman” involves a technician sent to repair a bit of kit on a remote and primitive planet. The kit is vital to interplanetary travel, but the unsophisticated locals have developed a religion around the artefact. So the repairman of the title must dress up as an indigenous creature, complete with spiky teeth and tail, and pretend to be an emissary from their ancestors / gods. It’s all a bit Star Trek, I think, in High Colonial mode. Ho ho, this salt-of-the-earth hero is so much smarter than the silly natives…
One thing of note is that the repairman surveys the area by sending down a “Flying Eye”, effectively a drone camera. In 2022, I got Samira Ahmed to interview Philip Hinchcliffe, former producer of Doctor Who (1974-77), at length, for the release Daleks! Genesis of Terror. He said that on getting the gig in 1974, “I gave myself a crash course in sci-fi I hadn’t read. Most of it was basic stuff: Asimov, Brian Aldiss and other people. And I thought ‘Wow, this is a really interesting story area’.”
As I argued in my essay for The DNA of Doctor Who — The Philip Hinchcliffe Years in 2024,
“Planet of Evil was the direct beneficiary of this: on the DVD, Hinchcliffe says the ‘occuloid tracker’ – what we’d now recognise as a surveillance drone – was his idea, drawn from one of the science fiction stories he’d read. There are, for example: automated flying ‘eyes’ in ‘This Moment of the Storm’ by Roger Zelazny; golden, basketball-like ‘copseyes’ in ‘Cloak of Anarchy’ by Larry Niven and ‘flying eye’ probes in ‘The Repairman’ by Harry Harrison.”
I read the story when researching that piece, but then completely forgot it. “Oh yeah,” I thought when I got to the reference to the Flying Eye this time, but couldn’t remember what happened next. That is not the greatest endorsement of a story.
In fact, there’s a Flying Eye in the next story in this collection, too, “Survival Planet”. This is another High Colonial story, this time about Good Space People visiting a world once ravaged by Bad Space People called Slavers. The primitive-seeming natives have taken steps to protect themselves from the Slavers, and treat the Good Lot as if they’re no different. But the implication, of two adjacent stories with the same kit, is that both occur in the same shared universe. It is the only evidence apart from Harrison’s introductions to each story that these are all connected.
The final story, “The War of the Robots” is not included in the acknowledgments as having been previously published, so seems to be new to this collection — and provided the overall title. It involves the last survivors on one side of a longstanding war, battling to continue in the rising heat of their underground base. Robots don’t suffer the same effects, so the humans withdraw, allowing them robots to pursue their war for them. Only things aren’t quite what they appear and at least some characters discover they have been duped…
There’s something fascinating here, and perhaps more relevant now than when it was first written, about artificial intelligence replacing human workers, with their enthusiastic consent. But Harrison’s introduction to the story is guilty, I think, of the same naive zeal:
“Homo sapiens is a born improver. Everything keeps getting bigger and bigger and better and better … This applies to war too” (p. 149)
The problem, then, is that he’s not at war with the robots.
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