Great Science Fiction About Doctors by Groff Conklin

The most recent – comparatively speaking – story, Arthur C. I’ll leave you to decide where ‘menace’ comes into it. Davis: 1917) is a quirky little one-act play.įor what it’s worth, my favourite selection is ‘But Who Can Replace a Man’ (1958), by the late and always to be lamented Brian W. ‘Efficiency’ (Perley Poore Sheehan & Robert H. Connington’s ‘Danger in the Dark Cave’ (1938) fuses Golden Age detective fiction with what would now be called AI: “My view is that once you give an organism – be it machine or anything else – the power of appreciating stimuli and coping with them, you produce something akin to intelligent life.” With the instinct of self-preservation, and the means to fight back. Fowler Wright: 1929) and ‘Rex’ (Harl Vincent: 1934).

Along the way, we are treated to such reclaimed treasures as ‘Automata’ (S. None of those stories appear in Ashley’s book, which makes it an interesting thematic companion piece.Īshley takes a more chronological approach than Conklin, with Adeline Knapp’s ‘The Discontented Machine’ (1894) – about a machine that calls its own wildcat strike – being the earliest (and also one of the best). The earliest anthology I know of SF stories about artificial intelligence in general as opposed to humanoid robots in particular is Science Fiction Thinking Machines (1954), edited by Groff Conklin. I enjoyed it even more than some of the stories, which were a tad over-familiar to an old-timer like me: ‘The Machine Stops’ (Forster) ‘The Evitable Conflict’ (Asimov) ‘Two-Handed Engine’ (Moore & Kuttner). Mike Ashley’s Introduction – nay, scholarly monograph – is full of half-forgotten facts like that. Change ‘mechanical’ to ‘electronic’ and ‘machines’ to ‘computers’ and only the slightly archaic style would give the game away.

Ascribed to ‘Cellarius’ but actually written by Samuel ( Erewhon) Butler. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.”Ī: It comes from an essay, ‘Darwin Among the Machines’, published in the June 1863 issue of a New Zealand magazine called The Press. “Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us day by day we are becoming more subservient to them more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. Q: Spot the year of first publication (+ or – 20 years): This review first appeared in The BSFA Review.

Great Science Fiction About Doctors by Groff Conklin