I finished this book on the bus Yesterday. Heavy traffic contributed to finishing this short collection of stories in one day.

I know Harry Harrison from his Stainless Steel Rat books. I think that I’ve read all of them over the years and I like his tongue in cheek humor and action filled writing. I think that the reason that I’ve never read War With the Robots is that it is a collection of short stories. I will almost always pick a novel over a short story collection. I have many short story collections in my eBay books, so I guess that I will be making up for this deficiency.

These stories average around 9K each and the better ones are 10K. I have been struggling with my stories to keep them below 5K as the guidelines to most markets seem to like stories from 3 to 5 thousand words. Pro markets have higher word counts. My thinking is that I should work on making my stories longer with more emphasis on character development. As I read Harrison’s stories, the better ones have more time devoted to rounding out the character and have more detail. The plot might have more than one arc to it with a shorter arc defining the situation and then a longer one to get to the climax.

What follows is a discussion of each of the stories in the collection.

WARNING!! SPOILERS!! (and way too many words!!)

Simulated Trainer (1958)

Before the phrase virtual reality came in vogue, the word used was simulation. Virtual reality is a real problem for writers because Vernor Vinge did it perfectly in True Names, and the movies did it badly in The Matrix, stealing all of Gibson’s vocabulary without any of the intelligence. Any virtual reality story that arrives in a slush pile now will get a sour look from the editor and has two strikes against it. Stories where the protagonist finally realizes that he is actually in a virtual world are especially obnoxious.

Survival Planet flips the virtual reality cliché onto its head. It starts with a pair of astronauts on Mars. One of them makes a mistake and dies. At this point we realize that it is just a simulation and the “dead” astronaut is replaced with a heavy sack and the other astronaut has to bring the body back to the ship and finish the training exercise. The next exercise will be the last one. This time, in order to get it right the astronauts are told that they the simulation will not be interrupted and if someone dies, they will die in reality. They need to get this right before they can go to Mars so they are upping the pressure on the men. The punch line is that the simulation is real and the astronauts are told it is a simulation because it will help them, psychologically, to succeed. The protagonist realizes that it is not a simulation just before he completes the mission. The mission, although difficult and touch and go for a while, is a success, and the men return from Mars.

Stories that rely on a piece of information withheld from the reader are usually annoying. Surprise endings are usually bad form and deserve rejection. Harry Harrison, though, makes the discovery of the situation the conflict, and the climax is the point where he realizes that the mission is not a simulation, and that he has to fight against difficult odds to survive without an easy escape. This takes the stock surprise ending and raises it to another level. The plot device of the simulation, not being a simulation, though, does not stand up to scrutiny. It doesn’t seem plausible that the psych boys would see this as an advantage. You have to suspend disbelief on this point.
The story is 10,000 words long and reads well. It is a good adventure tale, even if the premise is a little hard to swallow.

The Velvet Glove (1956)

How sentient can a robot get? I have written six stories about a robot detective. They were not very successful, as far as sales go. Two remain unsold and the others were either re-written to make the detective human or were given away to free markets. It turns out Harry Harrison wrote almost the same kind story in the 1950s.

The Velvet Glove is the story where the robot is the protagonist and has a very human personality and point of view. This is sometimes a problem with editors and readers who don’t think of robots or AI’s as being sympathetic characters. Most stories use robot characters as evil, dangerous or even comic relief, but they are seldom portrayed as the hero.

The story takes place in a future where robots have rights and cannot be owned. They must, however, make a living, just like anyone else and their labor is valued less than a human’s. The story starts out with a robot that repairs an injured knee. It turns out that he had to work for months at a dirty job in order to make enough money to buy the replacement part.

He reports to a labor hall where he finds that there is a job for a specialty robot. Jobs are scarce and he meets robots that may never find work and will die when their power packs run out. He is one of special variety of robot and reports for the job. It turns out that a group of criminals kidnap him and attach a bomb to him and also one on a bum off the street. If he tries to escape, both he and the bum will be destroyed. He is forced to retrieve a package from the hull of a ship in the harbor. The robot outsmarts the humans and calls the police. Along the way he discovers the parts of the previous robot that had been destroyed in the plot and manages to communicate with it. It was an undercover secret agent robot. When he solves the crime and the crooks are in jail, the hero robot is offered a job working as an undercover cop.

This is a good adventure packed story about 10,000 words long. It has a good conflict involving a robot’s prohibition against hurting humans without Asimov’s picky legalistic robotic laws. The character is largely human, but is interesting enough as a robot to be believable. The story also screams for the next chapter, which I bet Harrison has written, or at least planed to write. This is the best story in the collection.

I See You (1959)

Traffic cams, video monitors and a general loss of privacy make the world much safer, but at the cost of privacy. As Benjamin Franklin said, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

I See You is a story of a justice system where robotic eyes monitor everything. A man commits a theft. While repairing some equipment he realizes that he is in separated from a cash payroll by only a thin wall. He succumbs to temptation and steals some cash, but is immediately caught because the robotic sensors detect the theft. He is sentenced to 19 years confinement. There are no prisons so he is sent to a secure apartment and given the job of sorting garbage. He saves a life in a heroic act and three years is taken off of his sentence. He tries to find out more about the policy for sentence reduction, but loses his temper and soon has a life sentence. He destroys the robot judge and then discovers, as he enters the central computer that the robots cannot see into themselves and that the only safe place in the world is inside the computer. He finds a nicely furnished comfortable room with all the amenities and is about to settle in when he discovers that he is not the first to discover the safety of the computer room and is killed.

The theme of the loss of privacy and the inhuman judgments of robotic rigid justice is a good one, which is trivialized by Harrison’s decision to make the protagonist behave irrationally. There seems to be no logic as to why there are no cameras inside the central computer. Killing off the protagonist in the end is a senseless act that only serves to wind up the story. Jack Williamson has a better take on robot justice in his book The Humanoids. Harrison seems to have had a good idea, rode with it a while and then ended it when it stopped moving forward. Although the theme is interesting, there must have been a hundred better ways to resolve the conflict, which makes the story forgettable.

Arm of the Law (1958)

Robocop is a stupid kiddy cartoon of a movie where a robotic police officer fights crime. It might have been based on Arm of the Law by Harry Harrison.

The story is that a small police force in an out of the way town somewhere on a planet far from earth receives a robot police officer to help out. The police are all in the pay of the local organized crime group, so when the robot cop begins to solve crimes, the officers are afraid for the lives. The robotic officer eventually cleans up the town, arresting the crime boss and making the town a safe place to live. The first person story teller becomes the chief of police, but plans on leaving. The punch-line is that the robot will be chief of police when he leaves.

The story is about 3,000 words – very short. It consists of three parts, the arrival of the robot, the shoot-out in the police station and the last few paragraphs that wrap up the plot. It’s a light bit of nonsense, told with Harrison’s characteristic humor. It’s a fun read. It sold in 1958, but I doubt that it could sell to a pro market today. There is not enough social commentary or psychological angst in it. It’s just a silly story told well.

The Robot who Wanted to Know – (1958)

Robot love? If you concede that a human brain is a deterministic set of chemical circuits, it would not be inconceivable that a human brain could be reproduced as a digital circuit. Following along that logical line, a robot could fall in love. Would it make a good story? I think it just might. I’ve written two stories (both in rewrites) about artificial intelligence that falls in love. Of course, any story I write will be metaphoric. By necessity, all love stories are human loves stories. If one of the characters happens to be a robot, the metaphor will extend and we will suspend disbelief.

Harrison’s story is about a library robot who learns about human love from his books and develops an unhealthy preoccupation with love (for a robot, anyway). He dresses as a human and goes to a costume ball. He dances with a beautiful woman and manages to woo her. He is successful in his conquest until the moment of truth. At midnight when the masks come off he reveals himself for what he is and is the subject of a woman’s scorn and derision. He runs away in shame and his overworked circuitry fails. A flaw in a cooling pump causes him to overheat and he dies in a small explosion. A mechanic, examining the broken robot finds the failed circulation pump and declares that the robot has died of a broken heart.

It’s a long way to go for a punch-line. I could have done without it. There had to be a better way to end the story. The story should have been bound closer the viewpoint of the central character. He is not really the protagonist in this story and is more the subject of a report on his actions. It might have been more impelling if the reader felt a stronger empathy with the character. The character is a stock, bookish naïf and is never really fleshed out (pun intended).

The Repairman – (1959)

This is a customer support in space story. It is very short and not all that interesting. This is the weakest story of the collection. The plot is about a support engineer that is called to repair a space beacon on a distant planet. An intelligent race of lizard creatures has built a pyramid around the beacon and the local priests have fiddled with the controls, damaging it. The tech has to convince the priests that he is an envoy from the gods and talk his way into the pyramid, fix the beacon and then get out alive. He does this and the story ends. There isn’t much conflict. It seems easy, although the tricks are ingenious. The engineer is then ready for his next assignment. It is hardly worth the telling.

I would call this a gee-wiz story. It is entertaining in the way a bowl of potato chips is entertaining. It is not meant to be remembered as a great bowl of potato chips. Since one of the main audiences of Science Fiction in the 1950s was professional engineers, this may have had some appeal to audiences and editors. I could not sell it today, although Planet Magazine (free venue) would probably publish it happily.

Survival Planet (1961)

This is a strange story that seems to be a small part of a much larger picture. Harrison is has chosen to discuss the ability of man to adapt and flourish under harsh conditions, but it is told in the context of a galactic war. I wonder where this story came from and whatever became of the scenario that Harrison created for it?

A military unit is sent to an out of the way planet after intercepting an intelligent bomb (the only robot in the story). The bomb, rather than set to destroy enemy ships, was set to destroy a planet. The question becomes: what is so special about this planet that the defeated enemy would want to destroy it at the last minute? The military unit finds the planet, but no people. The one person that they discover is so terrified that she commits suicide rather than surrender. The eventually find that the people have dug elaborate tunnels beneath the surface of the planet and there are deadly traps. One of the characters is killed. The solution is that the people of the planet were slaves and the enemy used the planet as a breeding ground. They returned to harvest slaves from the growing population, but the slaves, left to their own devices, were able to defeat the slavers using a variety of low tech solutions. They adapted to the unbearable conditions and were able to win an unwinnable conflict. The enemy, as they were defeated, sent one last bomb to destroy the only planet of their own that defied them.

The story is engaging with an attempt to paint some deeper characters, but it is largely without action and the conflict is intellectual. There are many good points that stimulate thought and I might find myself thinking about the story years from now. The back story is interesting and I would like to know more about it. Perhaps I will pick up a Harry Harrison novel one of these days and find out much more about the intelligent bombs and the slaver empire.

The story falls short in that it hints at so much more but does not deliver. The conflict – what is special about the planet – does not quite cut it as a strong plot. Although we are engaged by the setting and characters, the resolution is weak and keeps this from being a great story.

War With the Robots (1961)

One of the problems with technology is that it seldom retrogresses. As Harrison points out in the comments to this story, war is not going to go away. Since technology is driven by war and pornography in my opinion, it is not likely that we will ever lose technology. We won’t backslide to an era of using candles instead of electric lights. The television is going to be replaced by something more technical and even more compelling. It is only by accident that I am reading print books rather than listening to them on my iPod.

It is actually hard to write futuristic novels unless you think of a way to slow down or reverse technology, and that’s not likely to happen. I find myself writing about people in the future and trying to ignore the tech. I throwin a few science fiction ideas and then write Last of the Mohicans or House of the Seven Gables.

Harrison tackles the problem of ever better tech in his War With The Robots. The story is about an army where all the humans are Generals or Colonels and everyone else is a robot. The humans are being beaten badly by the robots on the other side, but the robots themselves keep fighting and are even hampered by the humans. The robotic weapons are ingenious, deadly, and there seems to be no defense from them as far as the humans are concerned. The remaining humans manage to struggle out of the field of battle and encounter the humans from the enemy side of the battle. They discover that they neither have a place in the war, and they make peace with each other while they sit back and watch the War with the Robots.

It is a logical extension to warfare. Eventually war will be too deadly for humans to fight it. Wars won’t always be fought with third rate Iraqi armies. Eventually, humans will have to get out of the warfare business if they are to survive. The story makes a strong point and one worth remembering. Again, though, the characters are not very strong and the plot seems a little contrived in order for Harrison to make his point. It is, however a very good story. I would have preferred a little more internalized reaction to the situation. We need to be brought into the heart and mind of the protagonist, but he is pretty much led along the plot without any real decisions to make. He often has no choice and this makes for a weakness. This weakness is actually quite minor, and it is hardly noticed in the fast moving action, imaginative setting and ingenious robotic war devices.