Adam-Troy Castro

Writer of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Stories About Yams.

 

Short Story DVD Extra: “The Last Robot”

Posted on May 4th, 2024 by Adam-Troy Castro

Published in 1992, only about three years into my career, “The Last Robot” was, by my current estimation, the first story of mine that was really worth a damn. (There are a few older that have partisans, including my second sale ever, “Clearance to Land,” which made my opening splash, but I have a higher bar of self-appraisal now, and there are reasons why I now place it fairly low.)

It was a memorial to Isaac Asimov, and here I wish to offer the usual prophylactic warning that I bloody know about Asimov’s various misbehaviors and that stampedes to snide commentary referencing them are the response of dicks. Please don’t. I know, I know. This was about him being a gateway to a lifetime of reading and to my career, and I don’t now need any yes-buts. That’s a different discussion.

I have already written about how the story appeared in my head, fully formed, in the two minutes after I heard the news of Asimov’s death on the radio. I had the story written by late afternoon the next day and on the desk of Kristine Kathryn Rusch, then-editor of THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION. by the end of the week. Her rejection was a respectful but kind of understandably scandalized suggestion to the effect that maybe I should wait until the man was in the ground. I don’t disagree with her. It sold in short order to Scott Edelman at SCIENCE FICTION. As a story, it was important to me because, before this point, I would tell anybody within earshot that I didn’t, and indeed, could not, write science fiction. “The Last Robot” proved me wrong and opened new doors to me, a development of spectacular importance.
The story was about the death of a great man and PCP-321, a loyal robot who appoints itself the duty of keeping watch by his grave, as the years and ultimately millennia roll by. It was easy to write in part because I had internalized the Asimov story that gives it form, the classic “The Last Robot,” and anyone who had been reading the stuff for any length of time could discern Asimov’s influence and voice in the prose, and my regard for his legacy in its last few paragraphs. But it was also based on a story I had read somewhere about a loyal dog who had positioned itself at the graveside of its master, for years on end, surviving only because it was held in high regard by the community.

That dog was Greyfriars Bobby.

When I wrote the story I could not place the name or find, in those still largely pre-internet days, the citation. I figured it didn’t matter. Asimov’s robots were named with a collection of names and numbers, given more conversational sobriquets by human creativity. LNE, for instance, became Lenny. And PHP-321, a robot who has since appeared in only one other story, became “Philip.” It helped to evoke the author I was eulogizing.

At the time I also did not know the story of Hachiko, the Japanese Akita who spent nine years at his local train station, waiting for his deceased master to come home. It was a similar incident. And it has been dramatized in a couple of movies, notably HACHI, with Richard Gere, a little drama that turns people into melted pudding. It destroys you. It really does.

And this has been my long way of noting that while PHP-321 was a perfectly appropriate way of evoking Asimov, I would have done *very* differently had the historical precedents been convenient and on hand.

To wit:

I have spent twenty-five years kvetching to myself that I didn’t call that robot, or at least once reference him as, “Greyfriars Robby.”

Tags: , , | Category Books, Science Fiction

Another Incomprehensible Encounter with a Random Stranger

Posted on March 27th, 2019 by Adam-Troy Castro

Man is a social animal.

It is therefore permitted, even if we don’t know each other, to disturb my simple errand with your conversation.

I do not believe it too much to ask that if you do this, you first ensure that your overture is charming, informative, urgent, or sufficiently entertaining that it is excused of the obligation to any of those three.

Allow me to provide examples.

Charming is, “Oh! What a pretty dog!”

Informative is, “Your dog is taking a shit on that guy’s lawn.”

Urgent is, “Watch out for that dog shit!”

Entertaining is, “You know what? The average standard poodle shits enough to fill an entire Cadillac Eldorado in its lifetime.”

All of these are worthwhile interpositions.

If I do not know why you are even talking to me, you have failed in your overture.

For instance, today’s incident.

I was at the grocery store, picking up a few items for Judi.

One of those items is a rotisserie chicken.

And as I take it from the rack and bring it to the cart, you approach and boom, “BUYING A CHICKEN, EH?”

I do not imagine that this exchange can possibly get more inane, so I respond politely enough. “Um, yes.”

And you boom, “ONLY IN AMERICA!”

You left me with no choice but to reply, “Damn straight! You would never see this kind of thing happening in Belgium!”

And I’m sure you went home equally bothered.

Seriously, guy. Charming, Informative, Urgent, or Entertaining. A fine spectrum of opening gambits.

Comprehensible would be nice, too.

Tags: , | Category Life Wisdom, True Stories

The Competing Dystopias of the Left and the Right

Posted on March 23rd, 2019 by Adam-Troy Castro

Originally published on Facebook on 18 March 2018.

Story idea, one I do not have the patience to write (and which would be pointless to write, anyway, for reasons described down below):

Some magical handwaving splits the world into two alternate versions of itself, one where the left-wing gets what it wants, one where the right-wing gets where it wants.

We check back in a hundred years to see how it works out for both.

The first real problem is that you cannot write this story without turning it into a polemic for your own side, whichever side that is. Your guys will never make a mistake, the other side will make nothing but mistakes. You will almost inevitably produce your dream version of your own desired result and your nightmare version of the other side’s desired result. (Take my pictured results, below, with the accompanying grain of salt; I know.)

The second real problem is that left and right are not opposites on the spectrum, but in large part polar sides on a sphere, that will eventually meet each other the long way around. Left-wing dictatorships and right-wing dictatorships are both dictatorships, and where they actually stand in relationship to one another is largely a matter of nomenclature. There’s a reason why the left calls Nazism a right-wing nightmare and the right calls Nazism a left-wing nightmare. First, nobody wants to identify with the historical villain, and Second, Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot were all the end points of their own particular forms of devolution. They just were.

But the real problem, as I see it from the left:

If I write a story where the world on the left has universal health care and universal gun control and enforced diversity and sensitivity training and equal rights for people at all points of the sexuality spectrum and strict environmental regulations and economic justice and all that neat stuff, a world where no one is rich but no one is poor, readers on the left will only have their preconceptions enforced and readers on the right will see all that as a horrifying dystopia.

If in the same story the world on the right has no government at all and all policy decisions are made by whatever the rich feel like doing at the time, and all local communities are heavily-patrolled enclaves where armed folk take care of themselves because the government does not exist to do it for them, where folks either work or starve, where gender roles are traditional by law, where morality is absolutely Biblical, and where people can be forced to comply at gunpoint, where all countries that ever got in our faces are radioactive wastelands, then (aside from the environmental degradation being total), then again, readers on the left will only have their preconceptions enforced, and readers on the right will pretty much put it on their flags. As they did with Ayn Rand.

So what we have is not just two competing utopias but also two competing dystopias.

I honestly wish I could move into mine and leave you to yours.

But we are shackled together at the ankles, and there is no hand-waving force, and that is the problem.

Tags: , , , | Category Life Wisdom, Politics

 
 
 

Copyright © 2011 Adam-Troy Castro Designed by Brandy Hauman