Friday, December 17, 2010

R R Merliss' "The Stutterer" (novelette, manhunt, free): A manhunt with a happy ending for both hunter & hunted

Illustration by Riley accompanying the original publication in Astounding Science Fiction of short story The Stutterer by R R Merliss. Picture shows the human child, very scared on learning the fact that the man he was chatting is actually a wanted android.
Galaxy-spanning mankind had recently had a war on a world called Grismet. Among those who fought in the war were 20 very unusual specially-built androids. Now, after the war, these war machines are being disposed off. Only, they don't like being disposed off.

One of the machines, Jon Hall, will escape to earth & eventually tell his story to people there - a very moving story that melts a lot of hearts...

Collected in.

  1. Judith Merril (ed)'s "SF: The Year's Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy" (1956).

Fact sheet.

First published: Astounding, April 1955.
Download full text from Project Gutenberg, Manybooks, Feedbooks.
Rating: A.
Among the stories edited by John Campbell for Astounding/Analog.
Related: Robots/Androids/AIs in fiction.

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