Robert Emmett McDowell 34 min read

Henry Ohm leaps up in alarm: across the asteroid, Sofi Jokai flees her igloo with the robot R-7 pounding after her, a large wrench waving in its metal fist.

Robert Emmett McDowell's 1946 story mines comic AI-and-social-SF from a robot romance gone haywire. Fun, breezy golden-age SF. Read it for a genial tale of malfunctioning machines, an asteroid outpost, and love in all the wrong circuits.

In its time

Published in 1946, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

34 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).