Mari Wolf 30 min read

The phone won't stop ringing: three hundred androids were due on special assembly this week, a government contract is due Saturday, and not one robot has shown up for work.

Mari Wolf's 1952 story is a witty, pointed AI-and-social-SF tale of a robot labor uprising. Sharp, prophetic golden-age SF. Read it for a genial and surprisingly thoughtful story where humanity's mechanical servants decide they've had enough, and a harried plant manager must reckon with the consequences.

In its time

Published in 1952, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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