Norman Arkawy 9 min read

'Good morning, madam,' Ira says, sliding his size-twelve shoe into the closing door, for Ira represents U.S. Robot Company, now introducing a new line of home servants.

Norman Arkawy's 1955 story is a wry AI-and-social-SF tale of the hard sell in a robot age. Clever, satirical golden-age SF. Read it for a genial story where a persistent door-to-door robot salesman meets his match, with a sharp comic point about what we really want from our machines.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

9 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).