Jr. John W. Campbell 28 min read

'I am the last of my type existing today in all the Solar System', so a machine records, on the mentatype, the story of humanity's final struggle and the thinking machines that outlived their makers.

John W. Campbell's 1932 story is a landmark early tale of artificial intelligence and the far future. Visionary, elegiac, historically vital. Read it for a foundational vision of the machine succession, humanity's last war, told by the thinking engines that will inherit the cosmos, from the man who would go on to shape all of SF.

In its time

Published in 1932, during the 1930s, space opera soars.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Leo Morey