David C. Knight 28 min read

Minor Planets is the one solid account they have, and out at the spotel Min and the narrator run in the spacelanes, the trouble starts with a robot's leg, and a robot's heart.

David C. Knight's 1959 story is a wry, warm AI-and-social-SF tale. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a genial story set at a wayside space-motel, where a lovelorn robot named Frank Nineteen complicates the lives of its human keepers in unexpectedly touching ways.

In its time

Published in 1959, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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