William Harris 8 min read

Feeding the computer his cancer-research statistics, Henderson keeps getting nonsense back, 'Moon in 14° Pisces', as the machine develops disquieting notions of its own.

William Harris's 1962 story is a wry AI-and-hard-SF tale. Clever, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a sharp little story where a research computer starts returning astrological gibberish instead of statistics, hinting at something strange stirring in the machine, in a well-turned golden-age piece about the unsettling autonomy of artificial minds.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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