Who Goes There?

The years immediately following World War II saw a profound uptick in humor in science fiction—at least that which was published in the magazines. Almost overnight we went from hard-nosed narratives about scientists solving puzzles to inept military men and Joe the plumber getting more than what they bargained for with whatever the problem of the week was. We saw some very fine court jesters come to prominence in the post-war period, including C. M. Kornbluth, William Tenn, and of course, Robert Sheckley. While he hit the ground running in 1952, submitting to every outlet under the sun, Sheckley quickly became Galaxy‘s comedian of choice, especially during the H. L. Gold years. The two were a perfect match for each other, what with Gold’s desire for more urbane SF and Sheckley being perhaps the most aggressively urbane writer in the field then.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the February 1953 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. As is typical of early Galaxy, this isssue is stacked, with “A Saucer of Loneliness” by Theodore Sturgeon, “Four in One” by Damon Knight, and the last installment of Ring Around the Sun by Clifford D. Simak (I’ll review this last one eventually) being other notable picks. “Watchbird” was soon included in Sheckley’s first collection, Untouched by Human Hands, and nowadays you can find it in the collection Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley, which has a fancy NYRB edition. Most importantly, for those of you who are too lazy and/or don’t have the cash to spare, “Watchbird” fell out of copyrgith at some point and is available to read perfectly legit on Project Gutenberg, found here.

Enhancing Image

We’re gonna keep this relatively short and snappy, aight?

The central question that kicks off the story is that of murder. Police may be able to catch a suspect in a murder, but they can’t prevent a murder. Solution? Create a machine that can detect acts of aggression from a distance and intercept before a murder can be committed. Gelsen, the closest we have to a protagonist, is a government contractor who helps in the production of “watchbirds,” which are small flying machines that, while not self-aware, are programmed to comprehend a definition of “murder” and to act according to that definition. Of course this is a government initiative, since while the people in the story are not too bright, they’re at least smart enough to know that such a contraption should not be left in the hands of the “free” market. “Like the telephone service, it was in the public’s best interests. You couldn’t have competition in watchbird service.” Thus the US is essentially split into provinces for watchbird manufacturers, all being connected to the federal government but each having a sphere of control.

We’re gonna be following a lot of characters, most of whom are nameless, but Gelsen is the closest to realizing he’s in a Robert Sheckley story; he has a bad feeling that the watchbirds will do more than what was intended, although tragically he’s unable to articulate how this would happen. As I said, the watchbirds are robots, and not terribly intelligent at that; they are, however, able to learn—but not in the way that humans learn things. Because watchbirds are able to communicate with each other over long distances, without input from any human central control, what one watchbird learns will quickly get to others. What happens, then, when a watchbird expands the definition of murder? They all expand the definition of murder—into a shape that the human creators did not anticipate. This is what we might call a comedy of errors, and as is typical with Sheckley, “Watchbird” is very much a comedy, albeit with a lot of death and destruction.

If you’ve read enough Sheckley (and you don’t have to read too much to get the point) then you know he’s a big fan of the “science gone amok” type of narrative, wherein human inventors, apparently lacking common sense, fail to consider the ramifications of their new creation. The purpose of a watchbird is to stun what it perceives as an aggressor before the aggressor can commit murder—but what constitutes aggression? Just as importantly, the watchbird is supposed to help potential human victims, but this turns out to be too narrow a definition for the dumb robots. Watchbirds, while being designed to prevent murder, are also not opposed to killing people by way of omission; they do not consider, for one, that stunning an elderly person or someone with a weak heart might kill them. At first this goes unnoticed. The watchbirds seem to be doing their job, which mind you does not include other types of crime. “Of course, there were still robberies. Petty thievery flourished, and embezzlement, larceny, forgery and a hundred other crimes.” But the murder rate’s gone down! For now…

Gelsen is the closest we have to a protagonist, true, but he doesn’t do much—not that he can do much. The meat of “Watchbird” is the several micro-plots wherein random people are thwarted or ruined by watchbird intereference, including a hitman who’s killed without his would-be victim even being aware of it, a doctor who is forced to watch his patient die because a watchbird mistakes the doctor’s operating for aggression, and other one-off plots that function to show the watchbirds’ evolution—or rather their increased mangling of their prime directive. It’s all morbid and chuckle-worthy, but what’s important in a storytelling context is that Sheckley does not waste time at all here; his prose is on the extreme beige side, with people and places getting basically no description at all. The result is that this is a dialogue-heavy story where the action is conveyed in short bursts. A. E. van Vogt had in mind that a scene should be around 800 words and contain a plot complication; for Sheckley the wordage seems to be boiled down to 300 words a scene. The action escalates quickly, from normalcy to the watchbirds killing almost as many people as they’re saving.

This turns out to be only the beginning.

There Be Spoilers Here

Soon the watchbirds stop trying to prevent the “murder” of just humans. First living animals, then later electrical items like cars and radios—and the watchbirds themselves. The watchbirds come close to achieving sentience but don’t quite get there, which almost feels like a subversion of the classic “robot magically becomes self-aware” trope. These robots fail to understand, for one, that cars are not killed when they’re turned off—that cars are not, in fact, living things. As I said, watchbirds do not comprehend killing via omission (as opposed to commission), thus they don’t realize that by preventing farmers from harvesting crops they’re forcing millions of people to starve. Things escalate to the point where the US’s ecosystem falls into dire jeopardy, with watchbirds preventing predators from killing prey and hunters from killing the hunted. Even killing plant life for the sake of agriculture becomes murder in the eyes of the watchbirds. “No one had told the watchbirds that all life depends on carefully balanced murders.” Again the watchbirds eventually take themselves to be living things, but they lack the intelligence to go against their programming—they can only expand the parameters of their programming and then act on it.

Now, I’m not sure what Sheckley believes in. A gripe I have with the guy is that while he’s a good satirist, it’s hard to get a read on what he’s advocating and even what he’s really against, to the point where it can read as nihilism. I can assume that Sheckley is against the death penalty, but I don’t know that, nor can I really gauge that from reading this story. The watchbirds at first stop a guy from being fried in the electric chair (cool) but later prevent a doctor from saving a patient’s life (not so cool). Aside from a general message about hubris and failing to take into account the consequences of invention I’m not sure if a deeper reading is possible. It doesn’t help that I more or less anticipated the ending, which actually reminded me of an even earlier Sheckley story, “The Leech,” wherein (SPOILERS) the human protagonists find a short-term solution to the problem—only for it to be implied that said solution will cause an even bigger problem in the long run. Sheckley wrote a lot, so naturally he’d resort to a formula.

A Step Farther Out

It’s easy to stereotype early Galaxy as being full of witty satires on post-war American life, and admittedly Sheckley’s work doesn’t help with that; but if you can get past the fact that the humor is of its time, “Watchbird” is a pretty entertaining yarn. Despite being one of Sheckley’s longer early stories, it feels shorter than it is, with the rapid scene changes and punchy paragraphs constantly pushing the reader along until we’ve reached the foreboding climax. The joke does not overstay its welcome. It also helps that we avoid some of Sheckley’s nastier habits, such as his playful misogyny. “Watchbird” is a good introduction to Sheckley’s style but also the kind of SF humor that Gold wanted when Galaxy was at its peak.

See you next time.