Brian W. Aldiss: Super-Toys Last All Summer Long

In Mrs. Swinton's garden, it was always summer. The lovely almond trees stood about it in perpetual leaf. Monica Swinton plucked a saffron-colored rose and showed it to David.

"Isn't it lovely?" she said.

David looked up at her and grinned without replying. Seizing the flower, he ran with it across the lawn and disappeared behind the kennel where the mowervator crouched, ready to cut or sweep or roll when the moment dictated. She stood alone on her impeccable plastic gravel path.

She had tried to love him.

When she made up her mind to follow the boy, she found him in the courtyard floating the rose in his paddling pool. He stood in the pool engrossed, still wearing his sandals.

"David, darling, do you have to be so awful? Come in at once and change your shoes and socks."

He went with her without protest into the house, his dark head bobbing at the level of her waist. At the age of three, he showed no fear of the ultrasonic dryer in the kitchen. But before his mother could reach for a pair of slippers, he wriggled away and was gone into the silence of the house.

He would probably be looking for Teddy.

Monica Swinton, twenty-nine, of graceful shape and lambent eye, went and sat in her living room, arranging her limbs with taste. She began by sitting and thinking; soon she was just sitting. Time waited on her shoulder with the maniac slowth it reserves for children, the insane, and wives whose husbands are away improving the world. Almost by reflex, she reached out and changed the wavelength of her windows. The garden faded; in its place, the city center rose by her left hand, full of crowding people, blowboats, and buildings (but she kept the sound down). She remained alone. An overcrowded world is the ideal place in which to be lonely.

Brian W. Aldiss: Neanderthal Planet

Hidden machines varied the five axioms of the Scanning Place. They ran through a series of arbitrary systems, consisting of Kolmogorovian finite sets, counterpointed harmonically by a one-to-one assignment nonnegative real numbers, so that the parietal areas shifted constantly in strict relationships projected by the Master Boff deep under Manhattan.

Chief Scanner—he affected the name of Euler— patiently watched the modulations as he awaited a call. Self-consistency: that was the principle in action. It should govern all phases of life. It was the aesthetic principle of machines. Yet, not three miles away, the wild robots sported and rampaged in the bush.

Amber light burned on his beta panel.

Instantaneously, he modulated his call number.

The incoming signal decoded itself as "We've spotted Anderson, chief." The anonymous vane-bug reported coordinates and signed off.

It had taken them Boff knew how long—seven days—to locate Anderson after his escape.

They had done the logical thing and searched far afield for him. But man was not logical; he had stayed almost within the shadow of the New York dome. Euler beamed an impulse into a Hive Mind channel, calling off the search.

He fired his jets and took off.

The axioms yawned out above him. He passed into the open, flying over the poly-polyhedrons of New Newyork. As the buildings went through their transparency phases, he saw them swarming with his own kind. He could open out channels to any one of them, if required; and, as chief, he could, if required, switch any one of them to automatic, to his own control, just as the Dominants could automate him if the need arose.

Euler "saw" a sound-complex signal below him, and dived, deretracting a vane to land silently. He came down by a half-track that had transmitted the signal.

It gave its call number and beamed, "Anderson is eight hundred meters ahead, chief. If you join me, we will move forward."

"What support have we?" A single dense impulse.

“Three more like me, sir. Plus incapacitating gear."

“This man must not be destructed."

"We comprehend, chief." Total exchange of signals occupied less than a microsecond.

He clamped himself magnetically to the half-track, and they rolled forward. The ground was broken and littered by piles of debris, on the soil of which coarse weeds grew. Beyond it all the huge fossil of old New York, still under its force jelly, gray, unwithering because unliving. Only the bright multishapes of the new complex relieved a whole country full of desolation.

Brian W. Aldiss: But Who Can Replace a Man?

The field-minder finished turning the topsoil of a two thousand acre field. When it had turned the last furrow, it climbed onto the highway and looked back at its work. The work was good. Only the land was bad. Like the ground all over Earth, it was vitiated by over-cropping. By rights, it ought now to lie fallow for a while, but the field-minder had other orders.

It went slowly down the road, taking its time. It was intelligent enough to appreciate the neatness all about it.

Nothing worried it, beyond a loose inspection plate above its atomic pile. Thirty feet high, it gleamed complacently in the mild sunshine.

No other machines passed it on its way to the agricultural station. The field-minder noted the fact without comment. In the station yard it saw several other machines which it knew by sight; most of them should have been out about their tasks now. Instead, some were inactive and some were careening round the yard in a strange fashion, shouting or hooting.

Steering carefully past them, the field-minder moved over to warehouse three and spoke to the seed distributor, which stood idly outside.

“I have a requirement for seed potatoes,” it said to the distributor and, with a quick internal motion, punched out an order card specifying quantity, field number and several other details. It ejected the card and handed it to the distributor.

The distributor held the card close to its eye and then said, “The requirement is in order, but the store is not yet unlocked. The required seed potatoes are in the store. Therefore I cannot produce your requirment.”

Increasingly of late there had been breakdowns in the complex system of machine labor, but this particular hitch had not occurred before. The field-minder thought, then said, “Why is the store not yet unlocked?”

“Because supply operative type P has not come this morning. Supply operative type P is the unlocker.” The field-minder looked squarely at the seed distributor, whose exterior chutes and scales and grabs were so vastly different from the field-minder’s own limbs.

“What class brain do you have, seed distributor?” it asked.

Brian W. Aldiss: Tomorrow’s Yesterdays

When we look back over our century, over the years from AD 2000 to the present, 1st January, 2099, we can see how many of our present benefits have their roots in the twentieth century, and even earlier.

The Twenty-First Century has been a brilliant one, in contrast with its predecessor, with war – and the greed which often inspires war – largely in abeyance. While we celebrate its fruits, we look ahead to new challenges. And, as ever, to the unexpected – even the unlikely.

Some developments which seemed promising in AD 2000 have not matured. The expectation that we would have robot and android servants, for instance, is no more. Androids were too cumbersome and energy-consuming. The first models gave off hydroxils of a poisonous nature, and were banned. We have superceded them with something more adaptable – our dupes.

Let us leave that topic aside for a while, in order to consider the larger socio-economic benefits of Our Twenty-First Century.

Ambitions for closer cooperation between neighbouring countries, the striving for longevity, and the understanding that better health is achievable though better housing, sanitary improvements, and diet: the fulfillment of these concepts, and the abolition of most diseases, has transformed the world in which the majority of us live. As a result, consumerism has largely given way to contemplationism.

One thing we must expect from the future is the unexpected. Chaos Theory and experience combine to teach us that much. No one, a century ago, could have conceived that a handful of truly remarkable, benevolent, and charismatic individuals would arise simultaneously, strongly to influence the course of history. Nor would those predecessors of ours have expected the human species to turn to a mode of life so much less dependent on technology than was theirs.

At the start of this century, which we now think of as the Age of Idealism, six men and women came to power in the various nations that then existed, in Europe, the Americas, Russia, Central Asia, China, and Africa. This happened between the years of 2009 and 2023, as if six Nelson Mandelas had been born. What were the odds against these six powerful, enlightened and incorruptible people emerging at the same time? Perhaps no greater than the odds against such leaders as Stalin, Hitler, Franco, Soekarno, and others emerging almost simultaneously in the twentieth century. The Twentieth had the ill luck, we the good.

The world at this time was aghast at a nuclear conflict which had broken out between North and South Korea, practically destroying both countries and afflicting all surrounding areas. As a result, a new world order – if possible free of national rivalries, old grudges, and ideologies – was actively sought for.

Brian W. Aldiss: The Skeleton

The people lived in a spectacular setting, in a land where skyscrapers and luxurious shopping centres mingled with palm trees and flowers, set on the fringes of sandy beaches, warm seas and chilly economic realities.

One day, the people were taking an unpaid holiday on the beach when a stranger appeared. He was tall, pale, solid, and had a shock of fair hair. The people were astonished at the appearance of this young man, who threw himself upon them and demanded their love.

He saw them draw back from him and said, “I want only to be accepted. Let me stay here and be part of you. I need to be truly integrated.”

He was asking for something they could not give. But they cordially invited him to remain with them on the beach. It was not enough for him. He jumped up and tore off his skin, throwing it aside like an old track-suit.

“At least you cannot say my skin is a different colour from yours.”

They looked with astonishment at this man of scarlet, inviting him again to stay with them beneath the palms.

But he could not feel himself properly accepted. This time he wrenched away all his flesh, until only his gleaming white skeleton was left.

“Now you see that I have given all I have to be accepted by you.”

And he danced before them so that his bones rattled.

At this the people were very surprised, and ran off to swim in the warm sea. When they returned the skeleton was still there. Again they made him welcome.

“But you still do not accept me as one of yourselves,” the skeleton cried.

So they used him in their wayang as a figure of death. And then he was truly integrated with them.

He even became a small commercial success.