Short Story DVD Extra: “The Last Robot”

Published in 1992, only about three years into my career, “The Last Robot” was, by my current estimation, the first story of mine that was really worth a damn. (There are a few older that have partisans, including my second sale ever, “Clearance to Land,” which made my opening splash, but I have a higher bar of self-appraisal now, and there are reasons why I now place it fairly low.)

It was a memorial to Isaac Asimov, and here I wish to offer the usual prophylactic warning that I bloody know about Asimov’s various misbehaviors and that stampedes to snide commentary referencing them are the response of dicks. Please don’t. I know, I know. This was about him being a gateway to a lifetime of reading and to my career, and I don’t now need any yes-buts. That’s a different discussion.

I have already written about how the story appeared in my head, fully formed, in the two minutes after I heard the news of Asimov’s death on the radio. I had the story written by late afternoon the next day and on the desk of Kristine Kathryn Rusch, then-editor of THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION. by the end of the week. Her rejection was a respectful but kind of understandably scandalized suggestion to the effect that maybe I should wait until the man was in the ground. I don’t disagree with her. It sold in short order to Scott Edelman at SCIENCE FICTION. As a story, it was important to me because, before this point, I would tell anybody within earshot that I didn’t, and indeed, could not, write science fiction. “The Last Robot” proved me wrong and opened new doors to me, a development of spectacular importance.

The story was about the death of a great man and PCP-321, a loyal robot who appoints itself the duty of keeping watch by his grave, as the years and ultimately millennia roll by. It was easy to write in part because I had internalized the Asimov story that gives it form, the classic “The Last Robot,” and anyone who had been reading the stuff for any length of time could discern Asimov’s influence and voice in the prose, and my regard for his legacy in its last few paragraphs. But it was also based on a story I had read somewhere about a loyal dog who had positioned itself at the graveside of its master, for years on end, surviving only because it was held in high regard by the community.

That dog was Greyfriars Bobby.

When I wrote the story I could not place the name or find, in those still largely pre-internet days, the citation. I figured it didn’t matter. Asimov’s robots were named with a collection of names and numbers, given more conversational sobriquets by human creativity. LNE, for instance, became Lenny. And PHP-321, a robot who has since appeared in only one other story, became “Philip.” It helped to evoke the author I was eulogizing.

At the time I also did not know the story of Hachiko, the Japanese Akita who spent nine years at his local train station, waiting for his deceased master to come home. It was a similar incident. And it has been dramatized in a couple of movies, notably HACHI, with Richard Gere, a little drama that turns people into melted pudding. It destroys you. It really does.

And this has been my long way of noting that while PHP-321 was a perfectly appropriate way of evoking Asimov, I would have done *very* differently had the historical precedents been convenient and on hand.

To wit:

I have spent twenty-five years kvetching to myself that I didn’t call that robot, or at least once reference him as, “Greyfriars Robby.”