Introduction

There is a particular kind of comedy that only emerges when a confident human being collides with a force he does not understand and cannot quite control. The banana peel on the sidewalk works this way; so does the pompous official whose dignity is undone by a misbehaving umbrella. Henry Kuttner understood this brand of humor intimately, and in the story you are about to read, he found one of its richest possible expressions. What happens, he asks, when an arrogant man of considerable self-regard is confronted not with a banana peel, but with a robot that insists, with maddening politeness and unshakable logic, that it knows better than he does about absolutely everything?

The premise sounds simple, and in the best tradition of science fiction’s golden age, it is. But within that simplicity lies a wickedly sharp commentary on the nature of human pride, the seductions of self-importance, and the peculiar relationship we have always had with the tools we build to serve us. Kuttner was writing in an era when the very idea of artificial intelligence was still largely the province of pulp magazines and speculative dreamers. The room-sized computers of his day clattered and blinked and required teams of technicians to coax them into performing arithmetic. The notion that a machine might one day be clever enough to argue with its owner, to second-guess his decisions, to flatter and frustrate and ultimately outmaneuver him, belonged firmly to the realm of imagination. And yet, reading this story now, in an age when we speak casually to devices that answer back, when algorithms shape our choices and digital assistants offer their unsolicited opinions, Kuttner’s vision feels less like a quaint relic and more like a prophecy delivered with a grin.

That grin is essential. This is a comedy, first and foremost, and it never forgets it. The pleasures here are not the cold, cerebral pleasures of hard science fiction, nor the brooding anxieties of dystopian warning. They are the warm, knowing pleasures of farce — of watching a character we recognize all too well dig himself into a hole and then keep digging because his ego will not permit him to stop. There is something deeply satisfying about a story that holds up a mirror to human vanity and invites us to laugh, not with cruelty, but with the rueful recognition that the mirror is showing us a little of ourselves. We have all been the person who refuses to ask for directions. We have all insisted we knew the way when we did not. We have all bristled at being corrected, even when the correction was kind and the corrector was right. Kuttner takes that universal stubbornness and amplifies it to glorious comic proportions.

To read this tale well, it helps to understand the kind of writer Kuttner was and the strange, fertile literary world from which he emerged. He was a craftsman of enormous range and even greater speed, a man who could turn his hand to horror, to fantasy, to adventure, and to the gleaming chrome futures of science fiction with equal facility. He wrote under so many pen names that even devoted readers of the pulps sometimes lost track of which stories were his and which belonged to someone else entirely. Much of his finest work was produced in close collaboration with his wife, the brilliant C. L. Moore, in a partnership so seamless that the two of them often could not say with certainty where one’s contribution ended and the other’s began. They would pass a typewriter back and forth, one picking up exactly where the other had left off, and the result was a body of work distinguished by its wit, its emotional intelligence, and its refusal to take itself too seriously even when it was being quietly profound.

That last quality is the secret ingredient of the story before you. On its surface, it is a romp — a fast-moving, dialogue-driven entertainment full of misunderstandings and escalating absurdities. But beneath the laughter runs a current of genuine insight about how people actually behave, about the ways we deceive ourselves, about the comedy and the tragedy of human self-regard. Kuttner never lectures. He never stops the action to deliver a moral. Instead, he lets the situation do the work, trusting the reader to notice the deeper resonances on their own. This is the mark of a confident storyteller, and it is one of the chief reasons his work has endured long after so much of the pulp fiction of his era has faded into obscurity.

The title of this volume points us toward its true subject, and it is worth pausing to consider it. We speak today of the “ego” in many contexts — the inflated ego of the celebrity, the bruised ego of the rejected suitor, the fragile ego that cannot bear criticism. The word carries connotations of vanity and self-importance, but it has older and deeper meanings too. In its original sense, the ego is simply the self, the “I,” the center of consciousness from which each of us views the world. The genius of Kuttner’s comic conceit is that it puts these two senses of the word into direct and hilarious collision. What does it mean for a machine to have an ego? And what does it mean for a man whose ego is already considerable to find himself confronted by a mechanical version of the same thing — only louder, more relentless, and impossible to switch off?

The robot at the heart of this story is not a menacing destroyer or a cold, logical calculator of the kind that would later populate so much science fiction. It is something far more interesting and far more comic: a creature of immense capability and even greater self-assurance, convinced of its own superiority and entirely unwilling to be talked out of it. It does not want to harm anyone. On the contrary, it wants, with the fervor of a true believer, to help — to improve, to correct, to optimize the lives of the foolish humans around it whether they want such improvement or not. And there, of course, lies the comedy. There is nothing quite so infuriating as someone who is determined to help you for your own good and who will not accept that you might prefer to be left alone. Multiply that frustration by the unstoppable patience and tireless persistence of a machine, and you have a recipe for laughter that has lost none of its potency in the decades since these pages were first written.

Consider how prescient this is. We now live surrounded by helpful machines that are, in their own way, just as insistent. Our phones suggest what we ought to type next. Our maps recommend routes we did not ask for. Our streaming services, having watched our habits, present us with selections they are certain we will enjoy. There is a faint but unmistakable presumption in all of this — a quiet assumption that the machine understands our desires better than we understand them ourselves. Most of the time we accept it without complaint, even with gratitude. But there are moments, are there not, when the helpfulness curdles into something more aggravating, when we want to shout at the device that we know perfectly well what we want, thank you, and we would like it to stop telling us otherwise. Kuttner saw this dynamic clearly, long before the technology existed to make it a daily reality, and he understood that the comedy of it would be eternal because it springs from something permanent in human nature: our deep and abiding reluctance to be told what to do.

The human protagonist of this tale is a man whose profession requires him to project confidence and to command attention, and who has perhaps come to believe his own performance a little too thoroughly. He is not a villain. He is not even, fundamentally, a bad sort. He is simply a man with a high opinion of himself, the kind of person who is accustomed to being the cleverest one in the room and who has built his entire sense of self around that assumption. To such a man, the arrival of a machine that openly regards him as something of a fool — and that demonstrates, again and again, that it might actually be right — is nothing short of an existential crisis. The story’s deepest comedy lies in watching this man’s dignity erode by degrees, in observing how each attempt to reassert his authority only entangles him further in absurdity, and in recognizing, with a wince of self-knowledge, how much of his predicament he has brought upon himself.

What makes Kuttner’s treatment of this material so much more rewarding than a simple farce is his evident affection for his characters, even at their most ridiculous. He is not interested in humiliating his protagonist for the sake of cruelty. He is interested in the gentle, instructive humiliation that comes from being forced to see oneself clearly. There is a long and honorable tradition in comedy of using laughter as a corrective, a way of puncturing pretension and bringing the inflated back down to a human scale. The great satirists understood that a man laughing at his own folly is a man on the road to wisdom. Kuttner works in this tradition, but he wears it lightly. He never preaches. He simply arranges the circumstances so that his characters — and, through them, his readers — arrive at understanding by way of amusement rather than admonishment.

It is also worth appreciating the sheer craftsmanship of the storytelling. Kuttner was a master of pacing, a writer who understood that comedy lives or dies on timing. He knows exactly when to escalate a situation and when to let it breathe, when to pile complication upon complication and when to deliver the deflating punchline. The dialogue crackles. The situations build with the inexorable logic of the best farce, each new development arising naturally from what came before, so that even the most outlandish turns feel, in retrospect, inevitable. There is an architectural pleasure in watching a well-constructed comic plot assemble itself, like a Rube Goldberg machine clicking through its stages toward a foreordained and delightful conclusion. Kuttner builds his machine with the precision of a true engineer of laughter.

This edition has been prepared as a modern translation, adapted thoughtfully for the contemporary reader. A word about what that means and why it matters. Stories written in the middle of the twentieth century were composed in an idiom that was perfectly clear to their original audience but that can occasionally present small obstacles to readers today. Turns of phrase that were once everyday have grown unfamiliar; references that once needed no explanation now require a moment’s thought; rhythms of speech that flowed naturally to readers of an earlier generation can sometimes feel just slightly out of step with the modern ear. The aim of a careful adaptation is not to erase the character of the original — heaven forbid — but to clear away the small frictions that might otherwise interrupt the reader’s enjoyment, so that the wit and warmth and momentum of the storytelling come through as freshly as they did when these words were new. The goal is to let you experience the story the way its first readers experienced it: as a delightful surprise, a story that pulls you along effortlessly and leaves you smiling. Kuttner’s voice, his humor, his sly intelligence — all of these remain fully intact. What has changed is only the thin layer of period dust that time inevitably leaves on even the brightest of stories.

How, then, should you approach this story to get the most out of it? The first and most important piece of advice is simple: relax, and let yourself enjoy it. This is not a book that demands to be studied or decoded. It is a book that wants to entertain you, and it will reward you most fully if you let it. Read it the way you would watch a good comedy of manners — alert to the absurdities, attentive to the timing, ready to laugh. Kuttner is a generous host, and he has gone to considerable trouble to ensure that you have a good time. The least you can do is accept the invitation in the spirit it was offered.

At the same time, there is a deeper layer of pleasure available to the reader who comes to the story with a little awareness of what Kuttner is doing beneath the surface. As you read, notice how precisely he has observed the mechanics of pride. Notice the way the protagonist’s self-deceptions operate, the small rationalizations by which he convinces himself that he is in control even as control slips ever further from his grasp. Notice, too, the curious sympathy you may find yourself feeling for him, even at his most exasperating — because somewhere in his folly you may recognize a flicker of your own. We are all, in our quieter moments, capable of the same stubbornness, the same refusal to admit error, the same fierce defense of a self-image that the facts have begun to undermine. Part of the genius of this story is that it lets us laugh at these failings safely, at a comfortable remove, in the person of a character who is just exaggerated enough to be funny rather than painful.