“All the Traps of Earth”
Clifford D. Simak
Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1960
Currently available in I am Crying All Inside: The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Volume One and Space Pioneers edited by Hank Davis and Christopher Ruocchio

Today, August 3, would have been Clifford D. Simak’s 115th birthday.  Simak (1904-1988) wrote some of the best science fiction of the 20th Century.  One of the themes he returned to, and it’s a theme in this story, is robots and their role in society.

When people talk about robots in science fiction, the name of Isaac Asimov naturally comes up.  Simak might be mentioned if the people talking are well-read.  Between the two, I prefer Simak’s robots to Asimov’s, although I very much enjoy Asimov’s robots.  The difference, I think, is that Asimov’s robots tend to be cold and calculating, while Simak’s are more, well, human.  Case in point, “All the Traps of Earth”.

The story opens with a robot taking an inventory of a family’s possessions. Simak imbues the opening passage with a sense of sadness:

The inventory list was long. On its many pages, in his small and precse script, he had listed furniture, paintings, china, silverware and all the rest of it-all the personal belongings that had been accumulated by the Barringtons through a long family history.

And now that he had reached the end of it, he noted down himself, the last item of them all:

One domestic robot, Richard Daniel, antiquated but in good repair.

He laid the pen aside and shuffled all the inventory sheets together and stacked them in good order, putting a paper weight upon them-the little exquisitely carved ivory paper weight that Aunt Hortense had picked up that last visit she had made to Peking.

And having done that, his job came to an end.

That’s some powerful writing right there. Simak establishes a mood and a tone that gives the reader a sympathy with the robot that propels the story along.

Richard Daniel had served the Barrington’s for six hundred years.  Now that Aunt Hortense is gone, the Barrington line has gone with her.  All the possessions, house, personal items, everything, is to be sold to pay the debts she left. Those possessions include Richard Daniel. His mind will be wiped, all six hundred years of memory gone.  The law requires it.

But Richard Daniel is a lawbreaker. All robots are supposed to have their minds wiped every hundred years.  Through their power and influence, the Barringtons have managed to keep their beloved servant’s mind intact.  But now the Barringtons are gone, and with them, their protection.

So Richard Daniel does what he must. He goes on the lam.

After being on the hull of a spaceship as goes through hyperspace, Richard Daniel finds he’s no longer the robot he was. He has new abilities, abilities that allow him to commit crimes he would never have thought to commit.

Richard Daniel moves through several bad situations, seeking to escape the traps of Earth, but Simak doesn’t give the reader a downer ending.  The ending is perfectly consistent with the character of Richard Daniel, and it made me want to end  up where he did.

It’s also a very Simakesque ending.  It’s certainly not an ending Asimov would have written, at least not in the way Simak did.  In fact, this story was rejected by both John Campbell at Astounding and Horace Gold at Galaxy before Robert Mills bought it for F&SF.

Simak has been called the pastoralist of science fiction. I think that’s why he’s been a writer I’ve returned to consistently over the years. He doesn’t have galaxy spanning crises.  His stories are more personal and tend to deal with everyday individuals.  Simak was deeply concerned with the humanity of his characters, including the robots. The endings of his stories are usually upbeat, even if the stories sometimes contain a thread of deep sadness, such as “All the Traps of Earth”.

This is one of Simak’s most reprinted stories, and it’s easy to see why.  If you’ve not read it, it’s currently available in both print and ebook in two different books.  (I am Crying All Inside is AFAIK the only volume of the collected Simak short stories that is available in print.)