Home There's No Returning

Kuttner, Henry, and C.L. Moore. "Home There's No Returning." Coll. No Boundaries. New York: Ballantine, 1955.

Said by K. Amis to feature "a vast peripatetic computer […] incorporating the novelty, that, unlike ordinary computers but like men, it will make decisions on insufficient data." The machine fails: "Immediately upon being activated it goes psychotic, and most of the story consists of the various attempts to calm it down," which is done—and the computer shuts itself down. The military commander in charge of the operation concludes that the machine "couldn't act on partial knowledge. No machine could. You couldn't expect machines to face the unknown. Only human beings can do that. Steel isn't strong enough"—etc. Amis finds this conclusion not complacency exactly but more "witness in a highly representative fashion to a boundless self-confidence [in S.F.], a feeling that if humanity to itself do rest true, no situation will be too tough and no problem to difficult" for us to handle or solve (New Maps 1975: 79; ch. 3 [Amis's subjunctive "do rest true" alludes to W. Shakespeare's King John 5.7.118]). (RDE, 17/05/04)