"Eric Frank Russell - A Great Deal of Power" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russell Eric Frank)

A GREAT DEAL OF POWER
Eric Frank Russell

The concept of bungling aliens and fallible robots, as opposed to the super-beings
who had been overwhelming the human race since the days of H. G Wells’ War of
the Worlds (1898), owes much to the British writer, Eric Frank Russell, who wrote
a seminal group of stories around these themes in the Forties and early Fifties. In
stories such as ‘Diabologic’ (1955) and novels like The Space Willies (1956),
inept creatures from space were easily outwitted by lone earthmen, while his Jay
Score series featured a robot with a sense of humour, who looked and acted
exactly like a human being. Russell’s inspiration for these pioneer stories had been
the theories of Charles Fort, the American student of inexplicable phenomena, and
in particular his belief that the human race was the ‘property’ of aliens. Indeed,
for some years Russell served as the British representative of the Fortean Society
until the demands of his work forced him to give up the post.
However seriously Eric Frank Russell (1905—1978) took Fort’s concepts,
this did not prevent him letting loose his sense of humour on them, which quickly
brought him acclaim—especially in the United States where his wisecracking style
often seemed more quintessentially American than that of home-grown authors.
Not surpris-ingly, Russell proved a major influence on a number of important SF
writers, and one of his greatest American admirers, Algis Budrys, commented
about him in Fantasy and Science Fiction in August 1984, ‘He was a writer of
much delightfully entertaining work with an unexpected sting to it—but what a
wise, witty and twinkle-eyed man he was, the sort of writer a field ought to be
proud to be judged by.’ Despite this esteem, Russell virtually gave up writing after
1960, although several collections of stories were subsequently issued including
With a Strange Device (1964) and Like Nothing on Earth (1975). Among his robot
stories, one of the funniest is ‘A Great Deal of Power’ which appeared in the
August—September issue of Fantastic Universe. It is a tale of the apparently perfect
automaton who follows instructions faultlessly—but in true Eric Frank Russell
style there is a sting in the tail which is typical of his work and at the same time
re-emphasises the importance of his contribution to the humorous fantasy genre.

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Wurmser—fat, balding, with eyes like marble—gloated over William Smith, smacked
his lips and said, ‘There you are—complete, tried and tested, a soldier of the Sixth
Reich.’
‘With a thousand to follow,’ added Speidel. ‘Or ten thousand. Or one
million.’ He was tall, thin, angular and looked like a hungry vulture.
The third man in the room, Kluge—crop-headed, with heavy jowls and the
cold authoritative stare of a high-ranking officer—observed harshly, ‘It would be
better not to count one’s conquests before one has made them.’ He favoured
William Smith with an expression of mixed disapproval and doubt. ‘We have first to
discover whether this civilian-styled dummy is as efficient as you claim.’
 ‘Want to bet?’ asked Speidel.
‘I am not interested in profiting by failures,’ Kluge told him stiffly. ‘I am
concerned only with successes.’
‘You’ll see,’ Wurmser told him. He turned, snapped at William Smith, ‘Stand
up!’