{"id":1100,"date":"2021-05-10T16:44:45","date_gmt":"2021-05-10T16:44:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1100"},"modified":"2022-01-23T12:28:13","modified_gmt":"2022-01-23T12:28:13","slug":"father-by-ray-nayler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1100","title":{"rendered":"Father by Ray Nayler"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Father <\/em><\/strong>by Ray Nayler (Asimov\u2019s SF<\/em>, July-August 2020) is set in an alternate 1950s America,1<\/sup> and begins with the narrator of the story, a young boy, answering the door to find that the Veterans Administration have sent his mother a robotic \u201cfather unit\u201d; it starts to perform that role for the boy (whose real father died in the Afterwar\u2014the invasion of the Soviet Union after WWII) by pitching baseballs to him.
Later on, after some more robot-boy bonding, a local delinquent called Archie\u2014who has previously verbally abused the narrator, mother and robot\u2014does a low-level fly-by in his aircar and hits father with a baseball bat:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We ran out of the house in time to see Archie\u2019s hot rod arcing off into the sky, wobbling dangerously from side to side on its aftermarket stabilizers.
There were four or five faces sticking out of it. Laughing faces: a girl in red lipstick with her hair up in a kerchief, and the hard, narrow greaser faces of Archie\u2019s friends. As the hot rod zipped off one of them yelled: \u201cHome run!\u201d and hooted, the sound doppling off in the crickety night as they lurched away against the stars.
Father was laying on the ground. His head was dented, and one of his eyes had gone dark. As we came over to him, he was already getting up to his feet.
\u201cAre you all right, Father?\u201d I said.
He swung around to look at me. It was awful\u2014his dented head, the one eye snuffed out. But the other one glowed, warm as a kitchen window from home when you\u2019re hungry for dinner.
\u201cThat\u2019s the first time you called me Father,\u201d he said. \u201cI couldn\u2019t possibly feel better, hearing that word from my boy.\u201d
\u201cWe should call the cops,\u201d my mom said.
\u201cI doubt they\u2019ll do much,\u201d Father said. \u201cAnd that young man and his friends really have trouble enough as it is. I feel none of them are headed toward a good end.\u201d
\u201cI\u2019ve said the same myself, many times,\u201d Mom said. She was rubbing a dirty mark off of Father\u2019s head with a kitchen cloth. \u201cWhat did they get you with?\u201d
\u201cA baseball bat, I\u2019m afraid.\u201d He paused. \u201cPerhaps they mistook me for a mailbox.\u201d
\u201cHilarious,\u201d Mom said.
\u201cI\u2019m here all week, folks . . .\u201d Father\u2019s bad eye flickered back to life for a moment, then went dead again.  p. 49<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The rest of the story largely develops around Archie\u2019s continued persecution of the family, which includes the house getting bricked from the air when the father-robot and the narrator are out trick-or-treating (although the next time Archie flies over, the robot throws a hammer at him and hits him in the face). During this period there are also a couple of visits by an ex-military repairman, the first time to fix the robot\u2019s head and the second time to visit the narrator\u2019s mother. On the latter occasion the repairman says something vague that suggests that father-robot may be partially or all of Archie\u2019s<\/span> real father and, re the hammer attack by the robot on Archie, something about malfunctioning \u201csub-routines\u201d.
The final part of the tale (spoiler) involves Archie supposedly making peace with the narrator by taking him to Woolworths for a milk shake\u2014while the rest of his gang lure the robot out of town and attack and kill it (but not before the robot gets one of them). The repairman appears again at the narrator\u2019s house in the aftermath of this event, discusses with another military man the robot\u2019s lethal behaviour, and then what the pair did in the war (which includes a mention of their<\/em> sub-routines).
The bulk of this story, with its small town America, father-robots, air-cars, and amateur rocket fields, has a likeable Bradburyesque vibe. That said, the later material about the robot\u2019s true identity and its sub-routines is never adequately resolved, and it almost unravels the last part of the story. A pity\u2014if this had continued in the same vein as it started, it would have been a pretty good piece rather than a near-miss.
**+ (Average to Good). 7,200 words.

1. The alternate world pivot point in this story is the same as in Nayler\u2019s two \u2018Sylvia Aldstatt\u2019 stories (also published in Asimov\u2019s SF<\/em>): the recovery of a crashed flying saucer by the USA in 1938, and the subsequent use of the discovered technology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Father by Ray Nayler (Asimov\u2019s SF, July-August 2020) is set in an alternate 1950s America,1 and begins with the narrator of the story, a young boy, answering the door to find that the Veterans Administration have sent his mother a robotic \u201cfather unit\u201d; it starts to perform that role for the boy (whose real father […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[147],"tags":[256,296,4,148,12],"class_list":["post-1100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ray-nayler","tag-2-5","tag-296","tag-asimovs-sf","tag-ray-nayler","tag-short-story"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1100"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2539,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1100\/revisions\/2539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}