Title: The Golem

Author: Avram Davidson

Date of First Publication: 1955

Place of Publication: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

Type: Short story

Characters: No Character

Themes: ANDROID; POSTHUMAN; MAD SCIENTIST/MONSTERS

Critical Summary: Avram Davidson’s short story about a unique being, an android, created by a brilliant, lone, mad scientist–a Professor Allardyce, who never appears in the story, though we learn he studies electronics and neuronics for forty years to make his android. Instead, we meet the android as makes his way up to an old couple chatting, and bickering, on a porch, to inform them: “I am not a human being!” and “Between me and all mankind is an inevitable hatred” and his maker “made mankind, all mankind, superfluous; he made me!” However, the couple (who call him a golem) doesn’t care much about what the android says, and continue to talk and disagree with one another. When the android finally says he has come to destroy them, the old man gets up and slaps the android, telling it to “talk respectable.” The slap breaks the android, revealing wires; when the old man tells the android to go mow the lawn, it meekly obeys.

The android/golem seems to have gotten its ideas from reading “a complete collection of stories about androids, from Shelley’s Frankenstein through Capek’s R.U.R. to Asimov.” Davidson’s subversive story suggest we make not only new things, but make the story about what those things are and how they mean.

Administrative Notes: Dr. David Sandner