The day the Earth understood

Man and machine and world peace

Adapted from the cover of Air Wonder Stories #5 (1929)

You hardly ever see a movie with a giant robot fighting a gorilla.

When you come across a scene like that in an old sci-fi story, you can imagine how it might have caught on and become a trope. It might have been like the action star turning his back before the explosion.

It could have been a whole thing. Epic tales of a certain orientation might have featured the obligatory gorilla versus robot fight.

But history didn’t go that way, and that’s not because no one tried it.

There’s an old spaceship story called “Farewell to the Master,” by Harry Bates, from the October 1940 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, in which a robot from outer space 100% fights a gorilla. A human, in hiding, sees it all, including the fact that — here’s the remarkable part — when the gorilla loses and the gorilla dies, there’s a sadness in the robot’s electronic eyes.

In that same story, the robot also creates a living mockingbird. He does it by drawing the e…