Literateur: Henry Kuttner's "Robots Have No Tails"

Few things are more humbling to a writer than pulp stories from the 30's and 40's. You quickly realize everything has been done- and done WELL- almost a century ago.

Henry Kuttner was a master pulp practitioner. He did horror, sf, fantasy, everything. Particularly noteworthy: "The Graveyard Rats." Great story, great title. But today we're gonna look at this bad boy:

Robots Have No Tails is about Galloway Gallagher, a hard-drinking scientist who can only do science when he's drunk. It's like Jackie Chan's Drunken Master, but with science instead of fighting.

The stories are structured as scientific mysteries where My. Galloway has to work backwards to figure out how he performed an experiment or opened some timewarp while he was drunk the previous night.

And they're a hoot. The idea-per-page ratio is staggering. Not only did Kuttner basically invent the Tardis in here, decades decades before Doctor Who, he also offers:

-A dude who accidentally kills a future version of himself by reaching through a time door.
-A robot having a personality crisis.
-Bunnies from Mars arriving from 400 years in the future, determined to take over the world.
-Courtroom drama where time travel and clones and robot free agency are debated.
-Time-traveling mafia lawyers.

Also this exchange:

"You promised to help me. If you don't, I'm a ruined man."
"I've been ruined for years. It never bothers me."

It's even formatted like a classic pulp magazine- two columns per page, cheap paper, retro cover. It's a pure labor of love by the publisher.

The intro by noted author F. Paul Wilson is full of affection as well, though he's totally honest about the stories:

"Are they some of the best SF ever written? Hell, no. They show many of the failings of hastily written pulp fiction. The writing is slapdash at times, suffering from polyadverbosis and digressions that would give Poe fits. The science is often suspect, the extrapolation occasionally sloppy."

But they're still fun. There's a whole lotta of laughs and entertainment to be had here in this short volume. It feels like a contemporary send-up of classic sf, making it that much more remarkable that Kuttner was goofing on the genre so cleverly in the 40's.

-Phony McFakename

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