Where-serker?

I'd heard about the Berserker novels in passing but never got into them in my teens (when I would probably have enjoyed them more) yet decided to check them out in recent years after one character's aside in Mark Stanley's Freefall. It's hard to say why I've kept returning to them after the first few short stories; maybe, as with Anne Rice's vampire novels, it can be explained by the trainwreck appeal of a concept's misuse. Half a century after Saberhagen first chimed in on the topic inception, the "robot army of doom" setup has proved its shallowness with every new terminator and cylon.

These particular robot space-fleets of doom provide decidedly pulpy "fire laz0rz pew-pew" space operatic fare, but in itself that can be enjoyable enough... when it sticks to its guns and doesn't over-reach. No, what stands out about the Berserker books is just how little they concern the titular berserkers. The very first short story didn't even focus on them and was more of a "Chinese box" thought exercise. Nevertheless, the public loves an unempathetic villain with simplistic motivations, and killer robots fit the bill perfectly. The brand identity sold. Still sells, if the series' continuation from 1963 into the 2000s almost up to the author's death* is any indication. But aside from maintaining brand identity by allowing the death-bots to loom menacingly as plot-driving footnotes, precious few of the plots involve them at all.

Recruiting various authors for short story collections explains only a small amount of the insanity. Saberhagen himself doesn't seem to have held any coherent notion of just how to milk his cash cow. The reason for the Berserker's appelative, their initial gimmick of machine minds incorporating true random number generation to remain unpredictable was only good for one or two re-tellings. (Indeed, later stories have started falling back on the machines being baited into predictable behavior.) After that? Some of the better ideas at least maintain a pretext of relevance to space fleets and interstellar conflict. Even they make liberal use of cheesy love stories or telepathy inserted as a plot point and then forgotten a story later, etc. Others hail from entirely different genres with a killer robot shoehorned in somewhere at the end. There's a tournament of bronze-age barbarian gladiators, a child imbued with apotheotic technology who finds space-nirvana, a space version of Saint Francis of Assisi, some confused time travel story about space vikings, a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice - in SpaaaaaAAACE !

When I decided to get into this I'd expected to get bored of killer robots. Instead, halfway through the series, I've spent most of my time impatiently flipping pages wondering when they'll actually show up! Who knew Godot was a killer robot?


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*possibly at the claws of killer robots; one never knows