Robots Have No Tails...

...although ironically, I was just reading Stanislaw Lem's "Tale of the Computer That Fought A Dragon," in which a robotic dinosaur/dragon ate a computer to make itself a tail.

Robots Have No Tails is the name of a recently reprinted anthology of stories by Henry Kuttner (originally under the pseudonym Lewis Padgett) about an inventor named Gallegher. I don't have this collection (though I would rather like to), but I have read one of the stories in it thanks to a really big collection of oldish science fiction I have.

The story is called "The Proud Robot," and it features a hideous, extremely vain robot called Joe.

Joe pretty well makes the story, simply because he's a hilarious and thoroughly weird character.

One of the biggest reasons for this is because he's enormously perceptive. He has some kind of combination of psychic and hypnotic powers. He has imaginary names for most of them-when asked what one of them, vastening, is, he describes it as being "something like a cross between presience and sagrazi." "Sagrazi?" "Oh, I forgot, you don't have those, either."

I'd probably do a more complete summary of it or something, but plenty of other people have reviewed it, it's my birthday, and I don't feel like it. Go read a book.

-Signing off.