And would this little robot be less charming if it had been called Hexapod-5? For myself, I would have been fine with that. I wish Nevala-Lee had avoided this issue with a genderless name, but we humans anthropomorphize everything. Eunice has no gender traits, but I can’t stop thinking of it as a little girl. I don’t know why it is female other than its name. Eunice neither looks human or thinks like a human, yet we feel for it as her. All too often writers make their robots too human. Writing good robot stories is hard to pull off. (In many ways Eunice’s efforts to survive, remind me of Mark Watney’s ingenuity in The Martian.) “At the Fall” is about Eunice’s trials and tribulations crossing thousands of kilometers of the ocean bottom. Eventually, after waiting a long time for the yacht to return, Eunice decides to return to Seattle where it was created but it has very limited abilities to make this journey. One day the yacht isn’t at the surface, but the little robots keep at their job. They take turns returning to the surface to transmit their data and check in with scientists on a yacht. Because these robots work so far below the surface, beyond the range of radio, they were designed to work independently from human monitoring. The five hexapods were created to study deep ocean vents. It is one of five hexapods “sisters” (Thetic, Clio, Dione, Galatea) each with their own support robot that generates their power. I can’t help but think of the City stories by Clifford Simak.Įunice is a hexapod, a robot with six tentacle-like appendages.

The story is about a little undersea robot named Eunice and its companion support robot named Wagner who travel thousands of miles under the ocean hoping to find their home.

I hope Alec Nevala-Lee won’t be offended when I say, “At the Fall” is great old-fashion science fiction. This story is exactly the kind of science fiction I love. The above illustration by Eldar Zakirov is for “At the Fall” by Alec Nevala-Lee in the May-June issue of Analog.

Alec nevala lee