Short Science Fiction Story Review – Dave Hutchinson – The Silver Monkey

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2015 – Robinson – Mammoth Press. Spoiler alerts In the 1690’s a priest is sent as a Vatican envoy to assess claims about a miracle in a remote central European principality called Altenberg. After lots of padding and exposition he discovers that the town has inexplicably become the recipient of a mechanical, not a miraculous, artefact in the form of a robot monkey made of silver. The machine talks, predicting the devastating impact Darwinism will have on the church in the future. The automaton is promptly, smashed and burnt and the pieces buried in the Vatican’s secret vaults until unearthed by the narrator in the 1980’s. We see nothing of the origin of the monkey – it just is, so the story is less clever than it would like to be. Arthur Chappell