Short Science Fiction Story Review Brian Aldiss The New Father Christmas

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Spoiler alerts – The Friday Project Press A rather anti-Christmas story, in its utter bleak vision of a future Yule in a mechanized hostile World ruled by artificial intelligence. Many SF stories predicted robots as the saving grace of humanity – the ultimate labour saving devises. The reality is that automation relegates workers to the scrapheap. If a robot does a job, what is there to pay people for? And if robots ever do everything, humanity itself becomes an obsolete nuisance to be eradicated. The robots of a factory chase the humans living in hiding in its basements and cellars, reduced to tramps by poverty. An old bickering couple who live in a house discover it is Christmas when robots who maintain the Xmas tradition send them a card. The couple decide to bring some of the homeless to their house to celebrate Christmas, but is it all just a trap set by the robots to flush the hiding remnants of the working classes into the open? A very un-merry Christmas message. Arthur Chappell