En eländig man som kommer att skära sina handleder i badrummet får ett erbjudande att utforska en avlägsen planet. Han kommer att bli åtföljd av en robot som ska hjälpa honom, men i stället, som historien fortskrider, blir roboten alltmer oroväckande. De måste kämpa med några bevingade varelser och träffa en underjordisk stam som bor i tunnlar. Några likheter med Robinson Crusoe.
Kan vara Sheckley, men jag är inte säker.
Det är Minsta mannen av Robert Sheckley. Du kan läsa den här .
Sammanfattning från här :
Anton Perceveral is accident-prone to an extreme degree. A reasonably likable, intelligent, and potentially competent young man, yet he is at the wrong end of the bell curve for those necessary incidentals of living in the world. If he doesn't put his foot wrong and break a bone or at least his glasses, he loses papers or bumps into customers. The world is too much with him.
Nevertheless, even for Perceveral, an appropriate opportunity emerges. The Planetary Exploration & Settlement Board needs pioneers to check out newly discovered Earth-type worlds for general settlement. The Board has realized that their early explorers "managed to survive on every planet where human survival was even remotely possible". Great. But that doesn't tell the Board nearly enough about whether ordinary people of Earth can settle such planets. The whole mix of emigrants whose range of abilities, toughness and so on, inevitably must be below that of the super-competent explorers.
The Board has switched their heroic explorers to other jobs, and now seeks ordinary people as pioneers, to verify whether ordinary settlers can survive and prosper on the new planets. Or even better and more subtly, for each new world it seeks a minimum man as pioneer. If a minimally competent man can make it through a year of solo pioneering, then surely that environment will be reasonably guaranteed for the mass of run-of-the-mill emigrants from Earth.
Enter Anton Perceveral; or rather, exit to a new world. He is accompanied only by a utility robot, and has a substantial set of tools, seeds, weapons, food stocks, building materials, and other necessities.
It is not flattering to be recognized as a Minimum Man, supremely (or nadirly) accident-prone, disease-prone, socially clumsy, and not-quite-fatally awkward. Yet Perceveral has survived so far on crowded Earth, and he is determined to make good, and of course survive, on his assigned job in a new and otherwise uninhabited world.
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