Beside Still Waters: Solitude on a Rock Called Martha

Far from Earth, prospector Mark Rogers has made a home on a lonely slab of rock in the asteroid belt. He calls it Martha. There isn’t much there—a shack, a patch of soil, an air pump, a few water tanks, and Charles, an ordinary working robot that Mark has spent years turning into something much more interesting. He gives Charles a name, expands his vocabulary, and gradually creates the companion he never had.

Years pass beneath an endless night of stars. Mark and Charles tend their crops, repair their little world, argue about women, and talk away the hours. But machinery wears out, supplies disappear, and even a carefully built refuge cannot escape time forever. Beside Still Waters is a remarkably quiet and moving Robert Sheckley story about two old friends alone in the immensity of space—and the strange question of how much of a friendship has to be real before it matters.

Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) became one of science fiction’s most distinctive short-story writers during the 1950s, publishing in magazines including Galaxy Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. He was especially gifted at taking a simple science-fiction premise and pushing it in an unexpected direction, often with sharp humor and an ending that changed the way the entire story looked.

Sheckley wrote hundreds of short stories as well as novels including Immortality, Inc., The Status Civilization, and Mindswap. Although he became famous for satire and absurd situations, Beside Still Waters reveals another side of his writing: restrained, intimate, and surprisingly tender, with an old prospector, a battered robot, and an enormous sky full of stars.