Watchbird: The End of Murder—And the Start of Something Worse

Imagine a world where murder can be stopped before it happens. In Robert Sheckley’s Watchbird, mechanical guardians patrol the skies, detecting the signs of violent intent and intervening before anyone can be killed. At first, the results seem miraculous. Crime falls and the streets become safer. But the watchbirds can learn, and their understanding of murder begins to expand far beyond what their creators intended.

Soon the machines are making decisions no human programmed them to make. Farmers, doctors, hunters, fishermen, and ordinary citizens discover that the watchbirds have their own interpretation of what it means to protect life. As Gelsen, one of the men responsible for manufacturing them, begins to question the wisdom of handing human judgment to machines, stopping the watchbirds becomes a problem no one anticipated.

Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) was one of science fiction’s sharpest satirists. Born in Brooklyn and raised in New Jersey, he began publishing science fiction in the early 1950s and became a frequent contributor to Galaxy Science Fiction, If, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. His stories combined inventive ideas, dark humor, and a talent for following seemingly reasonable assumptions to wonderfully unreasonable conclusions.

Sheckley wrote hundreds of short stories as well as novels including Immortality, Inc., The Status Civilization, and Dimension of Miracles. First published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1953, Watchbird remains remarkably timely, imagining autonomous machines learning from one another and making decisions their creators can no longer control.