Berserker

Berserkers: The Beginning is a repackaging of much older short story collection set in Fred Saberhagen's Berserker universe, a setting where an ancient warfare between two forgotten races spawned the Berserkers-- once thought to have been autonomous killing machines designed to be "ultimate weapons"......more

I'm coming to the end of Alice Munro's "The Beggar Maid" and will be stuck with "War and Peace" if I don't start something else. This book collects the earliest of the Berserker stories. I think I may have read some of this already in an anthology the author collected called "Machines That Kill." He......more

These short stories reminded me of Asimov's "I, Robot" stories because most of them have humans defeating the Berserker or its agents with some little trick of illogical reasoning, humanity or history that is unknown to the Berserker fleet. Asimov's robot stories were like solving logic puzzles agai......more

Fred Saberhagen’s Berserkers: the Beginning is pulpy space opera of a style similar to E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s Skylark series, albeit published in the ‘60s and ‘70s when the New Wave of science fiction was rising to prominence. There are many intriguing elements to these stories that should feel familiar......more

Decades ago, Fred Saberhagen created a universe where humanity and a few other species are at war with a race of machines. Nobody knows too much about the machines except that they are programmed to destroy all life. The supposition is that they were created for an ancient war and that they eventual......more