The Silver Eggheads

This old sci-fi oddity, which dates back to 1958, is a sharp and (dare I say) eggheaded satire on the publishing industry, the art of writing, and the public's consumption of entertainment. In a future emerging from the slightly twisted mind of Fritz Leiber, writers have been replaced by machines called "wordmills" that crank out fiction for the masses who demand a cheesy new book every day – stories built out of market research for trendsters, but which offer nothing for deep thinkers. A union of writers destroys all the wordmills, only to find that they can't even begin to write for themselves after all. Meanwhile, this future society features mega-advanced robots with literary and philosophical musings and active sex lives, who turn out to be much better writers. Furthermore, publishers plan to overcome the wordmill destruction not by relying on the newly re-emerging human writers, but by using "silver eggheads" in which the brains of real classic writers of the past have been imprisoned in a world of pure thought. Much of Leiber's satire is period-based, but he was remarkably prescient on future trends in mass entertainment consumption. Many mass-market bestsellers are now being written by teams of wordmilling hacks, and you can really see some parallels between Leiber's lowest-common-denominator future mass entertainment and our modern obsession with things like iPods, video games, and instant messaging. That's what makes for good satire, and Leiber is pretty funny to boot. [~doomsdayer520~]

In a far-fetched, far-flung future, humans have begun relegating themselves to mere keepers of the machine, and no one feels it more keenly than the 'authors,' who take credit for the wordwooze written by computer 'wordmills.' An author's revolt smashes the wordmills, and the hapless authors find themselves attempting to actually write. Realizing they can't do it, the attempt to enlist the help of the Silver Eggheads, an artist's colony of disembodied brains. We robots find this a groundbreaking novel as it was the first to seriously suggest robots with gender and sex lives, as well as their own literature and culture, and in fact we consider St Fritz one of our greatest heroes and Zane Gort, the robot author, one of his greatest characters.

A very funny work by Fritz Leiber.The stoy is like this: all the books are made by wordmills and writers are bored to death, so they revolt. They destroy the wordmills and start to write books them-selfs but they find out they can't write a page much less a book. The field is open to the eggheads, brains in eggs. It goes all over sci-fi from wordwooze to robot(male) and robox(female) sex. It is one of the best funny sci-fi I've ever seen. It's a must read, but if you don't like wordmills burned, blown up, or melted a don't read.