That was great! I don't know anything about the source material, but I liked that moody piece.

Thank you so much!

The source material was a recommendation from thisbluespirit early in our acquaintance; I loved it and wrote about it and then it just sort of hung out in my head for the next five years until I finally became interested in checking out the much later-written sequel novel (the author's strength is not in his prose, but I enjoyed how much the plot riffed on the original patterns and themes), which I thought served as a good impetus to rewatch the serial. It is currently on Dailymotion in its original four parts. We never see Kaldor City in The Robots of Death—the entire story is set aboard the doomed storm mine—but we get the evocatively sketched picture of the kind of society where despite the decadence afforded by the ubiquitous service of robots, everyone owes their souls to the company store unless they are rich enough or hereditarily privileged enough to be the paymasters instead; the company in this case is a mining concern which is monopolized by and essentially interchangeable with the government, dominated by the descendants of the old colonial elite and thrumming with paranoia, not just because of all the corporate maneuvering. Robophobia is so unmentionably shameful precisely because it calls attention to the anxieties the rest of society is doing its damnedest to repress. The first scene in the serial involves one of the crew receiving a massage from a robot while one of his colleagues winds him up with the urban legend of a robot massage that ended in dismemberment. When I tried to imagine Poul coming back as one of the few survivors of Storm Mine 4, I kept getting J.G. Ballard a lot more than Hugo Gernsback. It was encouraging to find out that Chris Boucher agreed with me, but then I had to ignore most of what he thought had happened instead.