Author: Harry Bates

Farewell to the Master is a novella from 1940 in which a ship lands in Washington, a man and a robot come out, and the final line inverts everything the reader has assumed about which of the two was in charge. Hollywood turned it into The Day the Earth Stood Still and changed both the ending and the point. Bates edited Astounding Stories in the early thirties and had real influence over what American magazines printed, then wrote comparatively little afterwards. His reputation now rests on one story and, more precisely, on one sentence of it.