The Ideal

Dixon Wells has trouble arriving on time, holding his father's confidence and keeping his thoughts away from television performers. His former physics professor, Haskel van Manderpootz, has a more ambitious concern: proving what reason and machinery can accomplish. In the professor's New York laboratory, a metal robot supplies the occasion for extravagant arguments about individuality, perfect societies and the disadvantages of perfection.

Stanley G. Weinbaum's comic science fiction story turns those arguments into a personal problem when Dixon tries the professor's idealizator. He thinks of a girl and sees an image that leaves everyday life painfully disappointing. The professor's own trial exposes a very different idea of human excellence. Told through Dixon's amused and increasingly troubled account, the story connects speculative invention with romantic longing and an inventor's enormous self-regard. Readers interested in early visions of intelligent machines will also find a sharp comedy about the cost of getting exactly what the imagination wants.