"We Know Who We Are"
by Robert Silverberg
Form: Short story
Year: 1970
ID: 1266
Publication history:
- 1970: Amazing Stories July 1970, Magazine
- 1971: Moonferns and Starsongs, Ballantine Mass market paperback, ISBN 345-02278-5, 244 pp.
- 1979: The Songs of Summer, Gollancz Hard cover book, ISBN 0575025654, 173 pp.
- 1981: The Songs of Summer, Pan Mass market paperback, ISBN 0330263153
- 1982: Les Chants de l'été, J'ai lu Mass market paperback, ISBN 2277213926, 245 pp., in French as Nous savons qui nous sommes
- 1986: Amazing Stories: Visions of Other Worlds, TSR Mass market paperback
- 1997: Ringing the Changes (The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg Volume 5), HarperCollins UK Trade paperback, ISBN 0-586-21373-2, 359 pp.
- 2002: Le Chemin de la nuit: Nouvelles au fil du temps, tome 1, 1953-1970, Flammarion Trade paperback, ISBN 2080682350, 727 pp., in French as Nous savons qui nous sommes
Other resources:
[None on record]
Comments:
This is a strange far-future tale set in Shining City, a vast technological wonder of a city inhabited by a small number of people whose every need is satisfied instantly by ever-present machines. The people are happy: they know who they are, and they know what they want to be. The city is surrounded by a great purple desert, and no one from the city ventures far into it. Then one day a woman walks out of the desert. She has come, she says, to see the Knowing Machine, which happens to the the one machine the people of the city never use. After all, they know who they are already. Or do they?