Fondly Fahrenheit is a science fiction novelette by Alfred Bester. A newly arrived plantation owner on a hot and sultry planet has a personal android that looks so like him even he's not sure which one he is anymore. The android suffers from temperature-related psychotic episodes. When the mercury goes over 90°F, the android is no longer all reet in the heat. A murder is brought to their door, and neither the human nor the android have a good alibi.

Published 1954 in Fantasy and Science Fiction; reprinted in the collections Starburst, Virtual Unrealities, OMNI, and Cyber Killers.

Clark Humphrey on miscmedia.com says it's a "futurization of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men premise."

I read the OMNI version but only vaguely remember the acompanying illustration. Wouldn't this work well as an episode of The Twilight Zone? The android actor could have a CG skin applied to closely match the other actor, so that only mannerisms and odd tricks of light would give away the difference between the android and the owner. I suppose one talented actor could do both parts more cheaply, though.

"Fondly Fahrenheit" was written and published in the era of the post-WW2 recovery and the Korean War from 1950-53. Science and technology were advancing in leaps and bounds. The cold war against communism was in full swing and Joe McCarthy was performing his version of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" in the Senate.

Bester's story took aim at Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics" by introducing an android that killed and destroyed property under particular conditions. It blended commentary on the insanity of war, the role of technology in the age of "duck and cover" being practiced in schools, and how things can get sidetracked (intentionally or not) by a human with fundamental issues in their own wiring. The story was also one of the earlier examples of bringing in psychoanalysis and psychology in general to a mainstream science fiction tale.

The odd thing that threw me the first time I ever read the story was the constantly shifting viewpoint character. One minute it was the android, next it was the owner -- sometimes in the adjacent sentence. I initially thought it was an alien who could jump between bodies until Bester brought out a logical reason for the havoc. It also showed that Asimov's rules would work just fine as long as the android or robot was functioning properly.

It seems a little warm in here. All reet! All reet!

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