Robot Population
The future represented in the world of these stories is one with a population dominated by robots. Since the book as a whole is primarily a condemnation of humanity rather than technology, it is probably safer to take just one of the two obvious roads to symbolic meaning here: the overabundance of robots symbolizes the inherent laziness of man which lacks the foresight to see handing over operations to machinery will inevitably doom him.
Humans Are Medieval
Most of the humans that do populate the stories live within a feudal construct of society. Even though the stories themselves obviously take place within a time frame reflecting great technological advancement, the human population is characterized by this archaic and seemingly outdated socio-political dynamic. And therein lies the symbolic significance. Humanity is achingly slow to progress forward beyond that which remains familiar, no matter how bad it may be.
ALTRUIZINE
ALTRUIZINE is a drug which its discovered asserts will bring about an era of complete brotherhood based on compassion and cooperation. The drug is essentially a means of telepathically transmitting emotions of one person to another with the end in mind that he who truly feels the pain of another will experience empathy and compassion. Alas, this is not the case and the drug becomes a very dark symbolic representation of the extreme limitations of humans to genuinely empathize with the plight of others.
“Prince Ferrix and the Princess Crystal”
This is a love story about a robot prince and princess. The princess, however, has learned of a race of non-robots known colloquially as “palefaces” and impulsively decides that she will only marry one of these. The robot knight, being no fool, covers himself in mud until he begins to take on the appearance of one of these palefaces. Which is all fine and well until an actual human shows up and the difference between the real paleface and the fake version of the prince becomes impossible not to see. The larger symbolism of racial prejudice here is equally obvious, but as an allegory the details can be interpreted in a variety of ways.
The Pirate Pugg
Pugg is a dragon with voracious hunger for knowledge. Such is the intensity of this hunger that any strangers trying to make their way through his domain are captured and held hostage until they pay a most unusual ransom: information which Pugg has not yet acquired. In order to defeat this strange form of piracy, a “Demond of the Second Kind” is created which literally extracts meaningless information from a polluted barrel. Ultimately, Pugg is hoisted by his own petard as he “crushed beneath that avalanche of facts” learning things of no significance to his own existence. The story becomes a symbol for what at the time—ironically referred to now, of course—was a genuine fear of something called “information overload.”
