Neil Willcox Cursed With Beauty

Cinderella Sets The Record Straight by V A Bettencourt in West Trestle Review

Cinderella is not happy with the glass slipper, and not happy with the prince who does not recall her face well enough to recognise her. But she has a plan. A partnership, to go into business.

You may be thankful for her work.

Read This: To find out what Cinderella is up to, happily ever after Don’t Read This: Is moving from a feudal system to a capitalist one really an improvement on the tale?

In the near future (1983) a robot (Yul Brynner) in Westworld went wrong (Westworld, 1973), started shooting everyone, worse still was anachronistic escaping to “Medieval World” and “Roman World”. The Delos corporation have rebuilt* and the new version which includes new worlds is now (the near future of 1985) ready for the first guests.

Those guests include sceptical newspaper Chuck Browning and his former protégé and lover, TV reporter Tracy Ballard, who happily accepts everything Delos tells her, also Chuck calls her Socks. Other guests include the winner of a game show, a Japanese Minister and a Russian General.

Delos has spent $1.5 Billion to make sure it won’t go wrong. Their method to prevent the robots going wild is to use more advanced robots to run the park. It’s all robots except for a couple of executives and a handful of technicians (the robots go wrong when they get wet). One of them, Harry, has suspicions, and he teams up with Chuck to find out what’s going on.

As might be imagined, the Delos corporation isn’t just trying to get backing by offering free holidays to influential people. They are making robots that look and act like real people and intend to replace the world’s leaders before they lead the world to disaster (see Westworld (2016-22) for another version of this).

Watch This: For a paranoid 1970s science fiction thriller, about robots not going wrong, but instead being used for wrong Don’t Watch This: Apparently we learned nothing from this

• Westworld is a Michael Crichton story in which a futuristic theme park goes wrong, then they rebuild and have another go. Jurassic Park is a Michael Crichton story in which a futuristic theme park goes wrong, then they rebuild and have another go. I would say stop banging that drum Michael but 1. He’s dead; 2. This has made two major film and tv franchises; and 3. Yeah, this is pretty much what people do.

A set of six vignettes more-or-less related to other stories in the sequence, is now on my Patreon site for free. Six Knives.

Monster Of The Week 158 is BoneMistress, runs the bone shop in town, lives in the bone house, is studying bones in night school, trying to get an MBA (Mistress in Bone Arts).

Monster Of The Week is supported by my Patreon, which I am manifestly unqualified to operate not having an MPA (Magister Patroneus Artis), yet somehow there are stories, jokes, recipes and more appearing there on a regular basis.