Just finished rereading something I read over 50 years ago,
The Runaway Robot, credited to Lester del Rey but, I gather, written from del Rey's outline by Paul Fairman. Terribly anthropopathic robot, but what's to be expected from the author of that unpleasant story "Helen O'Loy"? Much more to my taste was another reading of Heinlein's "...And He Built a Crooked House," which is about as near perfect for what it is as anything I've read. I expect to start a rereading of
Asimov's Mysteries shortly.
I'm rereading, extremely slowly,
Paradise Lost, and just now, in Book IV, I was bonked over the head by Milton's way of describing Satan's first prowl through Eden in a fashion that reminds me of, say, an A. E. van Vogt monster story -- I'm thinking of the "Black Destroyer" one about Coeurl. The point of view is close to the invader's. As Satan gets closer to his prey, he keeps taking different shapes of animals. Whew, is it sfnal!
And Milton had that kind of imagination, or a proto form of it anyway. In one of his autobiographical prose passages elsewhere, Milton referred to his meeting Galileo in exile, and in this poem he thinks of the astronomer using his telescope on the moon so as "to descry new lands, Rivers our mountains in her spotty globe." I'm using Alastair Fowler's abundantly-annotated edition of the 1667
PL.