Review - Berserker by Fred Saberhagen

Berserker is a collection of short stories, the beginning of a saga featuring the titular entities: one of the greatest inventions in science fiction.

Here is how the first story begins:

The machine was a vast fortress, containing no life, set by its long-dead masters to destroy anything that lived. It and many others like it were the inheritance of Earth from some war fought between unknown interstellar empires, in some time that could hardly be connected with any Earthly calendar.
One such machine could hang over a planet colonized by men and in two days pound the surface into a lifeless cloud of dust and steam, a hundred miles deep. This particular one had done just that.
It used no predictable tactics in its dedicated, unconscious war against life. The ancient, unknown gamesmen had built it as a random factor, to be loosed in the enemy's territory to do what damage it might. Men thought its plan of battle was chosen by the random disintegrations of atoms in a block of some long-lived isotope buried deep inside it, and so was not even in theory predictable by opposing brains, human or electronic.

This is probably my favourite collection of science fiction, due to the variety of the stories. The first one is classic puzzle-solving s-f: the protagonist has forced the berserker into a precarious stalemate, and must resist the berserker's mind-beam long enough for reinforcements to arrive by developing a system to trick it--which features his pet monkey (who reminded me of Leinster's Murgatroyd) and an ingenious "programming" solution. A solid story, of a kind that doesn't often get written anymore.

The rest of the stories are nothing like this one; some skew towards space opera, others adventure, horror, fantasy, and even humour; some stories share characters (which lends to the book more continuity then the short introductions to them, written for the book edition), others are stand-alone. This approach may turn off some people, but all of them are great and the variety gives the book an additional, almost mythical depth rarely found in science fiction, even when it is explicitly inspired or emulates mythology.

Consider the excerpt above, describing the berserker; it is the closest thing to an absolutely evil entity, a destroyer of worlds, unequivocally against life but at the same time random and created by unknown beings--it represents anything from death and hate to a cold, indifferent universe and chaos; the berserkers are much like the fomor, or the giants, or the titans; and the stories when read in sequence feel like folklore of the future.

Highly recommend it, and its author, Fred Saberhagen, criminally under-appreciated these days.