The Berskers are a race of killer, self-replicating, life-exterminating machines from Fred Saberhagen's Berserker series, starting with the 1963 short story Without a Thought.
History[]
Background[]
Berserkers were built millions of years ago by a race known as The Builders, a warlike race that was engaged in a seemingly endless battle with another species known only as The Red Race. Eventually, The Builders created the Berserkers as a weapon against the Red Race, and while Berserkers did obliterate their opponent, their program to destroy all life also brought an end to Builders race shortly after: apparently Builders failed to ensure that their creation would not turn against their creators. The Berserkers' new mission was to destroy all life everywhere.
Without a Thought[]
Berserkers are originally presented as a sporadic threat arising in a few isolated incidents, but they slowly build up giant armies to fight man and become an existential menace. Berserkers can take many forms, from enormous starfaring spaceships to ground-based vehicles and even robots disguised as humans or other organic life. Eventually, The Space Force manages to fight off their initial 137 ship Armada, but their original reign of terror lead humans to form another group that fought Berserkers, known as The Templars.
The defeated Fleet had left human space to harness more power in order to create more Berserkers, and they came back by the thousands. They too were defeated by united humans, and came back once more incorporating human-berserker hybrids into their scheme. One group of humans would eventually create and unleash an anti-Berserker Berserker to aid humanity in its fight.
The war between Berserkers and humanity has never had a complete closure, as the author Fred Saberhagen died with his last Berserkers series, Rogue Berserker. It becomes clear that even after 500 years after humanity seemingly won their war against the genocidal machines, Berserkers recuperated and are still strong.
Fighting style[]
Ideally, Berserkers should be perfect machines for exterminating life. They are, however, never shown as very serious threats in the novels. Which is to say, Saberhagen seems to intend them to be threatening, but they are almost always defeated by heroes who are unlikely to the point of incompetence, very small numbers of humans that were already at the mercy of the machines, or very simple tricks that they should have rationally learned to avoid by the time they invaded human space. While sentient and capable of setting goals and crafting strategies, their intelligence is ultimately somewhat rudimentary.
Berserkers will also kidnap humans, calling the "Goodlife. These humans are promised a temporary reprieve from death if they will betray humanity and assist the Berserkers in their mission of extermination, but this almost always backfires in the stories. It seems irrational that they would open such glaring weaknesses up to humans, but they apparently do. Berserkers are also shown to preform medical experiments on humans, which are apparently never communicated between Berserkers, as after 100 years of fighting human, a Berserker found a human's reaction to getting flayed alive as "curious".
It is possible that the author just chose to focus only on stories where humans won, but the amount of sheer incompetence shown by the Berserkers would seem to suggest that they have difficulty understanding human thoughts and behavior. It is also conceivable that they do not learn from failure in the same way that humans do, or that they do not communicate the information that they collected about human behavior very well.
Gallery[]
Trivia[]
- Berserkers seem to be the inspiration of several other villains such as the Reapers and the Gah Lak Tus. The overall concept of hostile, self-replicating, space-faring machines has been explored in numerous other science fiction venues.