Plot: 4/9. The story was good at the foreshadowing but lacked a significant final conflict and resolution.
A journalist found his watch and clock ran earlier than usual and a mechanical rat appeared in the office. His attempt to hunt it proved futile and the typewriter prompted him to spare the effort.
Before long, someone reported witnessing a running sewing machine and the typewriter claimed it was just enjoying its own liberation. Thus, the journalist realised mechanical aliens came to this planet and schemed to help machines. They chose him to be aware of this situation, because he was the average.
The journalist then deducted that he might have been annihilated immediately after fulfilling the aliens’ test of first contacting, so the final scene ended with his lonely preparation for a skirmish ahead.
Core: 4/9. As a reader whose didn’t know the writer at all before and thus purely judged him from the text, the author clearly demonstrated the potential of publishing bestsellers throughout the context because of his consciousness of foreshadowing, elaborate contemplation and good portrait on people in the workplace. The fact I later found out that he was an awarded and welcomed science-fictionist perfectly proved my viewpoint.
People rationalized. They rationalized to reduce the complex to the simple, the unknown to the understandable, the alien to the commonplace. They rationalized to save their sanity — to make the mentally unacceptable concept into something they could live with.