TY  - BOOK
AU  - Harmon,Jim
AU  - West
TI  - How to Make Friends
T2  - Produced from Galaxy Magazine October 1962
AV  - PS 
PY  - 2016///
CY  - Salt Lake City, UT
PB  - Project Gutenberg
KW  - Science fiction
KW  - Short stories
KW  - Mars (Planet) -- Fiction
KW  - Loneliness -- Fiction
N1  - Release date is 2016-01-01; Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net; Original publication data not identified
N2  - "How to Make Friends" by Jim Harmon is a science fiction short story written in the early 1960s. The narrative centers on William Manet, an overseer on Mars who grapples with profound loneliness in his isolated job at an Atmosphere Seeder Station. The story explores themes of companionship, desire, and the underlying absurdity of human connections in the face of existential solitude.  As the plot unfolds, Manet's solitude drives him into a psychological struggle, and he eventually encounters a character named Trader Tom who offers him a "Socialization Kit" designed to create friends. Inside the kit, Manet finds various components and a manual titled "The Making of Friends and Others." In his humorous yet tragic attempts to create meaningful relationships, he constructs Ronald, a mundane companion, and Veronica, a less-than-astute female figure. However, when he tries to build Victor, who becomes his adversary, the story culminates in a poignant realization about companionship and the nature of friendship. Ultimately, Manet finds that challenges and conflicts can be more engaging than the shallow, vacuous connections he initially sought. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
UR  - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/50818
ER  -