"Baby, You Were Great" is a 1968 science fiction short story by American writer Kate Wilhelm. It was first published in Orbit 2.
Damon Knight — Wilhelm's husband — stated that "Baby, You Were Great" was inspired by his 1964 story, "Semper Fi", "with whose point of view Wilhelm disagreed", and that it is "in a sense, the same story [as "Semper Fi", but] with an entirely different plot, setting, and cast of characters."[1]
In a world where technology allows the direct recording and replaying of emotional states and subjective physical sensory experiences, a casting director holds auditions to find a woman who will have a suitable reaction to being raped.
"Baby, You Were Great" was a finalist for the 1968 Nebula Award for Best Short Story.[2] It has been described as "an indictment of men's exercising technological control over women's bodies",[3] while Strange Horizons emphasizes that the story "does not suffer in quality simply because the technology [for recording and transmitting emotions] it imagined shows no signs of arriving soon."[4]