The robot is an icon of Science Fiction, alongside the spaceship, the alien and the time machine. Of all these familiar themes, the robot is perhaps the closest to our actual lives, as aliens and time travel have yet to be proven to exist, while rockets have become part of our reality since the 1960s, they have yet to be practical enough for us all to venture from this planet. The robot on the other hand is part-and-parcel of manufacturing today, replacing workers who once did the worst and most repetitive jobs. Our ideas, our worries, our intrigue with robots are a real, tangible thing.
Most of our literary ideas about robots were formed before any real robots existed. The first, and still to this day, our primary example is Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) by Mary Shelley. As you may recall the monster, who is too often called ‘Frankenstein’ rather than his creator, was not a robot. He was a living creature assembled from dead tissues and reactivated by electricity. In the minds of many, these facts have as little to do with anything. Frankenstein’s Adam became the quintessential representation of the ill effects of technology. This typecasting remained well into the Pulp era and beyond, as is evident in the title “Frankenstein Unlimited” (Astounding Stories, December 1936) by H. A. Highstone (about a robot revolt) and “Dial F. For Frankenstein” (Playboy, January 1964) by Arthur C. Clarke (about the accidental creation of an AI.).
Even earlier than Shelley’s rejected man of flesh were the legends of the golem, which didn’t receive a novel version until The Golem (1914) by Gustave Meyrink. The golem gave us the hulky form and brute mentality so often attributed to Frankenstein’s creation.
As important were the works of E. T. A. Hoffman that inspired that rainy party on Lake Diodati in 1816 when Mary Godwin, along with Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and Dr. John Polidori, challenged themselves to write a ghost story in the Hoffman tradition. That rained-out party gave us Frankenstein along with the vampire classic, “The Vampyre” by Polidori but attributed to Byron. The Hoffman tales “Automata” (1814) and “The Sand Man” (1814) include a musical automaton called The Talking Turk and the man Spallanzani creating automatons and trying to pass them off as real people.
After Frankenstein, “Maelzel’s Chess Player” (Southern Literary Messenger, April 1836) by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Bell-Tower” (Putnam’s Monthly, August 1855) by Herman Melville, “The Dancing Partner” (The Idler, March 1893) by Jerome K. Jerome and “Moxon’s Master” (San Francisco Examiner, April 16, 1899) by Ambrose Bierce all present mechanical humanoids who ultimately bring hard luck to their users. Poe’s reason for being so anti-social with his robot is that he wrote the story as a scathing revelation on a real device known as the Turk, a hoax invented by Wolfgang von Kemplen from 1770 to 1854. The machine supposedly could play chess though it actually housed a human operator. This sensation also inspired Hoffman’s tale. Other stories include The Eve of the Future (1886) by Villier de Isle-Adam, “The Brazen Android” (The Atlantic Monthly, April 1891) by William Douglas O’Connor, and “The New Frankenstein” (Pearson’s Magazine, May 1899) by Ernest Edward Kellett.
Not all robots were terrifying killers. The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868) by Edward Ellis and its spawn Frank Reade and his Electric Man (1885) by Luis Senaren were dime novels about fantastic inventions. Jules Verne produced his own robot elephant in The Steam House (1880). L. Frank Baum created a comical “army of Oz”, a wind-up robot known as Tik-Tok in Ozma of Oz (1907), The Little Wizard Stories of Oz (1914) and finally his own novel, Tik-Tok of Oz (1914). These mechanical entities were humorous extensions of the American fervor for invention. Unlike their Frankensteinian predecessors, no ill effects, only wonder, were the results of their creation.
The early Pulps, which were weeklies known as the ‘Soft Magazines’, produced a Frankenstein homage in “The Man Without a Soul” (All-Story, November 1913) (aka The Monster Men) by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which follows a collection of monsters created in vats lead by the human-seeming Number 13. Burroughs gives us the usual mad scientist and his beautiful daughter. The Metal Monster (aka The Metal Emperor) (Argosy-All-Story, August 7-September 25, 1920) by Fantasy master, A. Merritt, supposes a living metal that dwelt in a Himilayan city. Though not robots, the living metal has an emperor that rules over the metallic beings in a fashion we shall see again in several Pulp stories.
The 1920s produced perhaps the greatest of synthetic human stories in the play, R. U. R. (1920) by Karl Capek. This Czech work gave us the word “robot” as R. U. R. stands for Rossum’s Universal Robots. The actual robots would be described as androids now but Capek wasn’t interested in actual robotics but wanted to comment on worker’s rights in our industrialized world. The play offers a world in which robots are everywhere, doing all the labor tasks humans don’t want to do. These androids are treated like any other machine. The League of Humanity forms, wishing to free the robots. Their movement fails. Ten years pass and humanity’s numbers drop. The formula for creating robots is destroyed. The robots revolt and kill all the humans except an engineer named Alquist, because he works with his hands like a robot. Alquist, the lone human, is charged with recreating the robot formula. To do this he must dissect robots. He threatens to dissect two robots who have fallen in love. Instead, he declares them the new Adam and Eve.
And along come the Pulps. First Weird Tales, which produced many Frankensteins, then Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories that surprisingly did not. The majority of the robots in that first SF magazine would appear after Gernsback lost control of the magazines and T. O’Connor Sloane took over as editor. Ray A. Palmer after him would give us Adam Link, but it was John W. Campbell and Astounding Science Fiction that produce the modern classics of robot fiction: Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, Lester Del Rey’s “Helen O’loy” and Jack Williamson’s The Humanoids. More on Pulp robots to come…
