The word “robot” came to us from the 1920 play “R. U. R.” by Karl Capek. Capek’s robots are actually androids who rebel against their creators. So, I imagined (as I think many do) that Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories (up to the April 1929 issue) was filled with robots. This actually isn’t true. After Hugo’s ownership, once the magazine sold to Teck Enterprises, there was John Beynon Harris’s “The Lost Machine” (Amazing Stories, April 1932) with its sympathetic Martian robot, Neil R. Jones’s Zoromes with Professor Jameson (a long-running series starting July 1931), and eventually, under Ray Palmer, Eando Binder’s famous Adam Link (starting January 1939), the robot who pleads to have the rights of a man. But before all that, there was only a few stories, and with the exception of one, none of them the first was hugely influential.
That exceptional one was the first. “The Comet Doom” by Edmond Hamilton (Amazing Stories, January 1928) has extraterrestrial robots trying to deflect the earth’s orbit. Hamilton’s metal men are actually cyborgs, having organic brains, the great-granddaddy of the Cybermen. Hamilton (and artist Frank R. Paul) created the look of future robots to come in this issue of Amazing Stories.
Hamilton had used androids for “Across Space” (Weird Tales, September October November 1926) and gigantic robots for “The Metal Giants” in Weird Tales, December 1926, two years earlier. Once again we see how important and largely uncredited Hamilton was. (Hamilton’s friend, Jack Williamson would later become one of the seminal authors to write about robots with “With Holded Hands” (Astounding, July 1947), but his first story “The Metal Man” isn’t really a robot story but about a man who gets turned into metal. It appeared in Amazing Stories, December 1928.)
Nine months after “The Comet Doom”, J. Schlossel gave us “To the Moon By Proxy” (Amazing Stories, October 1928). Schlossel wrote six Science Fiction stories, most for Weird Tales but the last two for Hugo Gernsback. In this story an aging inventor creates a robot “proxy” to carry out his exploration of the moon. Before this he tests the proxy out on a hold-up man, the escaped lion featured on the cover and a truck full of bootleg liquor. Once on the moon the robot jumps about the lifeless sphere before exploring a cave that contains strange lunar life. These mysterious lunarians crush the robot’s head with rocks, ending the inventor’s adventures. E. F. Bleilier says of the tale: “This was the first story to ever consider sending an unmanned probe to the moon and watching the results on television, and Schlossel should have full credit.” (The Gernsback Days: A Study of the Evolution of Modern Science Fiction, 2004)
“The Psychophonic Nurse” (Amazing Stories, November 1928) by David H. Keller M. D. follows a scientist who creates a robot nanny using something similar to a record player to program routines. He builds a second male robot to walk the pram. The new freedom from parental responsibilities allows the scientist’s wife to become a big name in social circles. The scientist feels a growing coldness between them and starts walking the baby disguised as the robot. A sudden winter storm threatens the child and father’s life but both are found huddled in the bushes, trying to keep warm. In his delirium, the husband confesses how he feels about his wife’s new role, she gives up everything to look after husband and child, finding she too is happier. This tale isn’t so much about robots as it is Keller’s rather dated attitudes about women and work. Unlike some of his later, more probing psychological outings, this one is tedious and wrong-minded.
This story appeared on Pepsi-Cola Playhouse in 1954, starring Lee Marvin as the father.
Most of Amazing‘s robots show up after Hugo sold his magazines and started new ones, Science Wonder and Air Wonder in 1929, both eventually combined to form Wonder Stories. Here Hugo Gernsback could explore all the new exciting ideas spawned from “The Comet Doom” (as were other publications such as Amazing Stories and Astounding, and of course, Weird Tales, mentioned above).
“The Threat of the Robot” by David H. Keller M.D. (Science Wonder Stories, June 1929) is an amazing piece of prediction even if the story is weak. A man named Ball who has been away twenty years in the jungle returns to New York to find robots are replacing humans everywhere, including his beloved football. The stands are empty because nobody has to come to the stadium but can watch the robot players at home on their televisions. Ball takes his fortune and buys his way into the team, into radio and TV, then slowly unravels his plan to destroy the threat of the robots, by having a team of humans defeat the robot champs. Keller’s solution is backward-thinking and a little too easy but he does predict such things as Pay-Per-View TV, robots replacing humans in factories, and the social changes caused by television. The robots are not intelligent and are not a threat in the “monster” sense but the larger sociological one.
“The Artificial Man” by Clare Winger Harris (Science Wonder Quarterly, Fall 1929) is a love triangle with a Frankensteinian twist. Rosalind Nelson is engaged to George Gregory before a football accident costs him his leg. George replaces the limb with an artificial one and the marriage is still planned. Later a car accident costs him an arm and his mind takes a cruel change. Rosalind rejects the new George and has fallen for Dr. David Bell, the surgeon and old friend, who has watched over the injured man. George comes to Bell with a strange idea. He plans to replace as much of his body as possible, to see at what point he stops being human. Bell rejects the challenge and Gregory leaves. He returns years later, after David and Rosalind’s marriage, having replaced most of his body. Only one arm, his chest and head remain. George traps Bell and tries to kill him. Only the quick work of Bell’s assistant saves his life. While unconscious, the police trap and kill the artificial man, who admits his error on his death bed. The story doesn’t feature a true robot since Gregory isn’t entirely a machine but we can see the dehumanized cyborg theme here.
One of Clare Harris’s last contributions to Science Fiction before she left the field, was a list of sixteen themes for Science Fiction she selected in a letter to the August 1931 issue of Wonder Stories. She does not mention robots specifically but #9 is “The creation of super-machines”. This shows how even in 1931 SF hadn’t yet become “time travel, rockets and robots”, though Harris does mention all three in her own way.
“The Robot Master” by O. Beckwith (Air Wonder Stories, October 1929) is a tale of robots used by a madman to conquer the world. Hyle Benning has created human-shaped robots with small ball-shaped heads. These machines are controlled by a gigantic board in his secret lair on an artificial island. From there the robots fly bombers against New York, and if Benning has his way, the entire world. He offers his power to his nephew, Arnld, but the young man refuses. The uncle attempts to kill him but Arnld sneaks back in and turns the tables. For a brief second, Arnld is tempted to accept his Uncle’s offer of ruling the world but he remembers a quote from the Bible. The robots are menacing but not independent. Beckworth is the first writer to envision robots controlled by a board of levers and switches.
“The Ancient Brain” (Science Wonder Stories, October 1929) by Arthur G. Stangland has a man’s brain preserved from modern times and resurrected in a future world where robots do most of the work. The robots are a detail and not that important to the tale.
“The Robot Terror” (Scientific Detective Monthly, March 1930) by Melbourne Huff is a little different since it appeared in what is partly a Mystery Pulp as much as a Science Fiction one. The plot follows the criminal robot known as “Monarch”. It steals a fortune in diamonds and kills a police man. The mastermind behind the killer machine sends a letter to the narrator, an inspector, warning he will kill the man’s daughter, Claire, if he tries to stop him. A voice on the radio is the clue that leads to the fiend, a madman named Eric, the Wireless Man, who is also the voice of Monarch. A visit to the asylum almost proves fatal when the doctor in charge of Eric, McMunsey, turns out to be an accomplice. And to make things worse, the detectives are helpless as Eric directs Monarch to break into the narrator’s home and kill his daughter. Fortunately, the cops have made a friend in another inmate, named Jose, who saves the day.
Two things strike me about this story. First, it is written in a refreshingly easy manner to read. Much of Gernsback’s story purchases are hard going, often stilted or Victorian in style. This one moves like a detective story should. Secondly, the image of the remote-control killer is the epitome of what killer robots will become, especially in the comic books. Here we have Schlossel’s “robot proxy” used for evil.
“The Infinite Brain” (Science Wonder Stories, May 1930) by John S. Campbell begins with a printing error. Gernsback mistakenly attributes the story to a John C. Campbell. Campbell should not be confused with John W. Campbell Jr, editor of Astounding Science Fiction either. John Scott Campbell was a West Coast author who also wrote for Top-Notch.
“The Infinite Brain” has an inventor named Anton Des Roubles trying to create an intelligent machine. He dies and leaves the experiment to the narrator. When Gene switches it on, the machine forces him to not turned it off again. The machine has abilities:
After a moment I arose from the couch and, walking steadily, returned to the laboratory and its maze of clicking humming apparatus. Stepping up to the switch-board, and keeping my averted from the big dark lens, which I sensed was watching my every move, I reached for the switch. But even as I did so, a frightful thing happened.
From a position on the floor which I had not noticed a long, many-jointed metal arm shot up and seizing me about the waist dragged me away from the rack. I struggled, i shrieked–but of what use are mere muscles when pitted against cold, tireless steel!
The narrator learns over time that the machine contains Anton’s personality and memories. At first the new machine and Gene get along fine. It is only when it wants to add an unlimited amount of storage space that we see that cruel streak again.
Once done the machine changes completely in attitude. It begins creating its own robots, remote devices controlled by radio. The ultimate goal is, of course, to take over the world. There are bombers and attack robots. One of its destroyer machines is the giant walking robot seen in the illustration (reminiscent of H. G. Wells’ Martian tripods). The Infinite Brain destroys New York and wipes out whole armies. It is up to Gene to try and stop the insane machine. He sneaks back into Manhattan but is captured.
The Infinite Brain does not destroy him out of some small memory of their friendship. He sends Gene back with a message for the world. Instead he returns with the answer. The Infinite Brain uses radio to communicate with its robots. The scientists jam the air waves and the menace becomes disarmed. In the end, the giant machine prefers retreat and sinks itself under a South Sea island.
After a long build up, the story is resolves fairly quickly. Campbell’s story is certainly the precursor to tales of giant computers like Colossus (1966) by D. F. Jones and its film version Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970). The robot war theme is the heart of The Terminator movies.
“The Eternal Man Revives” by D. D. Sharp (Wonder Stories Quarterly, Summer 1930) is a sequel story in which Zulerich awakens in a world of communistic and tyrannical people. The will of the ruling class is enforced by a squad of robotic policemen called telecops:
…Three grotesque imitations of men got out. They were giant fellows. They must have been ten feet tall, with angular arms as thick as a man’s thigh, and legs as large in proportion as the arms. They walked forward with a stiff mechanical lock step….
Zulerich shares his secret of eternity with the evil rulers, tricking them all into a hundred year sleep. Playing social reformer he tries to fix things but fails. With all the rulers asleep, there is no one to command the telecops. A weak sequel that has not received the reprintings that the first did. (At least 19 times.)
“The Radium Master” by Jim Vanny (Wonder Stories, August 1930) is a lengthy tale about two men who hear of an expedition to a metal city in the jungle called Urania. They fly over the spot and have their motors burnt out like the first expedition. They are taken in a futuristic ground car to see the ruler of Urania, the Masked Emperor. He shows the duo the wonders of the city including the numerous robots that do all the labor. The main characters are trained in the use of mining robots. The robots aren’t all that important to the plot but help support the Radium Master’s reputation as a genius and a man of Science. Too bad he’s crazy and wants to take over the world…
“In 20,000 AD” (Wonder Stories, September 1930) by Nat Schachner & Arthur Leo Zagat uses the word “Robot” to define its slave race but they are not machines but twelve-foot high men bred for strength and stupidity. The two authors probably took the word as did Karl Capek, from the Czech word for ‘forced labor”. There was a sequel in March 1931.
“The Man Who Laughs” by Norman J. Bonney (Wonder Stories, October 1930) has the mousy scientist, Menley, creating a simple robot with push buttons to exact his revenge on Crawford, the industrialist who has ruthlessly exploited him. At gun point, Crawford is forced to push the buttons on the robot. The machine picks him up and ultimately kills him. The experience is so intense that Menley is found laughing insanely afterwards. Bonney’s slight tale is fraught with cliches and lacks any real new ideas. Menley could have simply shot Crawford with his gun.
“The Soulless Entity” by Anthony Pelcher (Wonder Stories, January 1931) is not much of a robot story but is very important for what it later inspired. A Dr. Martinoff is murdered and the police attribute his death to his robot invention. Martinoff’s good friend, Dr. Farnum, knows the robot was not to blame and hunts down the human killer, a confidence man named Solokoff. Farnum extorts a signed permission from the killer so that once he is dead his body belongs to the doctor. Solokoff goes to the electric chair but Farnum revives him and turns him into an electro-zombie. The criminal’s girlfriend tracks him down and only promises to behave once Farnum allows her to take care of the dead man. She eventually poisons herself and Solokoff.
The final product is a weird, largely pointless story of twisted love and again is a cyborg tale. What is important about it is, the rather lame robot inspired two very famous stories to follow. The idea of a robot being convicted for murder was the inspiration for Eando Binder’s “The Trial of Adam Link” (1940) and that in turn inspired Isaac Asimov’s Caves of Steel (1953) and The Naked Sun (1957) in which a robot does commit murder despite the Three Laws of Robotics.
“The Green Torture” by A. Rowley Hilliard (Wonder Stories, March 1931) has a scientist, Dr. Thorne, who is being tortured for information on a new weapon, an ultra-sonic blast that knocks people unconscious. To get the details out of him, the agents of a foreign country place him in a dark room with a torture-bot. The robot has sharp prods that are covered in poison and a green light that the victim can see only from the front. This contraption pursues Thorne for hours, making sleep or attacking the bot impossible, due to its unflippable design. Eventually Thorne passes out, expecting death.
He wakes in a hospital in his own country. He was saved by forces armed with his new ultra-sonic weapon. He asks his friend about the torture-bot, only to find that the poison was not real, but green paint. Hilliard has taken a page from Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” but at least suggests that robots could be used for evil purposes. The Green Torture machine’s legacy is known to film fans in the hovering torture device used by Darth Vader in Star Wars.
“The Asteroid of Death” (Wonder Stories Quarterly, Fall 1931) by Neil R. Jones gives us another cyborg. Nez Thulan and Reene Kestron are students at the Martian university at Fomar. They volunteer to go on an expedition to the Asteroid Belt. Keene is selected for an away mission to crawl down a tunnel to the asteroid’s center, where he finds alien space bats. His pal, Nez, is trying to fix the propulsion system on the ship when it explodes. Everyone is killed except Reene. He jury-rigs the spaceship and makes it to Earth.
Upon waking in the hospital, he discovers that his friend, Thulan, has been reconstructed with robotic parts. The doctor calls him “a human robot” since the word “cyborg” wasn’t coined until 1960. Nez’s personality changes. He is brilliant, but cold and impersonal. His future marriage to the beautiful Zelna is cancelled. Zelna realizes she loves Keene. The love triangle element could have been central to the story, but Nez has been busy murdering people. He disintegrates the lab assistant, then removes the bones from his boss, Dr. Climm.
It is up to Reene to challenge him. Nez tries to kill his friend when his crimes are revealed. The two struggle, but Nez escapes after trapping Reene with a strange metallic plate on the floor. The robot plans to blow up his lab and his rival then take his revenge on Zelna. Kestron hears her scream as he struggles. He manages to escape, jumping out the window as the lab explodes. Thanks to the lesser gravity of Mars, he is not hurt.
Nez Thulan steals a space cruiser and flees with Zelna. Keene grabs a small flyer but is joined by a patrolman in a larger ship. Thulan appears to be headed for Deimos, one of Mars’s moons. A small craft shoots off from the liner. Keene realizes that Zelna is tied up on the craft and it will strike Deimos and explode. Both men use their smaller and faster ships to turn the liner away. This means Reene almost crash lands on Deimos. Zelna is saved but Nez Thulan escapes, to join the Moon Pirates of the next story in the series.
There were none stories in the Durna Rangue series, of which this was the first, but none of the others appeared in a Hugo Gernsback magazine. The next one would appear in Gernsback’s old magazine, his rival now, Amazing Stories.
“Between Dimensions” by J. E. Keith (Wonder Stories, October 1931) has Paul Rogers invited to a cabin in the Wisconsin woods by his friend, Loren Dahn. When he gets there, no sign of the engineer. Rogers searches for him but can’t find him. When he wakes up the next day he finds that the cabin is no longer in the woods but in a desert. He arms himself with a gun and goes in search of his friend. Rogers finds no signs of life. He discovers a very high cliff, and when he slips on a stone, falls off.
When he wakes again he is not smashed to pieces but in another place. Here he discovers metal tablets set at the side of a yellow brick road. (Oz reference is probably intentional.) Finally signs of life. He follows the road to a mechanical city where we meet the robots at last:
The tripod machines, like the one that carried me, interested me the most. We must have encountered fifty of them, and it was plain that they directed the others. I examined my own closely, but without gaining any information except as to externals. The operating mechanism was hidden in the cupola above me.
At first the many robots ignore Rogers. Now they have become interested in him and put him in a cage. Sitting, he figures out what is going on. Velocity triggers a jump from one place to another. His rifle, which he has with him, is useless because the bullets travel fast and will simple go to another dimension. Rogers escapes long enough to jump off a wall and return to the desert world. At last he finds his friend, Dahn.
There is a last adventure with an invisible creature from the strange dimension that the two men must outdistance but no more robots. The cabin disappears without them one last time and Rogers gets no explanations about all he has seen between the dimensions. The vision of a robot city without human masters will surface again.
“The Reign of the Robots” by Edmond Hamilton (Wonder Stories, December 1931) is a look at human attitudes towards robots. A society against mechanization convinces a rich man, Grant Perry, to take a time drug that will propel him and another, Loring, ten thousand years into the future (then return them) so they can see if man conquers his machines or vice versa.
When they get to the future, they find an underground city ruled by “The Masters”, robots armed with lethal ray weapons. After a daring escape, Perry and Loring return to the past, having to abandon the beautiful Eda to the Masters. Perry says he will donate the twenty million the society needs to prevent the takeover of the robots.
The only problem is Perry runs into Eda, who is actually Edith Loring, and the entire hoax is uncovered. Perry never went to the future but a clever fake city in Wisconsin. Perry doesn’t revoke his offer as long as one person doesn’t go to live in the society’s secret anti-tech colony, Edith. She is quite happy to become Mrs. Perry instead.
The fake robots of the future are a disappointing cheat but they do suggest all The Terminator movies of the future, not to mention The Daleks. “The Metal Giants”, “The Comet Doom” and finally “The Reign of the Robots” show how Hamilton shaped the idea of the killer robot in Science Fiction. It would take Eando Binder’s Adam Link and finally Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws to replace this idea with the non-killer robot.
“Flight Into Super-Time” (Wonder Stories, August 1932) by Clark Ashton Smith has Malgraff, a scientist, escape into the future in a time vessel. He has several adventures but in the end faces off with a giant robot tyrant that rules the future world. This machine, like Malgraff, comes from another time and space. The robot is destroyed along with the space/time ship and Malgraff is stuck in the future with the original winged inhabitants of the planet.
“The Robot Technocrat” by Nat Schachner (Wonder Stories, March 1933) is a tale of a destablized America with many factions fighting for control. A scientist named Kalmikoff invents a robotic brain that can use a history-predicting equation. The leaders of the factions are kidnapped and subjected to the scanner. One man, a thinly disguised Adolph Hitler, evades capture but attacks the location of the machine. The fall-out winds down to a solution for the country. While not a “robot” story in the sense of a mechanical man it does suppose a computer intelligence. His vilification of Hitler is years ahead of the wartime fiction that would satirize him. Nat Schachner was one of Asimov’s favorite writers before the Golden Age, and this story suggested the beginning of his Foundation series with its history-predicting formula.
“The Call of the Mech-Men” by Laurence Manning (Wonder Stories, November 1933) begins in a club for people who explore strange occurances. Marsh tells of his trip to the Magnetic North Pole to discover why the spot exists off-center from the actual pole. He and his pilot blow a huge hole in the ground and discover an underground city ruled by the Mech-men, alien robots who have been trapped on Earth for millennia. The magnetic pole is actually a distress call to other alien ships.
The Mech-men capture the duo, put them into a menagerie that includes arctic wolves, polar bears and even a pair of mammoths. The robots do not think the humans are intelligent. It takes Marsh experimenting with telepathy and finding a sympathetic Mech-man to bridge the gap. Marsh enters into several long conversations with the robots, explaining that humans use machines and are not their slaves. The Mech-men are outraged at first but slowly come around to laughter when they realize that humans feed and repair the machines. They think humankind are slaves to their machines, but are too foolish to know it. This misunderstanding is disastrous for the two humans because the Mech-men decide to stop feeding them and the other animals.
In desperation, the two flee the cage, travel through the immense caverns, the Mech-men in pursuit. A nail-biter of a race to the plane sees the duo home again. Marsh wants to tell the world but the pilot refuses to corroborate any of it.
Manning’s tale is interesting for several reasons. First, his version of the robots is similar to Neil R. Jones’s Zoromes though much less friendly. Secondly, his superior robots are also aliens, like John Wyndham’s Martian robot in “The Lost Machine”, supposing that humans could never create a superior technology. Lastly, he has done something Edmond Hamilton had not up to this point, that is look at the mental processes and culture of his killer robots, their cold indifference, their timeless patience.
“The Robot Aliens” by Eando Binder (Wonder Stories, February 1935) features more alien-created robots. But unlike Manning, the Binders play them for laughs for the story is a War of the Worlds parody.
The plot is strangely familiar when you think of the 1938 Orson Welles radio broadcast (three years later). A cylinder falls in a rural location (in the Mid-West, not New Jersey) and the locals go to see it. We get to meet all the cliches like the soldiers sent to fight the robots: Captain Pompersnap and his commander, Major Whinny. These are not characters you can take seriously.
When the robots show up the gunmen and bombers cause such a panic that thirty people are trampled. These deaths are blamed on the robots even though they were self-inflicted. Bombers are deployed to destroy the giants, blowing holes in roads and buildings but little else. One of the robots is destroyed by an ambush but the sole survivor is found by millionaire Frank Miller (not the comic book artist!) who takes the time to communicate with the machine man. He discovers the robots are mechanical ambassadors for the Martians, and mean no harm. In light of this, all the people who are to blame for fear-mongering and stupidity point at someone in blame.
In an epilogue we find out a mob destroys the last machine and Miller, claiming he is a Frankenstein who has created the monster, showing that Earthmen are not ready for contact with Mars.
Binder does get in one good poke at Science Fiction in the story when the Secretary of war is explaining the possible origin of the Robot Aliens to the President.
“…Some say they are a foreign threat, first members of an invading army of metal monsters; again they are creatures from the ocean depths, encased in pressure suits; or they are people from the center of the earth; or they are the invention of a crank who wishes to see the downfall of civilization; or they are the brain-child of a mad scientist who made thinking machines who then destroyed him and ran amuck; or they are an evolutionary product of a remote and unknown island. But the suggestion that most appalled me was that they are creatures from another planet!”
The President scolds these theorists for reading too much of that Science-Fiction junk that’s been floating around for the last twenty years. What Binder has done is describe virtually every monster plot in Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories and Astounding up to 1935. The entire story can be seen as Earl and Otto Binder’s call to SF writers to go beyond the cliches, something they would do themselves in 1939 when they created Adam Link.
David H. Keller comes full circle with “The Living Machine” (Wonder Stories, May 1935), one of the first stories to suggest robotic cars. After a near-miss with a car, Poorson the inventor, creates an intelligent vehicle. He sells the idea to a sports car manufacturer, but one engineer, “Try Um” Tyson tries to talk the company out of the new invention. Tyson explains that humans enjoy driving. He also sees a world ruled by machines.
The robot cars become big business, out-stripping the auto industry. In the end, the only competition is a gasoline monopoly called WGC. Pierce, the president of the gas company, learns that the spherical brain in each car is actually alive and figures out a way to hurt his competition (after almost merging into one company). He adds cocaine to the gas! The cars become violent, killing people.
About this time, Poorson has completely relented. He doesn’t like the way his living cars are treated like slaves and refuses to make any more. After the cocaine debacle, the car manufacturer agrees and everybody goes back to regular cars. The story peters out once everyone realizes it was wrong to combine brains and cars. Keller does describe how a population that has lost the ability to drive would have to regain that skill. Like “The Psychophonic Nurse”, the ending feels like a lecture after a logically thought-out set of events. His moralizing ruins the effect but not to the degree as the earlier story.
Science Fiction is not always meant to be predictive, but in this case, Keller has nailed it. The new experiments in self-driving cars are right out of this story. The inventor and Babson the car exec give the invention a 100 mile test that is right out of the news of 2018! He foresees many things: the use of automatic cars by the inebriated, the young, the reduction in accidents, the obsolescence of driver’s licenses, the change in social behaviors. His fight with the oil company almost brings him to electric cars but not quite.
“Mad World” (Wonder Stories, February 1936) by A. L. Burkholder has a massive telepathic brain being taken by a fleet of ten ships to a new home. A race of living robots attack the fleet and destroy nine of the ships. The brain and its single companion land on earth. The telepathic brain feels all the hatred in the world and must flee. The robots in this story were incidental but I suspect the author remembered Edmond Hamilton’s race of living robots from 1934. This story appeared in the second last of the run.
Hugo Gernsback would sell Wonder Stories to the Standard Chain in 1936. He wasn’t quite done with Science Fiction but his days of publishing robot stories were at an end.
