If you missed the last one…
Thomas O’Conor Sloane (1851-1940) was seventy-seven years old when he assumed the helm of Amazing Stories. His son, John, was Thomas Edison’s son-in-law. Hugo Gernsback, Sloane’s original boss, lost control of the magazine in 1929, probably because of some underhanded move by Benarr Macfadden. Macfadden had a “physical culture” magazine that Gernsback was competing against with Sexology. Macfadden played dirty and sent Gernsback into receivership. So this had nothing to do with Science Fiction.
Hugo went on to created Science Wonder and Air Wonder and SF fans got twice the number of magazines. So things worked out okay. But that left Sloane to carry on without Gernsback. Lester Del Rey describes Sloane in Worlds of Science Fiction (1979) thus:
...The editorship of Amazing Stories eventually fell to T. O’Conor Sloane, PhD. Sloane, who had been at least nominally editor under Gernsback, was 77 years old at the time. And while he had been an able scientist at one time, his ideas were somewhat behind the times. He repeatedly chided his readers for taking space flight seriously, for example.
Now Sloane may have felt that way about space travel but he didn’t shirk on robots at first. He published eight robotic tales between 1929 and 1934 as well as the first dozen Zoromes tales by Neil R. Jones. (Jones’s stories about the cyborg space travelers is the first robotic series in Science Fiction history. It is also one of the longest running. I dealt with it in its own separate article since Professor Jameson and his robotic friends deserve their own analysis.) Here we will look at the other stories in Sloane’s Amazing Stories.
The first robot tale Sloane provided was by an author that would prove very important to Science Fiction, but as an editor. It was here in Amazing Stories that John W. Campbell Jr. made his first reputation in SF beginning with stories like “The Metal Horde” (Amazing Stories, April 1930). This story is a sequel to the earlier “When the Atoms Failed” (Amazing Stories, January 1930). The Solarites have to defend themselves from a space armada of ships without living enemies. These ships contain gigantic mechanical brains. Fred Saberhagen must have been inspired by Campbell’s old tale for they seem much like Berserkers.
Campbell would give up writing in 1938 to become the successor to F. Orlin Tremaine’s Astounding Stories and begin the Golden Age’s Astounding Science-Fiction. As editor of that magazine, Campbell would make his most important contributions to robot fiction, including the classics of Lester Del Rey, Jack Williamson, Clifford D. Simak and Isaac Asimov. But more on all that later…
“Flamingo, A Drama of A. D. 1950” (Amazing Stories, July 1930) by Clarence Edward Heller is a story in the style of Hugo Gernsback’s “Ralph 124C 41+”, having little plot but a parade of cool inventions and undeveloped ideas. Heller’s future world of 1950 has robots doing most of the work including the actors at the play “Flamingo”. It might be a little too early to suggest this is what we are seeing in 2024 with the advent of AI characters but the idea is there.
“On Board the Martian Liner” (Amazing Stories, March 1931) by Miles J. Breuer is a murder mystery on a space liner with robots for stewards. The robots look human but aren’t. They aren’t an important part of the plot.
“The Metal Monster” by Otis Abelbert Kline (Amazing Stories, July 1931) has two pilots captured and taken to an interior world where Zet rules over a strange race called the Snal. They plan to enslave the human race (or course). The Snal have metallic spheres (robots) that they control telepathically. One of the men, along with his love interest, has to survive giant bugs, bats and mold to save humanity. Kline began as a sub-editor at Weird Tales before going on to being a literary agent.
“Automaton” by Abner J. Gelula (Amazing Stories, November 1931) offers us a world where robots become the leaders in society, driving humans away from love and human feeling. Our hero hates robots (Will Smith-like) and ends up in a nut house. For more on this story and Gelula’s tales, go here.
“Mechanocracy” by Miles J. Breuer (Amazing Stories, April 1932) has a unified world government controlled by a computer brain. Quentin Smith Lakeman is sent to the last holdout against the robots called Democratia. There he becomes converted to life without robots. When he returns to report to The Machine, he is sentenced to death. The robot brain decides to destroy Democratia as well. Lakeland and his girlfriend’s brother escape because they aren’t soft and submissive men like those living under The Machine. They blow up the robot brain since it is not well guarded. No one in that submissive culture would think of attacking it. For more on Breuer’s Wellsian SF, go here.
“The Lost Machine” by John B. Harris (later known as John Wyndham)(Amazing Stories, April 1932) is an example of a sympathetic robot before Isaac Asimov. And since it is John Wyndham (even in this early stage) it has more pathos than most Asimov tales. A Martian ship lands on Earth and sends the robot Zat out to explore. The ship explodes, stranding the machine. It encounters humans and through telepathy perceives that humans fear it. The machine wanders the country, is sold to a circus and eventually ends up with a doctor and his daughter. Despite there being some intelligent humans, Zat destroys himself rather than allowing humanity to possess technology they are not ready for. For more on Wyndham’s earliest SF, go here.
Triplanetary by E. E. “Doc” Smith (Amazing Stories, January February March April 1934) was serialized in four parts in Amazing and is a very important chapter in the history of Space Opera with the people of the Inner Planets exploring beyond the Solar System. We aren’t going to look at all of that but only its robot elements. The villain of the piece is a space pirate named Roger. He has his ships equipped with robots. The future Lensmen know that they can kill a robot in this way:
“…You know how to kill a robot, don’t you?”
“Yes—break his eye-lenses and his eardrums and he’ll stop whatever he’s doing and send out distress calls….
The robots in this novel, which is crammed with ideas and some purple prose, isn’t really about robot tech. The ‘bots are there to add menace to Roger and his pirates.
“Room For the Super Race” (Amazing Stories, August 1932) by Walter Kateley has a technologically superior race that uses robots for military soldiers ala the B-I Battle droids of Star Wars fame:
“What about the robots?” I asked. “Can they go anywhere–do anything?”
“No. They can only go where the light of a tower reaches them…” They can do a thousand actions. Their controllers in the tower have a keyboard with a thousand buttons for those actions. (Control-Alt hadn’t been invented yet.) “We have about a million of the robots. They are a dozen times as strong as a man. With ordinary usage, one wears out in about ten years of your time.”
For more on this story, go here.
“Into the Meteorite Orbit” (Amazing Stories, December 1933) by Frank K. Kelly is another story that has human-shaped robots but isn’t about robots. E. F. Bleiler calls the story confusing (Science Fiction: The Gernsback Years, 1998) but Damon Knight thought the story good enough for his Science Fiction of the 1930s.
“The Mentanicals” by Francis Flagg (Amazing Stories, April 1934) has a scientist create a time machine that an impulsive friend takes into the future. There he discovers the world in ruins as well as weird cylinder robots and humans mere savages. He tries to communicate with the beast-men but to no avail. Exploring, he discovers periodicals about a scientist named Bane Borgson inventing a mechanical brain-cell that leads to the invention of the Mentanicals. The floating robots do the labor of humanity, eventually throwing off their servant role to become the masters. One of their evolutionary steps is a form of whispering speech.
Bronson discovers the last intelligent man. In a small side room is Bane Borgson, now a thousand and five hundred years old. The Mentanicals have preserved him as a God figure but have abandoned him. Borgson asks him to return to his own time and tell everyone what will happen. Bronson and his friends will work to never allow robots to be created or take over. Flagg’s Wellsian concepts are about the evolution of robots, not humans. The ideas he uses are not new in 1934 but have yet to be perfected by Jack Williamson in The Humanoids in 1947. For more on the SF of Francis Flagg, go here,
NB. You will notice all the artwork was done by Leo Morey. Morey was the Frank R. Paul of Sloane’s editorship. Isaac Asimov and Lester Del Rey were not fans (they preferred Paul’s curly haired humans and his amazing tech). In many ways, Morey was the better artist, drawing humans much better if not the machines. He did artwork for other types of Pulps as well as SF. Later on, he transitioned into SF comic books for Fiction House.
Conclusion
After 1934, Sloane left robotics to Neil R. Jones and his Zoromes. Amazing‘s quality had been slipping for a while (partly due to Sloane’s editing but also poor payment for stories) and in 1936 the magazine became bi-monthly. The writing was on the wall. Amazing Stories could not compete against its competitors: Thrilling Wonder Stories, that appealed to young readers and Astounding Stories, under F. Orlin Tremaine, who was pulling in the serious SF crowd. In 1938, Teck sold Amazing Stories to Ziff-Davis in Chicago and the next chapter of the magazine’s existence under Ray A. Palmer was about to begin. Fortunately, robots were going along for the ride…
