This post is brought to you by Ships of Steel, an upcoming anthology of Space Opera novellas including a new Sudana and Zaar adventure. These two appeared in Whispers of Ice and Sand in four stories. They return to take on space pirates, an evil android named Todd and a planet filled with discarded robots. Ships of Steel should be out this Spring.
It turns out there is another type of story I dislike. The first is humorous Fantasy. Somehow a tale of dragons and warriors that aims at laughter isn’t my thing. I need the writer to take his world building more seriously, I guess.
Turns out humorous Westerns stink just as much. Take for example, “Doc Swap’s Mechanical Man” by Ben Frank (West, March 1952). I find this story intriguing for its supposed Science Fiction elements despite the author’s sole purpose of making us giggle. The Doc Swap stories were a long-running series by Frank, numbering over two dozen tales. In most of them, Doc is trying to get one over on Sheriff MacLoyd, a man who thinks himself the better swapper. We follow Doc as he trades items from one person to another until he has the things he wishes to possess so that he can win. The series is set not in the Old West but in more recent years.
This tale, which I will get to in a moment, reminded me that robots and cowboys have a connected history that is at times odd. One of the first bestsellers in the Western genre goes back to the Dime Novels. The Steam Man of the Prairies by Edward S. Ellis was published in American Novels, August 1868. It was the first American SF Dime Novel. The robot is created by a young man named Johnny Brainerd who uses the machine to pull his cart all over while he has adventures. It was reprinted many times.
Before we get to Doc Swap in the 1950s, we have to stop off and check out a serial called The Phantom Empire. This 1935 serial starred Gene Autry. The trio of heroes are enjoying ranch life before they are kidnapped by the underground dwellers of Murania. This underworld has futuristic science including robots. The plot has a rebellion inside Murania at the same time evil criminals from outside are planning to take over. The robots are typical tin robots. Now I don’t know if Ben Frank saw this show or read old copies of Thrilling Wonder. But from 1939 on, the tin robot is part-and-parcel of common culture.
So when we final get to 1952, the author does not have to explain what a “mechanical man” is. He could have used the word “robot” which was invented in 1920 but his story might be happening before Karl Capek’s play “R.U.R” so he uses “mechanical man”. The plot of Frank’s tale involves a shifty professor named Jonas Jordan selling Sheriff MacLoyd and a few other richer men on the idea of perpetual motion. The sheriff has a demonstration model locked up in his safe. The sheriff’s memory isn’t good so he keeps the combo on a piece of paper. Doc Swap smells a rat (and he wants a Swiss music box that MacLoyd has) so he begins swapping with an eye on exposing the professor.
He trades a bunch of stuff until he get an old tin boiler. With this he creates a fake mechanical man, having his Native friend, Charley Whitehorse, who has been to college and explains that perpetual motion is a fraud, wear the suit. Doc asks the sheriff if he can lock up the robot in the jail so that nobody can steal his invention. That night, Charley takes off the suit, opens the safe using the paper and examines the perpetual motion gizmo, proving it a fake. The next morning, Doc reveals the scam and the professor flees. The sheriff wants to chase him and arrest him but Doc tells him to let him go. It’s a fifty dollar lesson on gullibility. Doc walks away with the music box, swapping “George the robot” for it.
Well, that piece left me cold. The humor was not my thing and I hated that the robot was a fake. But Frank is well within the Steam Man/Lost Empire bracket here. Some Western readers don’t want good Science Fiction. I have to assume they want laughs. Taking a look at actual SF at the same time, we had “The Iron Men of Venus” by Don Wilcox in the February 1952 issue of Amazing Stories. At Galaxy, July 1952 we got a Jack Coggins cover showing a mining robot. These images show the two ends of the spectrum of robotics, killer monster to actual useful bot. Doc Swap’s readers may have been familiar with these as well. Or not. They may have been more familiar with tin robot through cartoons like Bugs Bunny’s 1953 “Robot Rabbit'”.
Conclusion
Robots and cowboys didn’t end with Doc Swap. Yul Brynner thrilled us as the killer cowboy robot in Michael Crichton’s Westworld (1973). Crichton may have channeled this robot/Western history by accident but I doubt it. He was pretty aware of themes going back to the Victorians. The Star Wars franchise has used some similar themes with the robot IG-88B in The Mandolorian as well as a non-robot gunslinger in The Book of Boba Fett with Cad Bane.
The jump isn’t really that far. As I discussed in “A Cowboy, A Space Captain, a Private Detective and a Barbarian Walk Into a Bar…” the American Pulps were responsible for all four of these tropes. The character of Conan the Cimmerian, Hawk Carse, Philip Marlowe and Jim Hatfield all share a core of independence and courage. Why shouldn’t they share other things, like robots too? I haven’t found Detective stories with bots but I do recall Roy Thomas using robot slug monsters in one Conan comic. There could be more. The ultimate realization is that all these Pulps genres share common tropes and ideas. Cross-fertilization, even to the small amount we see in “Doc Swap’s Mechanical Man”, happens. It happens but I still don’t like humorous Westerns. I’ll stick to Peter Dawson and Wayne D. Oversholster and forget about the laughs.
Discover these RAGE m a c h i n e SF books
Leave a Reply