In January 1930, Science Fiction pulps changed forever. At the time, no one would have paid much attention to Astounding Stories of Super-Science, or as it has become known, The Clayton Astounding. As an SF Pulp it was not of the caliber of its later incarnations, first the Tremaine Astounding that would foster “thought-variant” stories then the Golden Age magazine that would dominate everything for decades, John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction. SF historians have a tendency to dismiss the thirty-four issues edited by Harry Bates because of their Bug-Eyed Monster covers, because of the roster of early SF writers, and most important, its perceived lack of classic stories. This is dangerous. Harry Bates set several wheels into motion, wheels that would have consequences for decades.
In 1929, according to Bates in Alva Rodgers’ A Requiem For Astounding (1964), Clayton was looking to increase his titles. One of these was a poor historical magazine that Bates despised. He went to the newsstand to find an alternative and spied a copy of Amazing Stories. Bates pitched a Science Fiction title in place of the other magazine and Clayton bit, making Bates editor. Bates had little or no experience with Science, had no missionary zeal like Hugo Gernsback. Bates simply saw it as a vehicle for adventure in outer space. And with the creation of Astounding Stories of Super-Science, a genre dominated by gadgets and long-winded info-dumps, became more plot-oriented. Some critics see this as the beginning of a decline in SF quality but it was a necessary development to bring SF to a wider audience. The worlds of Star Trek and Star Wars would have looked different without the Clayton Astounding.
Bates published a wide range of stories in his thirty-four issues, at first taking what he could get but later choosing more carefully. As Lester Del Rey described the first issue in The Worlds of Science Fiction (1976): “The rest of the contents was a sadly mixed business.” Bates found many SF writers did not have the skills to even write Pulp adventure. He cultivated the best of them and was able to produce series writers of better quality. He published stories of space adventurers like John Hanson of the Space Patrol by Sewell Peaslee Wright, an early Star Trek type space opera series, and the famous Hawk Carse Space Western (written by himself and Desmond W. hall, under the pseudonym, Anthony Gilmore), the scientific ghostbreaker, Dr. Bird by S. P. Meek as well as Arthur J. Burk’s Manape the Mighty and a number of other entertaining tales. But not all were of the simple entertainment quality. In September 1931, Astounding featured “The Sargasso of Space” by Edmond Hamilton, the first story to feature the space suit with a phone as well as Jack Williamson’s “Salvage in Space” (1933) that featured space armor.
“Gray Denim” (Astounding Stories, December 1930) by Harl Vincent is the first of a trilogy about Socialist politics in the year 22nd Century. This first outing offers a brief glimpse of the place of robots in a society designated by colors. The prols wear gray, the cops red and the one percenters purple. The robots are even lower, working in the lowest depths of the eighty-level city:
In the levels of the mechanicals they romped boisterously. To them the strange robots–creatures of steel and glass and copper–were objects of ridicule. Poor, senseless mechanisms that performed the tasks that made the wearers of purple independent of labor. Here they saw the preparaton of their synthetic food, untouched by human hands. In one chamber a group of mechanicals, soulless and brainless, engaged in the delicate chemical compounding of raw materials that went into the making of their clothing…
The robots also tend the babies and children, which goes a long way to explaining why the Purples are such hearless bastards. I was surprised that Vincent didn’t have the robots and the prols fighting for jobs. I guess the robot jobs are even beneath the Greys.
Robots seem like a natural for this new adventure Science Fiction. In his short three years, Harry Bates only published a handful of stories with significant robots, with the July 1931 issue having three robot stories in it. (Bates would write a robot classic of his own, “Farewell to the Master” but that was ten years away. The film version, The Day the Earth Stood Still was twenty.) The first of 1931 stories was “The Gate to Xoran” (Astounding Stories, January 1931) by Hal K. Wells. Blair Gordon goes to the nightclub, The Maori Hut, to make up with his estranged girlfriend, the starlet, Leah Keith. Before he can approach her, a stranger with glowing blue eyes activates a necklace she is wearing and leaves with her in a trance. Leah’s director, Redding, tries to stop them but gets his neck broken.
The stranger takes Leah to his roadster and Gordon follows in his car. They drive all over the Hollywood hills. (Wells describes which roads and directions as only a man recently moved to the area can find interesting. Wells moved to L. A. in 1930, obviously before he wrote this story.) Eventually the man pulls into a stately gated home. Gordon jumps out and tries to take Leah from him. The man knocks him a dozen feet with just a hand motion. Gordon tries again, more cautiously, punching the man in the face. His chin and most of his face falls away. Pulling off the mask, the creature underneath sends a tentacle flying out and zaps Gordon into unconsciousness.
When he wakes, Gordon finds himself alongside Leah in a strange room. The stranger is no longer disguised as a man:
Now that his disguise was completely stripped away, his slight frame was revealed as a grotesque parody of that of a human being, with arms and legs like pipe-stems, a bald oval head that merged with neckless rigidity directly into a heavy-shouldered body that tapered into an almost wasp-like slenderness at the waist. He was naked save for a loin cloth of some metallic fabric. His bluish-gray skin had a dull oily sheen strangely suggestive of fine grained flexible metal.
The creature’s face was hideously unlike anything human. Beneath the glowing eyes was a small circular mouth orifice with a cluster of gill-like appendages on either side of it. Patches of lighter-colored skin on either side of the head seemed to serve as ears. From a point just under the head, where the throat of a human being would have been, dangled the foot-and-a-half long tentacle whose forked tip had sent Gordon into oblivion.
The strange being, in best villain fashion, over-explains everything. He is Arlok of Xoran, a planet in the constellation of Rigel. He is preparing a gateway that will allow his brethren to cross space and take over the world. The Xoranians are beings of living metal. He shows the couple his world, a lifeless rock covered in living machines. He shows the Xoranian armies conquering a planet in the Canopus system. Ruthless and deadly, the machines wipe away all resistance.
Gordon sees his .45 on the table. He signals Leah to make a distraction and goes for the gun. He empties it into Arlok’s face before he is rendered unconscious again. The metal man is made of impenetrable steel.
When he wakes again, he and Leah are tied up in the hallway. The knots that hold them are so tightly made by Arlok that only burning them with Gordon’s lighter frees them. They spy on the metal man. He is cutting pieces for the gateway machine with a torch of alien technology. Gordon gets an idea. He send Leah to play decoy. Arlok goes after her, allowing Gordon to get the torch. When the metal man returns, Gordon attacks. First he cuts off his zapping tentacle. Arms are next and finally, Gordon stabs him in the head, killing him. With the gate keeper dead and the gateway destroyed, Earth is safe.
Now you can argue that Arlok isn’t a real robot, not a human or alien constructed machine but there is little difference. Abraham Merritt wrote a famous novel about a living metal creature called The Metal Monster in 1920. Merritt has a Himilayan valley inhabited by a living metal, ruled by the Metal Emperor. Merritt’s reputation was huge at the beginning of the 20th Century and I have no doubt Wells was not aware of him.
“Terrors Unseen” (Astounding Stories, March 1931) by Harl Vincent combines invisibility with robots. Eddie vail is on holiday when he sees a beautiful woman being attacked by something invisible. Turns out she is Lina Shelton, the daughter of a mad scientist. Shelton is developing invisible war robots in secret. Lina’s father takes Vail on as an assistant. Eddie learns that a former employee, Carlos, has sold the professor out, building a separate power unit. The professor’s invisible robots keep running away. In the end, two invisible robot champions duke it out. Shelton agrees to give up his robot experiments and return to New York. Eddie ends up with the girl.
Vincent offers a description of a visible war robot before it is covered in invisibility paint:
…He examined the monster and saw that it was quite similar in outside appearance to those supplied by Universal for heavy manual labor, excepting that this one was armed as were those used for prison guards. There were the same articulated limbs and the various clamps and hooks for lifting and heavy hauling; the tentacles for grasping; machine guns front and back. Under the helical headpiece that was the antenna this robot seemed to have two eyes–a new feature–but closer examination showed these to be the twin lenses of a stereoscopic motion picture camera…
Bates used serials throughout his run beginning with The Beetle Horde by Victor Rousseau in issue one and two. The third one he used was by Ray Cummings, called The Brigands of the Moon, but Cummings returned with a second serial novel called The Exile of Time (Astounding Stories, April May June July 1931) with illustrations by H. W. Wesso though it never got a cover. The novel was released as an Ace Double in 1964 with a cover by Alex Schomberg.
George Rankin and his friend, Larry, are walking in Greenwich Village late one night when they find a woman trapped inside a house on Patton Place. They free her only to discover she is from 1777 and that a seven foot robot named Migul abducted her and brought her to 1930 in a time machine. So begins a novel that will travel throughout time though most importantly to 1777, 1935 and 2930.
The men take Mistress Mary Atwood to see a psychiatrist friend, Alten, who declares Mary quite sane. The men figure with Mary’s help, that Tugh (pronounced Too) the owner of the house in Patton Place and a deformed cripple, is behind everything. Tugh has sworn to have Mary, to have his revenge on her father, and on the city of New York 1935 and to be the master of the robots in 2930.
A strange time chase begins when George and Mary are taken by Migul, while Larry joins up with Princess Tina and Harl, a brother and sister from 2930. The duo work to stop Tugh from fomenting a robot rebellion. (I have to wonder if Cummings named Harl after Harl Vincent, another Astounding author in the early 1930s. Both authors also wrote for Argosy. I have no proof of this but Vincent did eventually move to L. A. as well.) The heroes can’t stop Migul from executing Tugh’s revenge scheme, with Mary’s father murdered and an invasion of metal giants pouring out of Patton place to attack New York. The robots kill citizens with hand swords, death rays and freezing cannons:
“McGuire later told how he saw it as it emerged from the entryway of the Tugh house. It came lurching out into the street—a giant thing of dull grey metal, with tubular, jointed legs; a body with a great bulging chest; a round head, eight or ten feet above the pavement; eyes that shot fire…. Presently there was not one Robot, but three: a dozen! More than that, many reports said. But certain it is that within half an hour of the first alarm, the block in front of Tugh’s home held many of the iron monsters. And there were many human bodies lying strewn there, by then. A few policemen had made a stand at the corner, to protect the crowd against one of the Robots. The thing had made an unexpected infuriated rush….There was a panic in the next block, when a thousand people suddenly tried to run. A score of people were trampled under foot. Two or three of the Robots ran into that next block—ran impervious to the many shots which now were fired at them. From what was described as slots in the sides of their iron bodies they drew swords—long, dark, burnished blades. They ran, and at each fallen human body they made a single stroke of decapitation, or, more generally, cut the body in half.”
Not since Edmond Hamilton’s “The Metal Giants” (Weird Tales, December 1926) has there been such a robotic massacre.
Eventually everyone ends up in 2930 (Except Harl. He gets murdered by Tugh.) The robots are on the verge of a revolt. Tugh manipulates Tina into revealing the secret access tunnel to the Power House, a strategic spot for his rebellion. The robots can be stopped by not recharging their batteries. Tugh gets the secret, spurs the robots into rebellion but loses the Power House because of George. As the robots destroy the New York of 2930 (not described in as much detail as the 1935 massacre) Tugh kidnaps Mary once again and flees in time. Tina learns that Tugh is from a time even more distant than 2930. George, Larry and Tina pursue him to the year One Billion A.D. for a shoot out with lasers among the rocks of a devastated earth. George finally kills Tugh by smashing in his head with a battery. The dead man’s head reveals gears and wires. Tugh (perhaps Number Two) is a super-robot from some age beyond 2930.
Cumming’s robots are pretty typical killer metal men though he does rise a little above the Hamilton prototype with the character of Migul. The robot struggles to throw off his reliance and servitude to humans, but can’t quite do so with Tugh. (Ultimately, this is because Tugh is a super-robot, not because he is human.) We get a small glimpse of the major themes of Philip K. Dick but Cummings does not develop them beyond Migul’s slave-like hatred of his masters. In the end, Tugh tears out Migul’s mechanical heart and he dies another slave.
“Doom From Planet 4” (Astounding Stories, July 1931) by Jack Williamson has a schooner blasted in the South Pacific. The bolt of green flame comes from Davis Island. The owner of boat, Dan McNally, is the only man to survive. He strips off his clothes and swims to the island. There he encounters a weird robot that he disables by smashing the control mechanism on top. Going further he sees a giant version of the control mechanism on a building. He deduces two things: the needle is the source of the green death ray that sank his boat, and that the needle is pointing at Mars in the night sky.
Wandering he finds the only living inhabitant of the island, the attractive Miss Helen Hunter, who Dan saw in a newspaper article months ago, along with her father, the scientist. Helen feeds Dan and gives him a sheet to cover himself. She also explains what is going on.
Her father and his assistants and Helen came to Davis island to try and establish communications with Mars, using large flashing lights. They succeed and begin to communicate with the Martians. Next they establish television communications, though the Martians are careful not to reveal their appearance. The humans, with the Martians’ direction, build the first robots. These in turn, despite the humans’ alarm, build the power station with the needle. When Dr. Hunter and his helpers try to blow up the station, they are fried with the green ray, leaving Helen alone and hiding in the woods. Helen explains that the Martians turned out to be robots as well, all controlled by a Master Intelligence. They have built flying craft and are ready to take over the planet. She is desperate to stop them.
Before the couple can cook up a plan, they are discovered by the robots. Blasts and explosions knock Dan unconscious. When he wakes he finds Helen gone. He comes up with a single, desperate plan. He will throw himself at the needle and try and destroy it. Without control from the Master Intelligence, the robots will cease to work. Dan sneaks up onto the ring that holds the needle. The robots discover him too late, shooting rays at him. He jumps and loses consciousness again.
Dan McNally wakes to find himself in a tent, covered in bandages. Helen comes in and has him rest. His body is severely broken and he must heal. She explains the robots had taken her to be experimented on, leaving Dan for dead. Suddenly they all stopped working and Helen went in search of Dan, finding him in the ruined power station. She has been nursing him back to health for days. The Earth has been saved and Dan can rest, though he takes time to let her know that he is in love with her.
Not the best story Williamson ever wrote. The plot seems pretty simple but Harry Bates wasn’t looking for complex plotting, or even all that much Science. If the story had been sold to Ray Palmer seven or eight years later, there would have been footnotes to explain each idea. The robots were well designed and the idea of a controlling intelligence wasn’t too cliche yet. Williamson keeps the robot master at arms length so we don’t the usual glimpse into the terrifying robot civilization that Hal K. Wells gave us.
In The Early Williamson (1976), Jack wrote:
“I’m struck now with the contrast in theme between ‘The Cosmic Express’ and ‘The Doom from Planet 4.’ Though they were written only a year apart, their attitudes toward technology are sharply opposite. The first story accepts progress as a good thing and pokes fun at the primitivistic longing to escape from a mechanized world.
‘The Doom from Planet 4’ reverses everything. Machines are the enemy, threatening to mechanize the Earth for the Master Intelligence of Mars. The human hero, empty-handed and nearly empty-minded, making a living bullet of his own body, becomes a symbol of pure primitivism. When I wrote the stories, of course, I was simply trying to write good pulp fiction, with no thought of symbolism. As a professor of English now, I’m more alert to themes. Especially, I’m concerned with the increasing pessimism I’ve seen in science fiction since 1926, and I’m a little surprised to find technology-as-demon emphasized so clearly in such an early story of my own.”
“The Revolt of the Machines” (Astounding Stories, July 1931) by Nat Schachner and Arthur Leo Zagat was a nice change from the usual plots in Astounding. It begins with a long info-dump about how the world is made up of two classes, the pleasure-seeking Artistos and the slavish Prolats. The polar ice caps have grown, forcing the world’s populations into the equatorial belt. And to make everything worse, 90% of all work is done by robots. The prolats rebelled but were decimated by the Death Bath, a kind of death ray. Only 400 Prolats have been left alive to supervise the robots. (Whew! Now the story can begin.)
Keston and Meron are the two brainiest of the Prolats. They have to punish Abud, a physically large but stupid Prolat, who almost crashes two airplanes. Keston is not worried about Abud because he has finished his new tech that creates a thinking robot to control all the robots. The Prolats will be free to join the Aristos. The control robot is dangerous, having tried to rip off Keston’s arm but he proceeds anyway. The control robot :
“…towered fifty feet above me, halfway to the arching roof, a machine that was the ultimate flowering of man’s genius. Almost man-form it was–two tall metal cylinders supporting a larger, that soared aloft till far above it was topped by a many-faceted ball of transparent quartz. Again I had a fleeting, but vivid, impression of something baleful, threatening about it.“
Three Aristos arrive to hear of Keston’s plan. Their reaction is not quite what the engineer thought it would be. (He has that problem a lot.) Instead of freeing the Prolats, the Aristos send them to the Death Bath. Keston freaks out and activates the control robot. It immediately starts killing the Aristos, first the three there, then all the others in their luxury palaces. The Prolats duck for cover.
The robots have taken over. The Prolats are forced to go live on the ice, beyond the scope of the robots’ electronic eyes. Abud is in his element, being physically large. He rules the Prolats because he can kill the polar bears and dogs that are their only food. He torments Keston and Meron because he resents their intelligence.
Eventually, all three find their way back into the robot city, devise a plan to melt the glacier that hangs above the control center using a disintegrator. While the machine does its work, the men play decoy with the planes that are dropping bombs all around them. Abud chickens out and gets blown up. The humans successfully destroy the robots and take back their world. The story ends with Keston sad because of the beauty of his robot creation, now destroyed.
The idea of a control robot and a robot revolt are not new. Zagat and Schachner do use the ideas in a way that is so familiar today with the Terminator franchise. The duo’s story is refreshing for two reasons: first, there is no pointless romance elements that so many Clayton Astounding stories had. Secondly, his robots are not humans dressed up as metal people. They are cold, deadly and terrible, just as they should be. Fred Saberhagen would expand this idea in his Berserker series, later in the 1960s.
Our last Clayton robot comes from “Raiders of the Universes” by Donald Wandrei (Astounding Stories, September 1932). This story doesn’t follow the usual Clayton formula either with space hero, love interest and aboriginal people disguised as blue men. Wandrei’s mentor was H. P. Lovecraft and HPL’s influence can be felt here, at least to begin with.
Phobar is an astronomer, the first astronomer in five planets to notice that a distant sun is coming closer. Night after night, this dark star approaches so after a week, it has displaced Pluto, Neptune and Saturn. It keeps coming for Earth, causing mass riots and violence in the streets.
This takes up half of the story. Wandrei is keen to show his astronomical knowledge, building his believability with actual Science. Once the star approaches Earth, Phobar gets an unpleasant surprise. He is beamed off the planet into the cavernous halls of Xlarbti, the dark star, which is actually a planet made of an unknown element. He meets an underling first:
Everywhere loomed machines, enormous dynamos, cathode tubes a hundred feet long, masses and mountains of such fantastic apparatus as he had never encountered. The air was bluish, electric. From the black substance came a phosphorescent radiance. The triumphant drone of motors and a terrific crackle of electricity were everywhere. Off to his right purple-blue flames the size of Sequoia trees flickered around a group of what looked like condensers as huge as Gibraltar. At the base of the central tower half a mile distant Phobar could see something that resembled a great switchboard studded with silver controls. Near it was a series of mechanisms at whose purpose he could not even guess.
All this his astounded eyes took in at one confused glance. The thing that gave him unreasoning terror was the hundred-foot-high metal monster before him. It defied description. It was unlike any color known on Earth, a blinding color sinister with power and evil. Its shape was equally ambiguous—it rippled like quicksilver, now compact, now spread out in a thousand limbs. But what appalled Phobar was its definite possession of rational life. More, its very thoughts were transmitted to him as clearly as though written in his own English: “Follow me!”
He is taken to the master of the gigantic honey-combed planet, the inside taller than New York City. The master, who is named Garboreggg, is also a weird metallic being. He explains their agenda and nature. The lords of Xlarbti are inter-dimensional beings from a different universe, where there is no plant or animal life and no water. All is metal. They have the technology to cross into other universes to take what they want. And they want radium.
Garboreggg wants Phobar, as the representative of Earth, to have all humans mine and gather all their radium in one week. To demonstrate the consequences of non-compliance he levels Manhattan with a death ray. Garboreggg then goes on to explain (arrogant villain style) how all the levers on the control board work and what they do. Some are for acceleration, one is for controlling the amount of space in between molecules and thus the size of all things on the planet. Another controls the orange ray that beamed Phobar to Xlarbti. Garboreggg is not worried about Phobar trying to use this information because he can read the earthling’s mind. That is how he knows English.
Phobar is desperate to save the Earth. In ten minutes he will be returned to his own planet and unable to do anything. He must act now. To stop Garboreggg from reading his thoughts, he thinks in the ancient Greek alphabet he learned in school. (This idea of thwarting a psychic opponent will be expanded in Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man (Galaxy, January 1952) where the man trying to hide his thoughts uses annoying advertising jingles to cover them. Here is that basic idea in the much reviled Clayton Astounding, so there, Golden Age snobs!)
Phobar waits for the time for him to be re-beamed with the orange ray. Hiding his thoughts with Greek, he imagines a bolt of lightning coming through the ceiling and striking the creature. This distracts it for only a second but he uses it to throw his keys at the console and knock down the size controlling lever. The metal monsters all begin to shrink along with the planet. Since Phobar is from another universe he does not. He grows giant and beats back the smaller and smaller robots, guarding the console.
Eventually he is surrounded by the tiny monsters. They lasso him with their metallic tentacles. Phobar kicks one and then realizes he can destroy them all, stomping and kicking. He sets the console for maximum speed away from the earth then destroys the controls. The lords of Xlarbti are going to keep shrinking and speed away at incredible speed. Phobar uses the orange ray to beam back to Earth.
The story ends with a short denouement explaining that the solar system corrected itself and Earth suffered only some environmental changes. The astronomers of Earth saw a new star form in the constellation of Orion, so the lords of Xlarbti will never be back.
The story is Lovecraftian until it is time to defeat the bad guys. Wandrei slips into Astounding mode and has the villains handing the solution to the lone human. Any whiffs of Lovecraftian cosmic terror dissipate in a cloud of story element from Western and pirate yarns. In the end, Wandrei’s robots are not all that different from Hal K. Wells’, living metal in the A. Merritt tradition.
Looking back over these five stories, Harry Bates did not redefine robot Science Fiction like others who came after, but his run was short and he was busy creating a more entertaining version of the SF story. His robots fall into two types: the alien metal being and the killer robot, one alien sourced and two others future human sourced. None of these were particularly innovative, appearing earlier before the Pulps, in Weird Tales and in the Gernsback magazines.
The Clayton Astounding ended with the March 1933 issue. The entire Clayton chain went into bankruptcy and it looked like Science Fiction would go back to being the domain of Sloane’s Amazing Stories and Gernsback’s Wonder Stories. But October 1933 saw the beginning of the Tremaine Astounding that would eventually become the Golden Age’s Astounding Science Fiction. But that is, as they say, is another story….
