Hugo Gernsback launched Amazing Stories in April 1926. This was a big deal for “scientifiction” as Hugo called it. An all-Science Fiction magazine! This would be a logical place to begin looking at Pulp robots. But even during the Pulp era, there were precursors to Amazing.
One magazine that set the stage for what was to follow was Weird Tales, edited by Farnsworth Wright (1888-1940), it was not an all-Science Fiction magazine, typically regarded as a horror magazine. But as editorial assistant, Otis Adelbert Kline, wrote in an early editorial, “Why Weird Tales?”, “The Unique Magazine” published three kinds of fiction: horror, fantasy and what:
…. might be termed “highly imaginative stories.” These are stories of advancement in the sciences and the arts to which the generation of the writer who creates them has not attained. All writers of such stories are prophets, and in the years to come, many of these prophecies will come true.
The letter columns were full of praise (and sometimes the opposite) for “pseudo-scientific stories”, usually pointing to two stories in particular, “When the Green Star Waned” by Nictzin Dyalhis, and the second of our robot selections, “The Metal Giants” (Weird Tales, December 1926) by Edmond Hamilton.
Edmond Hamilton (1904-1977) began his writing career with an A. Merritt-style desert adventure called “The Monster-God of Mamurth” (Weird Tales, August 1926) but after that initial tale his stories all follow a plot formula based on H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898), in which a weird and unearthly power rises to threaten the world before being put down by hardy earthlings. We should mention H. G. Wells here, because the master of Victorian Science Fiction did mention the idea of robots in his The War of the Worlds, though he did not develop the concept:
When I looked again, the busy handling-machine had already put together several of the pieces of apparatus it had taken out of the cylinder into a shape having an unmistakable likeness to its own; and down on the left a busy little digging mechanism had come into view, emitting jets of green vapour and working its way round the pit, excavating and embarking in a methodical and discriminating manner. This it was which had caused the regular beating noise, and the rhythmic shocks that had kept our ruinous refuge quivering. It piped and whistled as it worked. So far as I could see, the thing was without a directing Martian at all.
EDMOND HAMILTON
Hamilton’s first try at robots and androids was in “Across Space” (Weird Tales, September October November 1926), a lengthy serial involving bat-like Martians hiding on Earth in a subterranean city beneath Easter Island. The faction that has come to Earth is slowly drawing the red planet closer so that more Martians can come and complete their invasion. When Dr. Whitley sees the connection between the volcanic activity near the island and the approaching planet, the heroes take off to explore. The Martians, who look like the statue carved on Easter Island, are using a red ray to draw Mars closer. The heroes plan to destroy the ray but it is guarded by a slave race of androids:
“So their scientists took counsel and produced at last the creatures that are now their slaves, two of which brought you here. The Martian scientists had gone far within the secrets of life and death, so far that they were now able to reproduce the processes of life itself, and make out inorganic elements the things you have seen… I have seen the things being made myself, and a ghastly sight it is. They do not eat, they do not sleep, they are literally living machines, needing only a certain stimulant from time to time, which is injected into them just as you would oil a machine.”
The androids are controlled telepathically. Whitley and his crew use their minds to take over the robots and defeat the Martians. This plot of terror, exploration, dire consequence and human sacrifice will be repeated by Hamilton for years, garnering him some well-earned criticism from fans. Allen Glasser wrote in “The Science Fiction Alphabet” in The Fantasy Fan, September 1933:
H is for Hamilton, who has written a lot;
He sure makes good use of his favorite plot
“Across Space” was Hamilton’s second story. The idea of robots and robot conquerors would be explored further in his next story. “The Metal Giants” concerns a scientist named Detmold. While he is creating an electronic brain with consciousness, he is ousted from his position at Juston College. The man is ridiculed to the point where he will not be steered away from his experiments by his friend, the English teacher, Lanier. Detmold takes his developing mechanical brain and disappears.
Four years later a farmer near Stockton, WV, reports strange ten-foot circular tracks and seeing a giant metal man. The man is disbelieved, but later when a reporter confirms the footprints, newspapers begin writing about Stockton. One of these articles brings Lanier in search of Detmold. Nobody knows a doctor with that name but his description sounds like a Dr. Foster who has a farm near the town. Lanier goes in search of his friend.
Later that night the town is attacked by a score of giant metal giants. With Wellsian detail, Hamilton describes the terror:
For on the heights around Stockton, in a great circle, stood a score or more of gigantic shapes, silent, motionless. They seemed quite identical in appearance, towering metal giants cast in a roughly human form, each with two immense limbs, smooth columns of metal ten feet across, looming up all of a hundred yards in height. And set on those two huge supports, the body, an upright cylinder of the same gleaming metal, fifty feet in diameter, quite smooth and unbroken of surface, and bearing on its smooth top something that flashed brilliantly in the sunlight, a small, triangular case in each side of which glittered a lens of glass. And from each cylinder projected two additional limbs, arms, shining and flexible, hanging almost to the ground, tapering, twisting.
The giants, shrieking like the Martian tripods in Wells’ novel, herd the people of Stockton to the center of town before gassing them with a yellow spray that leaves flesh but dissolves bones, making them so many meat bags on the ground. Stockton destroyed, all but four of the monsters march off to crush Wheeling, WV. The army engages the robot army, but the giants cover the land with gas ahead of their movements, wiping out ninety percent of the troops. Lanier watches all this from a hilltop outside of town.
Lanier continues his search for Detmold. He finds his farm but not the man. In a lengthy diary, Lanier reads how Detmold attached more and more sensory organs to the robot brain, teaching it like a child until it could do scientific experiments better than its creator. All the strain of working on the brain puts Detmold in the hospital. When he returns he find his creation gone. Tracking it to the woods, he discovers the brain has given itself an octopoid set of arms and has build machines that gather and smelt metal. With these, it builds the metal giants along with new robot brains, less intelligent than itself, to power them. (Machines making more machines was an earlier theme and shows up again and again in the Pulps.) Detmold confronts the brain but must flee or be gassed.
Lanier heads out in search of the metal brain or its creator. He arrives in time to see Detmold attack the giants using a gigantic wheel that crushes the robots. Two giants grab the wheel and all looks lost but the superstructure falls over destroying the master brain. The giant robots fall over like puppets. Wheeling and the rest of the world are saved. Detmold dies in Lanier’s arms, gaining a small amount of forgiveness.
“The Metal Giants” was Hamilton’s second try at this type of Wellsian tale. There would be many more. Farnsworth Wright reportedly never rejected a Hamilton tale, regarding him as the premiere “pseudo-scientific writer” in Weird Tales. The early letter columns support this, with readers asking for more Hamilton type stories. Ed was happy to oblige, being one of the few Pulp writers scrounging a living out of Science Fiction exclusively. (His good friend, Jack Williamson, was another.)
PSYCHIC ROBOTS
“The Twin Soul (Weird Tales, March 1928) by Amelia Reynolds Long (1904-1978) is a far more typical Weird Tales story, with its pseudo-spiritualist leanings. Sir Guy Sullivan, his friend Lucas Hammond and the manservant, Ferguson, are staying in the old Sullivan mansion that is haunted by a presence. They must wriggle a mystery out of theSullivan’s renter, a spooky Dr. Murnane, psychic doctor. There are psychic episodes, plenty of hypnotism, a stalking figure in black and other Gothic touches. In the end, Murnane proves that the presence is a twin brother whose body never formed. The only way to save Sir Guy is to remove the soul of his brother. This is done at the end when Murnane puts his essence into an android that he created with science. The twin brother goes on to live a happy life, never knowing he is an android.
Amelia Reynolds Long was a writer of mysteries and Science Fiction. The mystery elements in “The Twin Soul” shows her familiarity with structuring a story slowly, laying down clues. Long’s tale is also typical of its time when psychical research hit its second wind after the massive deaths in World War I. Lucas Hammond says: “…this has to stop. If there’s such a thing as a spook of any kind in this house, why, we must get it out. That’s what the Society of Psychical Research is for; isn’t it?” The story is filled with pseudo-scientific jargon and ideas, making it a muddle of ghost story paraphernalia ultimately solved like a Science Fiction story. (Stories of this kind make Science Fiction fans grind their teeth.) Such a story was perfect for Weird Tales, being both a horror story and a Science Fiction story. It will not be the last to explore religious matters.
Francis Flagg (1898-1946) (whose real named was George Henry Weiss) was another Wellsian writer, working mostly for Hugo Gernsback. But “The Chemical Brain” (Weird Tales, January 1929) has a machinist, John Lester, working for two older men, Captain Rowman and Walter Parsons. The two inventors are creating the first mechanical man. Rowan is a theosophist while Parsons is a complete atheist. The two men argue in a friendly way about whether there is life after death. Parsons is secretly having an affair with Rowan’s sister, Genevieve. Lester suspects Rowan knows but holds his tongue. The robot is finally finished when a lumpy mass is placed in the brain pan. At this moment, Rowan has a heart attack and dies. The robot comes to life after a period of time and breaks into the house, attacking and killing Parsons. Lester destroys the machine with a large monkey wrench. The man is certain the spirit of the dead Captain had animated the machine and taken its revenge.
It isn’t surprising this story appeared in Weird Tales, rather than Amazing Stories. The religious question would not have been to Gernsback’s liking. Gernsback’s slowness in paying his writers may have also been a factor. Flagg may have tailored the story to sell it to Farnsworth Wright. What is even more interesting is that Flagg, in one section where Lester is horrified at the implications of the invention, delineates the robot idea fully, including robots that make robots, terrible job loss, and even a war with the robots. All these ideas would be used in future stories, especially those by Jack Williamson, but Flagg outlines them all here in 1929. There can be little doubt he was influenced by Edmond Hamilton’s earlier robot stories in Weird Tales and Amazing Stories.
KILLER ROBOTS
The next robot to appear was in “Automata” (Weird Tales, September 1929) by S. Fowler Wright. This strange triptych of vignettes begins, like many clunky, early SF tales with a speech or lecture. The president of the British Association relates how that after the Industrial Revolution happened the number of horses sharply declined. He then extrapolates that the industrial worker, the house maid and all laborers will disappear likewise. Evolution will see the machine replace all humans in the near future. Before Wright closes this first section he gets in a dig at Arthur Conan Doyle and Spiritualism:
At this point Sir Ireton Mount looked at the illustrious author of Sheerluck Soames, who was seated beside him. They shook their massive heads in a troubled wonder. Their colossal intellects told them that such developments were logical enough. But why had the spirits given no hint to their faithful servants? They went out to consult Pheneas.
We jump into the far future, a world in which machines are worshipped as divine and the remaining humans are not many. Four women gather for tea in a replica of a Georgian house to enjoy its “barbarity”. They are few to enjoy the ancient digs, equipped with automata girls who meet them in the hallway. The women are free because this week they are not part of the mating cycle regulated by the machines.
Wright gives us some of the history of how humans were reduced in numbers, including revolts, and a killer machine called a Crawler, that grabbed humans by the throat and choked them to death methodically. (Let’s not forget that Weird Tales was a horror magazine at its heart, and horror fans might find some of the Science Fiction equally graphic and hair-raising.)
From here, Wright segue ways into a workshop where some of the last human engineers draw up blue prints for new machines. The unnamed protagonist has produced only five out of six schematics and knows the robots will be unhappy. A machine comes to get him. The man remembers how those who rebelled were sacrificed on altars to their new machine gods. He goes quietly, walking to his doom with the robot sent to fetch him.
Sydney Fowler Wright (1874-1965) was a British poet who turned to more commercial genres like Science Fiction and screen writing. Wright was a conservative who did not champion human society but criticize it. Naturally, this shows in “Automata” with the stupidity of the British Association, the pointlessness of the female party-goers and finally with the failed draftsman. He would later return to the killer robot novel with The Adventures of Wyndham Smith (1938) that would be reprinted in the Pulp, Famous Fantastic Mysteries in June 1950.
“Sola” (Weird Tales, April 1930) by W. K. Mashburn (1900-1968) is a journal of Dr. Dietrich, a scientist who has had enough of the gentler sex. He decides he will build his own woman. The diary details in alarming terms the depths of his hatred and the insane plan he follows in creating “Sola” (from the Latin for “solo” or alone.) The robot looks like a real woman (though mute) and is controlled by thought waves. Dietrich has a close call when he gets frustrated and turns to violent thoughts. This animates Sola, who attempts to kill him. He is only just able to deactivate her and escape.
Finally finished, Dietrich invites to his home two peers, men he considers his inferiors but able enough to appreciate what he had done. At that meeting, Dietrich decides to destroy his robot girl by bludgeoning her with a heavy ornament. Sola picks up his homicidal thoughts and attacks him. The two visitors pull the robot off Dietrich, who has knocked her head off, but the man dies from Sola’s steely blows.
Mashburn brings the legend of Pygmalion into his story, with Dietrich hoping he is creating a Galatea and not a Frankenstein (sic). Later writers such as Lester del Rey would use this same idea of the robot builder and romance in “Helen O’Loy” (Astounding Science Fiction, December 1938). In del Rey’s version, the robot becomes sentient and the man falls in love and marries his creation. Even back in the 1970s, this story seemed oddly titillating but today in our world of sexbots it has become less speculative. Mashburn’s tale has the feel of a “spicy” Pulp, which may have been why Farnsworth Wright selected it. Mashburn’s protagonist is so unlikable that his tale has none of the sentimentality of del Rey.
“Men of Steel” (Weird Tales, December 1930) by Desmond W. Hall (as Ainslee Jenkins) is filled with the worst kinds of Pulp plot clichés. Eccentric scientist, Arad Haggard, lives in a desert castle called “Miner’s Folly”. He invites his neighbor, the writer Jim Wells and his fiancée, Jean Esrkine, to see his masterpiece. The Navajo servant, Old Tom, and a local friend warn the couple off but they are too curious to refuse. Once there, Haggard drugs them and gags them and ties them up to his strange machinery. In typical villain style, Haggard explains that he has created a machine that takes the souls out of humans and transfers them to robot bodies. To prove his claims, he shows the couple a robot that was animated with Old Tom’s soul. Unable to speak, for that is how the robots are controlled, Jim uses his research into Navajo hand language to tell Old Tom to free him. Once freed, Jim throws Haggard into the vat of acid that cooks the flesh off the victims before being transferred into the robots. The machinery explodes, the castle catches on fire, and the couple flee into the desert.
It is interesting that Hall sold this story to Wright as he was associate editor of Astounding Stories of Super-Science published by the Clayton chain. Harry Bates could have used the story for his fledgling magazine. I have no information on why the story appeared elsewhere. It may have been all stories in the magazine were considered just a part of his salary. Or it may be that Bates didn’t care for robots. Few robot stories appeared in the three years Bates edited the magazine. It is not surprising that Hall chose to hide behind a pseudonym.
MORE ROBOTS
“The Blood Vein of the Robot” (Weird Tales, July 1931) by L. Harper Allen (1878-?) is one of those obscure Pulpsters that we know so little about. He may have been an exporter but he later lived in New York as a writer. The plot has only the slimmest of robotic elements. Aram Mandraga, an eccentric miserly recluse, creates a robot to run his massive collection of gold and silver in a continuous stream. Foolishly, he gets trapped inside the machine, where the coins pummel him to death. It is an unimportant tale that could have been written without reference to robots.
“The Iron Man” (Weird Tales, June 1933) by Paul Ernst has a mad scientist create a twenty-foot high robot that is controlled by brainwaves. The scientist, Klegg, also has the brain, heart and eyeballs of the mass murderer, Tuzloff, in a solution of salts. No surprise to anyone, the brain and starring eyes are placed in the head of the robot. The machine goes on a rampage after tearing Klegg in half. It is up to his confidant, Cleave, to rally the police as the killer robot stomps cars and tears apart streetcars. The guns of the police are ineffectual. When Tuzloff’s brain recognizes Cleave the chase is on, with the killer machine coming for the man. One brave policeman, named Doyle, climbs the shining monster and shoots it squarely in the eye hole. This smashes the brain and stops the massive pincher claws only in time to save his life.
Paul Ernst (1899-1985) was a magazine writer who began in the horror Pulps but finished his career writing for magazines like Good Housekeeping. A consummate content-producer, he could write anything from the hero Pulp, The Avenger to Shudder Pulp torture stories for Horror Stories to the noir novel, The Bronze Mermaid (1952). He also wrote Science Fiction for Harry Bates’ Astounding Stories of Super-Science and F. Orlin Tremaine’s Astounding Stories. His relationship with Farnsworth Wright and Weird Tales goes back even farther, beginning in October 1928 with the horror tale, “The Temple of Serpents”. He later penned the Doctor Satan series for Wright.
Where S. Fowler Wright works with Wellsian prediction, Ernst must have been inspired by the cinema. The film version of Frankenstein was a hit in 1931. Ernst borrows the mad brain element introduced in this movie as well as scenes of a gigantic monster savaging the countryside. Ernst most likely had read Hamilton’s “The Metal Giants”, and uses some of the ideas suggested by it, but adding a more personal experience of the giant robot. Where Lanier watches from a distance the battle between metal giants and the super wheel, Cleave and Doyle are in the thick of the fight.
HAMILTON RETURNS AND RETURNS
Edmond Hamilton returned to robots in Weird Tales with “Corsairs of the Cosmos” the final Interstellar Patrol story in Weird Tales, April 1934. An Interstellar Patrol ship under Captain Dur Nal investigates strange ships that have been raiding the Eight Worlds of their suns. Their cruiser follows the marauders to a lifeless planet.
The twilight surface of the star was crowded with their numbers. There were towering machines that stalked to and fro; many-limbed mechanisms such as I had never seen; and dozens of other kinds.
The eye could not count them, so great were their numbers. There were no other life or moving things in sight. Here was mystery of the cosmos, dark enigmatic. How came the active and apparently masterless machines to be peopling these dirigible worlds?
Later Dur Nal finds out the answer: the robots slowly evolved conscience then overthrew their masters to conquer an entire galaxy. At first, the patrol is helpless to stop the thefts but later defeats the robots by dragging dark stars into their galaxy. In typical Hamilton fashion, the answer is on an intergalactic level, earning him the nickname “World Wrecker Hamilton”. What is perhaps more interesting is how much Hamilton is the precursor of Star Trek, with his captain and crew on a giant adventure, and that vision of a completely robotic world is seen later in the vision of an all-Borg earth in First Contact (1996).
“The Body-Masters” (Weird Tales, February 1935) by Frank Belknap Long (1901-1994) A close friend of H. P. Lovecraft, Frank began his career writing horror but gradually moved into Science Fiction. Long wrote for the demanding Astounding Science Fiction. This particular tale would not have appealed to John W. Campbell, as it is not so much about Science as marriage. Surgeon V67 has taken a mistress in the robot Mechanical Companion GH8. The Supervisor of Emotion has declared that robot mistresses do not constitute cheating.
We follow V67 through the futuristic world that includes travel by vacuum tubes to his work at the Gland Surgery. He takes a drug called astravasin, which heightens thinking but dulls emotion. He operates on a man who became jealous and killed his wife. The surgery is successful, restoring the man’s sanity.
Returning home, V67 finds his wife getting it on with another man. It proves to be a Mechanical Companion. V67 thinks it is okay for him to have a robot lover but not his wife. He agrees to get destroy his robot lover but his wife is smart enough to know that he does this so no one else can have her and that the memory of her will be even worse than if she still existed.
Long attempts to say something deep about humanity with this tale, in which robots are only circumstantial. Unlike writers of the killer robot variety, FBL strived for a human connection in his work. In 1935, the idea of robot lovers might have seemed odd or far-fetched but has become quite on-the-nose today with the sex doll industry.
Edmond Hamilton wasn’t done with robots. He appeared again in the “Unique magazine” with “Child of Atlantis” (Weird Tales, December 1937). This Pulpy set-up has David and Christa Russell, newly-weds marooned on an island that lies behind an electric field. The island is inhabited by men and women who have been shipwrecked over the years. David has to fight Red O’Riley to keep his mate but makes a friend of the Irishman, as well as the German Von Hausman and the Swede, Halfdon Husper. The island is ruled by a mysterious Master who lives in a black castle right out of a Gothic. Every so often the shipwrecked men are called telepathically to the castle. The call is undeniable. None ever return.
The men secretly work on fixing David’s boat. While working on it, Christa is taken by the Master. David drives the villagers to rise up to destroy the Master. This revolt is short-lived for when they arrive at the castle, everyone is mind-controlled to return except David. He enters the castle to meet the Master, an Atlantean robot that grew so powerful the Atlanteans had tried to destroy it. Instead, the robot god destroyed Atlantis, the weird island being all that remained of the super-continent.
The end comes when the Master is about to send Christa away to be experimented on. David creates a lie in his mind that he is an agent of surviving Atlanteans. This trick works, breaking the robot’s telepathic signal. David hurls his ax into the robot’s head, sending it crashing into the giant crystal that powers the island. Everything begins to fall apart, as the island starts to sink. David, Christa and their friends rush to the repaired yawl and escape.
“Child of Atlantis” was Hamilton’s one hundredth story and his style had improved greatly since “The Metal Giants”. Between these stories he had written the highly influential “The Comet Doom” for Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories in January 1928 (his eighth story). This classic gave us the traditional robot body inhabited by a cyborg brain. (Again, a story that Ernst likely had read.) In later years, Hamilton would pair up a robot and an android with his space opera hero, Captain Future, for a series of juvenile
novels.
EANDO BINDER AND THE FUTURE OF ROBOT FICTION
“From the Beginning” (Weird Tales, June 1938) by Eando Binder is without doubt the most important robot story to appear in the magazine. The plot follows two men who are experimenting with a strange metallic orb rescued from a bed of dinosaur fossils. Walker and Darrell experience the story of a robot named Tumilton, who existed millions of years in the past. In a series of episodes we learn that Tumilton and many of the “Youngers” or later-created robots are to be destroyed so their radium pellets can be harvested. The radium is needed because a small group of robots are going in a spaceship to find a new system since the radium has been mined completely in the old.
Tumilton refuses to be terminated and runs. Unlike the Elders or Ancients, he has evolved to possess free will. Tumilton gets himself on the ship and leaves the old system. The new one has nine planets. The robots slowly work their way inward, building canals on the fourth planet. Tumilton stays on the third planet, even when all the others leave for the second. On the third planet he discovers a race of primitive men. They worship him as a god. He helps them to survive, to learn, to evolve.
Walker and Darrell are rocked by this knowledge. That all human history, all mythology, all civilization was begun by a robot from another world. They refuse to believe. In the end the sphere stops working and they must accept what they have learned.
“From the Beginning” is an important story for several reasons. First, though it is told in a series of segments, it is first and foremost, a story with a robot protagonist. Not since John Wyndham’s “The Lost Robot” (Amazing Stories, April 1932) had this been done so well. More important still, this will lead Earl and Otto Binder to write “I, Robot” (Amazing Stories, January 1939) in which they go a step further and tell the robots story in the first person.
Also to found in this story is the idea that robots are not monsters but ultimately can be saviors to humankind. (Is Tumilton as reference to Milton’s “paradise Lost”?) Binder predates the “Adam and Eve” cliché stories of the 1940s and stories in which God is a computer or Arthur C. Clarke’s “Nine Billion Names of God” (1953).
STILL MORE ROBOTS
“The Thinking Machine” (Weird Tales, May 1939) by J. J.Connington (1880-1947) whose real named Alfred Walter Stewart, was a British chemist and mystery writer who also wrote early Science Fiction. Both Dorothy L. Sayers and John Dickson Carr were fans of his Mystery work. In SF circles, Stewart is best remembered for his first novel, a disaster piece called Nordenholt’s Million (1923).
In this tale, we have the reclusive robotics scientist again, Stevenson, who takes his assistant, Milton, to a remote island north of England. There, in a sea-cave, Stevenson has created his “thinking machine”, a gigantic creation with lamps for eyes and long mechanical tentacles. Stevenson believes the best way to prove sentience is to make the machine hostile against its environment. This gets the creator strangled and ripped to bits, stranding Milton with the robot for a dark night. Milton throws objects at its lamp-eyes to blind it then slinks away in the darkness. Connington describes the vicious machine well but the tale just winds down to the clincher. The machine is fueled by sea power, so it can remain eternally in its cave, waiting for its next victim.
Farnsworth Wright left Weird Tales in 1939 and died shortly after in 1940. The magazine was sold to new owners and Dorothy McIlwraith (1891-1976) became editor. McIlwraith was instructed to make the magazine more of a horror title but two of Wright’s old school regulars produced two more robot tales. The first of these was “The Robot God” (Weird Tales, July 1941) by Ray Cummings (1887-1957), which garnered the cover. Hannes Bok’s odd cover image accentuates the horror aspects of the idea, with the robot looming over its human victim.
Ray Cummings was a veteran Science Fiction writer by 1941. His first piece was “The Girl in the Golden Atom” in All-Story, March 15, 1919. After leaving the weeklies for Pulps, he wrote for Hugo Gernsback, Harry Bates as well as Farnsworth Wright. As Science Fiction matured under John W. Campbell, Cummings turned to Mystery, Shudder Pulps, and finally low-paying SF magazines. Like many of the early innovators the original of SF, he was quickly forgotten as the genre moved on. It should be no surprise that “The Robot God” appeared in a horror magazine rather than a slick, new SF periodical. Unlike the other stories presented here, “The Robot God” takes place in space. The starship, The Starfield Queen is heading to the capital of the Martian Union when the robots onboard revolt and take over. Many of the crew are killed except for our chemist hero, George Carter, his pal, Pete Barry, the beautiful daughter of the robot company owner, Diedre Dynne, and the stunted and dwarfish engineer, Torrington .The robots change course for Asteroid-40 in the Asteroid Belt. While being detained Torrington attempts to find a weapon and is killed.
After this the leader of the robots shows up, the gigantic, gold-plated Thor, who has a strange affection for Diedre, promising he would never hurt her. Thor gloats at the approach to his asteroid kingdom that he calls Mechana. Carter and Barry are put to work making food chemically to feed the thousand human slaves of the robots. Deactivating the robot guarding them, they sneak out and find Thor placing Diedre inside a robot, his goddess to rule beside him. When the new queen of the robots is revealed at a celebration, Diedre falls out of her goddess prison and the robots go insane. They start killing all the humans and attack Thor. The robot god grabs Diedre and heads for the ship. Barry takes Diedre while Carter fights Thor. Opening Thor’s chest , Carter finds Torrington alive and inside. Carter throttles him and the heroes flee the asteroid, all the other humans dead. The story ends with Diedre and Carter married, on Earth, living in a palm-shrouded house with no robots to serve them.
Ray Cumming’s wrote The Exile of Time in 1931 for Astounding. He takes elements of that novel and inverts them for “The Robot God”. Where Tugh the deformed villain proves to be a robot in the novel, here the cripple becomes a fake robot. In both cases, deformity announces villainy and spurs on evil. “The Robot God” is pretty cliché for 1941. Worse, it suffers from logical problems. The robots often displace emotions and behave too much like men. He includes descriptions of the robots smashing golden-haired children on rocks and bloody knives cutting up prisoners, perhaps to add an element of horror to please Farnsworth Wright’s horror magazine agenda. His vision of robotic hoards worshipping a golden god is about as far from Asimov’s new burgeoning ideas about robots as you can get.
Buried in the middle of Weird Tales, January 1944 is “He Came at Dusk” by Frank Belknap Long returns with another tale of robots and marriage. Jim Reston is a robotic scientist. He has created a scholarly and artistic robot named Tom Gordon. Reston’s wife, Louise, is very fond of the machine and Reston has promised never to experiment on him. When the robot is destroyed, Louise scratches Jim’s face and calls him a murderer. Reston is driven to try and recreate Tom, even though he knows this is impossible. The resurrected Tom is not a gentle soul but an evil one. He attacks Reston, strangling him. If the scientist can only unplug the machine… He, of course, fails to do so. Long’s handling of the tale is the most sophisticated of the Weird Tales robot stories since S. Fowler Wright. It was also the last.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Weird Tales did feature other Science Fiction stories after 1944, in particular works by Edmond Hamilton, Emil Petaja, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Margaret St. Clair, Theodore Sturgeon and Frank Long himself, all tinged with the usual Fantasy or Horror feel. The magazine did not return to the idea of the killer robot. Perhaps because the old chestnut was played out or because Science Fiction magazines had proliferated– there were now a dozen– to the point where such fare did not seem to belong any longer.
The core of all of these stories – despite the fact that Carl Kapek’s play gave us the word “robot” – is Frankenstein. (Eando Binder and S. Fowler Wright are the only exceptions.) Again and again, each story refers to Mary Shelley’s monster (erringly naming him Frankenstein). Weird Tales was not the birthing ground for classic robot stories that John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction would be, but it was first, cementing older ideas that remain with us today in the Terminator movies, the giant robots of Japanese culture, and the evil bad guys of just about every Saturday morning cartoon.
