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The tin robot has become such a part of our nostalgia of Science Fiction that many have no idea where it all began. They know that The Iron Giant is based n old SF but what exactly bred such a gigantic metal man? Here is that history in twenty-four magazine covers that tells how the image became a hallmark of a genre.
The first Pulp magazine to offer robot stories was not a purely Science Fiction mag but Weird Tales, which featured the first robotic brain, giant robots and robot despots in Edmond Hamilton’s “The Metal Giants” and Ray Cummings’ “The Robot God”.
Hugo Gernsback came later (no surprise) with the quintessential killer robot story, Edmond Hamilton’s “The Comet Doom”. Ed’s robots are actually cyborgs with human brains. This story inspired everything from H. P. Lovecraft’s Yuggoth brain jars all the way to Keith Laumer’s brain-driven Bolos or Anne McCaffrey’s Ship Who Sang.
J. Schlossel’s “To the Moon By Proxy” features the first robotic stand-in.
Eando Binder’s “The Robot Aliens” is a spoof of politics and first contact but it did give us the word “alien” meaning extraterrestrial. The duo’s Adam Link would be far more important.
John Wyndham under his real name of John B. Harris gave us the Asimovian robot before Ike was old enough to drive. “The Lost Machine” features a Martian robot that is perhaps more human than humans.
Amazing Stories after Hugo Gernsback slumped quite a bit but it did publish most of the long series of stories featuring Professor Jameson and his Zoromes. Again, cyborgs, the Zoromes brains are organic.
Francis Flagg’s futuristic hot water tanks, the Mentanicals explore the angst of robots replacing humans, a recurring theme since before the Pulps.
The Clayton Astounding under Harry Bates did not feature a lot of robots. “The Gate to Xoran” by Hal K. Wells was one, as was Ray Cummings’ novel The Exile of Time.
Eando Binder scored a big hit in 1939, the Year of the Robot, with “I, Robot”, the first Adam Link story. A robot story from the robot’s point-of-view. Otto, the younger of the brothers, would write ten stories about the mechanical man, taking him through his trial for murder, to private investigation and finally saving the world. Isaac Asimov would ask the Binders if he could use I, Robot for the title of his first collection in the next decade.
The killer robot did not go away in the 1940s. Thrilling Wonder and other pulps aimed at younger readers kept them coming.
The real break from the silly killer robot comes with John W. Campbell and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Jack Williamson’s “With Folded Hands” would start The Humanoids series, while Clifford D. Simak would leave his robots to the dogs in City. Ninety per cent of all robot stories in anthologies come from Campbell’s Astounding.
Horace l. Gold’s Galaxy and the 1950s saw robots being used in new ways, some largely social commentary or satirical in nature. Harry Harrison would write his War With the Robots during this phase.
The killer robot did not go away in the 1950s. Howard Browne and Paul W. Fairman’s Amazing Stories and other pulps aimed at younger readers kept them coming.
The 1950s did see the robotic theme become varied and widely accepted. Any SF story could feature killer robots, enslaved robots, simple machines in the background, Asimovian technological robots, etc. Writers like Robert Sheckley, Robert Silverberg, Harry Harrison, Philip K. Dick, Fred Saberhagen and many others wrote as many different kinds of stories as authors. Like time travel, space travel and galactic empires, robots had spread throughout SF. Not until George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977) would robots have another renaissance in the movies.
