Revenge

the first issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories

After reading "The Iron World" by Otis Kline and "The Conquest of Life", a story by Otto Binder (both in the August 1937 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories) I went back to the very first issue (August 1936) of Thrilling Wonder Stories and read the "The Hormone Menace" and "Revenge of the Robot". From 1930 to 1936 the magazine had existed as Wonder Stories, but after being sold by Hugo Gernsback, it became Thrilling.

Previously, I became intrigued by Binder's interest in hormones and the possibility that Binder's stories about hormones might have influenced the writing of Robert Heinlein's story, "Methuselah's Children".

In the case of Kline, I suspect that his stories about robots had an influence on Isaac Asimov. 

interior art by Marco Marchioni

Back to the Future. "Revenge of the Robot" begins in the late 20th century when the roboticists of the world are competing to create the first fully autonomous humanoid robot. The competition ended on January 1, 2000. We all know how that turned out.

 Kline imagined that by 1999 it would be possible for passengers to be flown by "stratospheric rocket plane" from Europe to the U.S.A. in less than an hour and that a tunnel under the Atlantic ocean would allow people to zip from London to New York City in just half an hour.

robot contest requirements

 Ho Hum. One of the robots that is entered in the contest operates by telepathy, with a human mind remotely controlling the robot's body. Sadly for the inventor of this model of robot, the contest requires that the winning robot be self-controlled, not externally controlled. Nobody in the year 2000 seems at all impressed that telepathy can be used to control a humanoid robot's actions.

humanoid robots

I'm forced to conclude that in Kline's fictional world of the year 2000, telepathy is a well recognized phenomenon along with other advances like rocket planes and sub-oceanic transportation. Also, by the year 2000, several roboticists have each built humanoid robots that can autonomously move their bodies in a fairly human-like manner. However, only the robots built by Albert Bradshaw truly look like people and can move among humans without being recognized as robots. No roboticist has been able to make a complete artificial intelligence; we hear nothing of computers in "Revenge of the Robot" (computers were not invented until the 1940s).

Much of the plot in "Revenge of the Robot" reminds me of Isaac Asimov's fictional universe of positronic robots in which only one man, Dr. Han Fastolfe can make robot bodies that seem realistically human. Also, Asimov depicted the humaniform robot, Daneel, as having telepathic abilities.

Daneel

 Back to 2000 AD. In "Revenge of the Robot", Albert Bradshaw dies and his two humanoid robots are stolen by Hugh Grimes. Grimes enters the two robots in the competition, but they are unable to think creatively, although they can be controlled remotely by means of radio signals. 

Just before Grimes wins the contest, a third robot that had been created by Albert Bradshaw appears and reveals the fraud (hidden remote controls) being perpetrated by Grimes. This third robot looks exactly like the dead Albert Bradshaw and is intent on making sure that Grimes will not win the contest.

mind-body dualism

The robot that was constructed to have the physical appearance of Bradshaw reveals that inside its mechanical head is Bradshaw's biological brain, connected to the robot body by fine wires. Bradshaw explains that his brain is floating in a special liquid and it should last for 1000 years. Kline's 1937 story, "The Iron World", continues the tale 1000 years in the future, when robots are threatening to take over Earth and exterminate the human species.

interior art by Marchioni

 The Invisible Spy. "The Hormone Menace" begins with secret agent James Wistert, code designation S-23, of United North America being air-dropped into enemy territory on a dark night. The enemy is the Allied States of Europe. Since this is the late 20th century, James Bond has a Hi Tek™ Invisibility Cloak and so he can sneak into the closely guarded enemy base.

Giants. Inside the base, James discovers 8-foot-tall men, brutish and "driven like oxen" by armed guards. For the past 10 years, Director Bergmann (a biologist) has been preparing for war between Europe and North America. Successes of his military research and development plan include the Radio-wave Absorption Screen™ and the Super-Sonic Gun™.

By experimenting on human subjects, Bergmann discovered how to use hormones not only to create the "giants" but also multiple types of hormone-treated people some of whom never forget what they read (eidetists) and others with telepathic abilities, who when looking into the minds of the eidetists, can instantly solve math problems. 

"thrilling" adventure

 

from "The Hormone Menace"

Most important for Bergmann's weapons development program are his thyroid hormone-treated men who have super-human imagination and who write science fiction stories have developed devices such as the Super-Sonic Gun, which will soon allow Europe to defeat North America and rule the world.

interior art for "The Hormone Menace"

The most awesome weapon under development by the super-clever gland-men is an atomic-powered weapon that will shoot down aircraft. Having infiltrated the base a month earlier, secret agent Y-44 talks to the gland-man who is developing the atomic weapon and convinces him to detonate the device, destroying the entire research facility.

The Trilling Conclusion. Agent S-23 is captured and will be executed at dawn, but he is rescued by Y-44 and they escape just as the research facility is destroyed in an atomic explosion. All the talk of hormones must have gotten Otto's hormones flowing... at the end of the story it is revealed that Y-44 is a girl and S-23 plans his next mission to be a careful exploration of Y-44's physical features.

image source

Asimov wrote: "...even the silliest notions can undergo a sea change into something rich and strange in the hands of a skilled science fiction writer". I'm glad I searched back through Binder's stories about hormones to reach "The Hormone Menace". The destination is plenty strange, but for me it is inspiring in the context of a story that I am currently writing about an Interventionist attempt to speed technological advances on Earth by feeding advanced scientific ideas to ancient Greeks.

In my story, Empedocles ends up creating a legacy of strange philosophical ideas that almost seem to have been founded upon misunderstanding of scientific truths. Otto Binder achieved a similar effect in stories such as "The Hormone Menace" by twisting actual endocrinology into a perverted fictional form.

The Rossi Intervention

Back in the 1930s, Binder was seemingly in the story writing mode pioneered by Mary Shelly with the story Frankenstein. I view Frankenstein as a horror story that is anti-scientific in its depiction of the creation of an artificial life form. Similarly, Binder's story "The Hormone Menace" treads the line closer to comic book anti-science nonsense than to science fiction genre scientific plausibility. 

Clearly, Binder was not interested in scientific plausibility. His audience was not well informed about biology and the goal was to create some kind of "thrilling" military/spy adventure story; a bit of disposable fluff that could entertain readers of Thrilling Wonder Stories. It is interesting to contemplate how pulp magazine stories full of fictional biological nonsense must have impacted the young Asimov when he was going to college and learning biology. He must have been simultaneously motivated to avoid making his own science fiction stories not quite as glaringly silly but also lulled into a sense of complacency with respect to what story writers could get away with in the pulp magazines.

cover art by Howard V. Brown

 More Robots. Returning to the topic of old science fiction stories about robots, I read "Robot A-1" by Oscar J. Friend, published in the July 1939 issue of Startling Stories. The story begins in the far-off year of 1940 when a mechanical man, robot A-1 is on trial and ready to defend itself.

Mechanical Man on Trial in 1950

The Tri-octopus made the cover of Startling Stories. Having seen the cover art, the readers must have been puzzled to read the criminal charges against poor old A-1 which involves murder down in the subway tunnels below Times Square.

Hold on to your hat! interior art by Alex Schomberg

Hold on to your hat. But wait! Not only have the well spoken A-1 (who boasts of having "super-mental powers" and a social security number) and the 7-foot tall Tri-octopus (see the image to the right) been on the streets of New York City, there is yet another robot: a gigantic (hundreds of feet tall, each of its three feet weighs 5 tons) Tri-octopus that walks into Manhattan, crossing the Hudson River from New Jersey and malevolently spreading destruction in its wake.

Robot A-1 saves the day by using a raygun to disintegrate the huge Tri-octopus. However, when the giant mechanical monster is destroyed, poor A-1 is crushed under the weight of one of the 5-ton Tri-octopus feet.

interior art by Alex Schomburg

In the September 1940 issue of Super Science Stories, Isaac Asimov's first robot story "Robbie" appeared under the title "Strange Playfellow". It is easy to imagine that "Robot A-1" as one of the stories that annoyed Asimov with their destructive clanking robots, however Asimov claimed that "Robbie" was written in May of 1939, two months before "Robot A-1" was published. 

Asimov also turned away from depictions of genius inventors who created the first man-like robot by working alone in their garage. In "Robbie", Asimov began to develop his thinking about a robotics industry and robots engineered to include protections against them doing harm to humans.

Related Reading: "The Trial of Robot A-1" by G. W. Thomas

Next: two old time travel stories from the 1940s

Thrilling Wonder Stories was only one of many Thrilling pulp magazines