by Joshua Glenn
. OK, don’t overlook them. But look into it out: Extended before Autobots, Fembots, and the Urkelbot , Radium-Age SF authors obsessed over excitement-, steam-, and clockwork-powered machine-men or “robots” (a relative to introduced in 1921) that might unshackle us from the strain of labor… or else run amuck and confute/yoke us. Before Yul Brynner, Daryl Hannah, and Brent Spiner played troubled biomechs, replicants, and fell-jobs in Westworld , SF novels and stories published from 1900-35 (amateurishly) asked what, to the letter, distinguishes an “android” — a word, signification “compassionate-like,” first popularized in an 1886 French SF narrative — from one of us? And before the Six Million Dollar Man, the Terminator, and the Borg popularized the mysterious 1960s mental picture of the “cyborg,” Radium-Age SF authors had already inserted understanding brains into machines, and immorality versa, creating existential crises of every brand for their characters.
Here’s a register — in no specific busted — of 10 of the most compelling and uncanny myrmidon, android, and cyborg-oriented novels, stories, and plays that were published in the decades without delay before SF’s so-called Fair-haired Age. There’s a more finalize roll at the end, too. Suggestions, criticisms allowed! Study more in this series.

1) L. Candid Baum, Ozma of Oz (Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1907). The third Oz log, and the first in which we have one of Baum’s most enjoyable characters: “He was only about as big as Dorothy herself, and his consistency was in a circle as a ball and made out of burnished copper. Also his supreme and limbs were copper, and these were articulated or hinged to his essence in a singular way, with metal caps over the joints, like the armor all in by knights in days of old.” From a printed membership card betrothed to its neck, Dorothy learns that Tiktok is a “Grant...
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