William P. McGivern (1918-1982) achieved considerable success as a crime writer but early in his career he wrote a lot of science fiction stories for the pulps.
The fact that The Mad Robot is a story about robots written in 1944 is significant. At that time robots did no exist in even the crudest form. Computers were being experimented with but a truly practical general-purpose computer did not exist. The earliest computers were enormous. Transistors, integrated circuits, microchips all lay in the future. It was difficult to imagine that a computer small enough to allow a robot to act independently could ever be built. So in this story the robot have human brains. Or rather they have organic artificial brains constructed from human brain tissue.
Which actually makes the story a bit more interesting today, at a time when machine artificial intelligences seem to have certain serious and possibly insoluble limitations. Maybe organic artificial intelligences will eventually have more potential.
Space pilot Rick Weston is sent to Jupiter to check up on the experimental robot plant there. There’s no reason to think that anything untoward is happening there but it is felt that it would be advisable to send someone to do a bit of investigating.
A scientist named Farrel is in charge of the robot project, working closely with Martian scientist Ho Agar. The robots seem impressive. Rick is puzzled that Farrel seems so defensive and even paranoid.
Of course it turns out that there are problems. The robot brains suffer from certain very human weaknesses. Occasionally they go mad.
Naturally Dr Farrel has a beautiful young daughter, Rita. Rick thinks she’s pretty cute.
At first it appears that the robot project has been a huge success, but when a robot tries to kill him Rick starts to have his doubts.
McGivern was only twenty-five when he wrote this novella so you have to cut the guy some slack. It is rough around the edges and it does occasionally veer towards silliness. It is very very pulpy. On the other hand the basic idea is pretty good. McGivern just wasn’t quite experienced enough to carry it off.
It is also only a novella so he didn’t the scope to flesh out the ideas or to engage in any ambitious world-building. It’s mentioned in passing that the experimental plant on Jupiter is contained within a bubble with an artificial atmosphere and artificial Earth gravity but the setting comes across as being rather generic. There’s a Martian character but there’s no attempt to make him seem truly non-human.
Rick is your standard pulp hero.
The plot has a couple of reasonably effective twists and we are kept in some doubt as to what is really going on. There are interesting echoes of Frankenstein.
Armchair Fiction have paired this one with J. Hunter Holly’s 1963 novel The Running Man.
The Mad Robot is not great but it’s worth a look if you like robot tales that are slightly out of the ordinary.
I’ve also reviewed McGivern’s 1953 noirish crime classic The Big Heat.
No comments:
Post a Comment