In the 1943 story “With Folded Hands,” Jack Williamson first
created the humanoids, sleek black robots whose “Prime Directive” is “to Serve
and Obey, and guard men from harm” (it would’ve been great if this bit of
gendered language had saved women from humanoid intervention, but that’s asking
a lot from a 1940s story). As the story
unfolds, we see that the robots take their Directive a little too seriously,
and they create a totalitarian state which carefully monitors everyone’s
behavior and drugs or lobotomizes people who refuse to properly avoid potential
harm. It’s a dark take on the trade-offs between security and freedom, and a
relatively early take (maybe the first?) on what has become a well-worn
technophobic trope. “With Folded Hands” may be Williamson’s signature work –
it’s probably his most anthologized.
Rather than an expansion or reimagining of the novella,
Williamson revisited the concept with a full-on novel-length sequel, The Humanoids, serialized
in three parts in John Campbell’s Astounding in 1949. In the process he adds
lots of new concepts and themes and comes up with a work that rapidly flits
between ideas and never really finds a center.
We learn that the Humanoids were created over ten thousand
years in the future, after humanity has spread across the stars and created
scores of different planetary cultures (this background isn’t very apparent in
the original story, though in both we do learn that the robots were created
after a devastating war on the planet Wing IV). The planet Starmont is in a
sort of cold war with the totalitarian Triplanet Powers. In his finest
speculative moment, Williamson comments on the burgeoning Cold War by warning that
“threatened with the inevitable fruit of its own exported know-how, the
democratic republic was already sacrificing democracy as it armed itself
desperately.” The technology in question is rhodomagnetics, which is like
magnetism, but works on interstellar distances and allows Williamson to break
Einsteinian laws of physics whenever necessary.
Our protagonist is Dr. Clay Forester*, the world’s foremost
expert on rhodomagnetics. At the beginning of the novel, a group of powerful
psychics, including a young girl who can teleport vast distances named Jane
Carter, contact Forester and warn him that the humanoids are coming. Forester
is skeptical of psychic phenomena and wary that these strangers know so much of
his research. When the humanoids do land, Forester does little; they are around
to help after all, and they promise to remove the threat of the Triplanet
Alliance. Then, they begin forbidding science (which could be used to make
weapons) and drugging people who are hostile or depressed, including Forester’s
neglected wife. Forester’s only hope to defeat the humanoids is to turn to the
team of psychics and attempt to unlock the powers within his own mind.
*Yes, for the entire novel I imagined him looking like this:
Yep, it’s psychics versus robots! And it gets weirder from
there. I’m not sure if it’s just the everything-including-the-kitchen-sink
nature of Golden Age sf (John Campbell’s fingerprints are all over this story – he
was a big fan of “unleashing the psychic powers of the human mind” stories), or
maybe it’s a case of a serialized story going off the tracks due to lack of planning, but this is a
real mess. The pacing is bizarre, as Williamson zips by the key moments (like
the humanoid takeover of Starmont society); characters disappear (the entire
psychic team mostly fades away after an elaborate introduction – wherefore art
thou, Graystone the Great?); and plotlines are foreshadowed without paying off
(there are lots of hints about the mysterious origin of Forester’s friend
Ironsmith, but he’s really just a robot-loving, wife-stealing jerk). The ending
is also a bit of a mess – there’s some intentional ambiguity, but there also
seems to be some confusion about the political message.
However, despite this messiness, I really enjoyed this book.
It juggles interesting concepts and has some big sf set-piece moments. Overall,
the book has a real “anything goes” Big Idea attitude that is both its greatest
virtue and failure.
Grade: B+
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