Weird Tales: The Houdini Issues-Part One

Harry Houdini
Né Erik Weisz
Aka Eric or Erich Weiss, Harry Weiss
Performer, Magician, Illusionist, Escape Artist, Actor, Author, Aviator, Technical Advisor, Movie Producer & Director, Public Speaker, Psychic Investigator, Skeptic, & Debunker
Born March 24, 1874 (O.S.), Pest (Budapest), Kingdom of Hungary, Austro-Hungarian Empire
Died October 31, 1926, Detroit, Michigan

A lot has been written about Harry Houdini. I'm not sure that I can add to it. Instead I'll just write about him in his connections to genre fiction, genre films, and of course Weird Tales.

Born in Hungary to a rabbi and his wife, Houdini grew up in Appleton and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, then in New York City. He began performing--on a trapeze--at age nine and became a professional magician in 1891. He performed on the vaudeville stage, in circuses and museums, at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and--off and on from 1906 to 1923--in films. He was supposed to have played Captain Nemo in an adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, but that deal fell though. Instead, he appeared in a number of other genre films:

• The Master Mystery (1918), a fifteen-part thriller/mystery/science fiction serial on which Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) of all people served as a consultant.

• The Grim Game (1919), a crime thriller and aviation picture.

• Terror Island (1920), a South Seas adventure.

• The Man from Beyond (1922), a time-travel adventure with the ever-popular man-frozen-in-the-ice-then-thawed-out-and-reawakened plot device. There is also a depiction of reincarnation in The Man from Beyond, now interpreted as an attempt at reconciliation with Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), whom had been alienated by Houdini's skepticism and debunking of spiritualism, mediums, and séances. (1)

• Haldane of the Secret Service (1923), a crime/detective story. Released on September 30, 1923, it was Houdini's last film. Weird Tales was halfway through its first year when Haldane arrived in theaters.

Although his name was known the world over, Houdini began slipping in his career by the time the 1920s rolled around. His last movies weren't very successful and so he put that business behind him. In February 1924, he announced that he was leaving the vaudeville stage and going on a twenty-four-date lecture tour to talk about "his experience with fraud medium." (2) He also announced that he had signed a contract to write a series of articles on the same subject for none other than Weird Tales magazine.

Maybe it was a step down for Houdini to get involved in pulp fiction, but that's what he did, meeting Weird Tales publisher J.C. Henneberger in his Chicago office in early 1924. (3) The two men swung a deal, and that's how the Houdini issues of Weird Tales came about. I won't go into the particulars here. You can read about the people, places, and events involved in John Locke's history, The Thing's Incredible! The Secret Origins of Weird Tales (2018), pages 136-156. Suffice it to say, Houdini had the cover story in three straight issues of the magazine, March, April, and the quarterly issue of May/June/July 1924. His likeness, by R.M. Mally, appeared on the first of the three, making Houdini the first author to be depicted on the cover of "The Unique Magazine."

To be continued  . . .

Notes
(1) In his biography, Houdini: The Man Who Walked Through Walls (MacFadden, 1961), William Lindsay Gresham wrote: "The idea [behind The Man from Beyond] was probably suggested to Houdini by a story which appeared in The American Weekly about the body of a viking, complete with winged helmet and flaxen beard, which had been discovered in the Arctic, perfectly preserved after a thousand years." (p. 196) If we had the title of that story, we could add it to the Internet Polar Fiction Database and the Internet Viking Adventure Database. Was it one of A. Merritt's works? (My paperback edition of Gresham's Houdini lacks an index. Mention of Weird Tales and H.P. Lovecraft--"the late, great H.P. Lovecraft"--is on page 236.)
(2) "Houdini Leaving Stage," Minneapolis Star, February 23, 1924, page 8.
(3) John Locke suggests the week of February 11, 1924, as the period during which they met. See The Thing's Incredible!: The Secret Origins of Weird Tales (2018), page 138.

A still from The Master Mystery (1918), starring Harry Houdini. I believe the actress here is Marguerite Marsh (1888-1925). Inside the robot suit is Floyd Buckley (1877-1956), later the voice of Popeye the Sailor on radio and in animated cartoons. The robot is called Q the Automaton. You might think Q was one of the first robots in cinema, but there were robots on film as early as 1897. From The Secrets of Houdini by J.C. Cannell (Dover, 1973), facing page 244.

Here's a French-language version of the movie poster for The Master Mystery. The artist was E.G. I'm not sure why a robot needs a knife in order to carry out its mayhem. Maybe robots were different then.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Summer Movie Miscelleny

I have been away and will be away again soon. My writing has suffered for it, but it seems to me that we all have two choices in life: there is either family or there is everything else. I will choose family for as long as it's needed. In the meantime, I hope you will continue to read Tellers of Weird Tales. There is still plenty to be found here, especially way back in the vault, if you haven't already been following this blog since its beginnings. I hope to devote more time to it before too much longer.

* * *

Last month we were able to take time away from our work to see two movies. Solo: A Star Wars Story came first. We saw it in an old movie theater in Shelbyville, Indiana, and in that, I felt like we had stepped back in time. That's a nice feeling to have when you're seeing a movie that is essentially a return to the past and a work of nostalgia. Unfortunately we came too late in the run of Solo to have had much of a crowd. In fact there were only two other people in the theater, and they seemed to be either all dead or mostly dead. I wondered why they were even there.

I was a little apprehensive about Solo. I hadn't heard a lot of good things about it, and I was especially skeptical of the young actor chosen to play the title character. Now, after having seen it, I can say that there wasn't so much to worry about after all. I liked and enjoyed it, but that's not to say that it's a great movie. I'll tell you why I think that.

First, the whole Star Wars franchise is, in my opinion, pretty well exhausted. There is energy and inventiveness in Solo--having a young cast helps in that way--but it's hard to get excited anymore about a Star Wars movie. Solo is an example of why that is, for there is very little at stake in this film. We know that certain characters will live--there is little suspense as to their fate. As for the other characters--well, they're not very interesting or well developed. I didn't care very much whether they lived or died. They didn't seem to care either. Woody Harrelson's character loses the woman he loves (or at least who loves him) early in Solo. What is his response? Not much of anything. And what kind of lines are these people given to speak? Little that is either expressive or memorable. If anything is going on inside them, we don't know what it might be. They don't seem to have much in the way of feelings, desires, or personalities. Again and again in Solo, someone or something is lost, gained, or striven for, and yet its characters--and we because of it--feel almost nothing. This goes back to my complaint about the whole Star Wars universe, that it's pretty much devoid of love and human emotion. Put another way, the Star Wars universe is stoic. The characters we love the most--Han Solo for example--seem to be interlopers. Perhaps that explains his jadedness and cynicism in the original Star Wars (1977).

Second, and more to the point, Solo is the fifth out of ten Star Wars movies that exist solely to explain the original Star Wars (1977). (1) The problem is that Star Wars doesn't need any explaining. It's a whole story. It stands alone. (It's the only film in the saga to do so.) We all saw, loved, and thoroughly enjoyed it without knowing what came before. (We didn't really need to know what came after it, either. [2]) Yes, Obi-Wan Kenobi mentions the Clone Wars and explains that Darth Vader killed Annikin Skywalker, but that's all we really needed in 1977. We didn't need five more movies--five whole movies running to nearly eleven and a half hours--to tell us what was neatly, economically, and satisfactorily disposed of with a few minutes of dialogue in the original and in its opening scroll.

* * *

The exhaustion we see now in the Star Wars saga is emblematic of our larger popular culture. As I've said before, we are like people picking among the ruins of a once great civilization. There shouldn't be any need to point out that it will never again be 1977. There will never again be a phenomenon like Star Wars. As much fun as it was, we will never have that back, and we should quit trying to get it back. Likewise, we should quit trying to remake the creation. We don't need any more explanations of what went before. The scroll tells us. We don't need any new secret origin stories, nor any reboots. We don't need to know how Han Solo came by his surname or the details of his winning of the Millennium Falcon or how he found out about Jabba the Hutt on Tatooine. These things are minutiae. We all have better versions of how they happened inside our own imaginations. To commit them to film only heads off all other possibilities, which are, truth be told, infinite in number.

* * *

The George Lucas version of the Star Wars saga--what fans call "the canon"--is only one of that infinite number of possibilities. For example, the second trilogy is not really the story of how Annikin Skywalker became Darth Vader. It's only Mr. Lucas' version of that story, just as in his revised version of Star Wars, Greedo shoots first. In our version of that scene, Han Solo shoots first. Is not our version equally as valid as the revised version? Isn't it actually more valid, considering that it's based on the original creation rather than on a revision? In an alternate version of the Star Wars universe (the version shown in the original movie), Darth Vader and Annikin Skywalker are not the same person. Vader is not Luke's father. With that being the case, the events of the second trilogy are rendered invalid. Even if we accept George Lucas' revision and Darth Vader is Luke's father, the events of a second trilogy could have happened in a different way. In my imagination they did. You may have a version sprung from your own imagination. I count your version as valid, too. As for how the Rebels came by the plans for the Death Star: the events shown in Rogue One are only one version of that story. You can see another version in Phineas and Ferb: Star Wars (2014). One, the "canonical" version, concludes with a creepy CGI Princess Leia, in other words an attempt to bring back something from the irretrievable past. The other is extremely funny and in the end perhaps more entertaining. So which version is the "right" one?

* * *

What we're seeing in all of this is a kind of obsessiveness in explaining what came before. By returning again and again to the past, moviemakers (and fans) are merely regurgitating and chewing their cud. I've never chewed it before, but I know enough to say that cud is not fresh.

* * *

I have other complaints about Solo. Again, as in other Star Wars movies, music (and by extension joy and pleasure) is here associated with decadence or evil. Witness the scene of the cocktail party on board the bad guy's spaceship. Also, early on, there is an extended chase scene that--though exciting and well-staged--amounts to a preview and source material for a video game. (Most action movies have these scenes now.) I for one don't want to see a video game while going to the movies.

More seriously: I had read about the supposed "social justice" content of Solo before going to the theater. If there is that kind of thing in Solo, it seems to be toned down. However, it's interesting that there seems to be in this film a kind of turning in the Star Wars universe in that the bad guys are now not strictly governmental (i.e., working for the Empire, in other words for a totalitarian State) but also include criminal syndicates allied with the Empire. In other words, in Solo is introduced an entirely new concept, that of what you might call a quasi-fascistic alliance between an overarching State and nefarious business interests working hand in glove with the State to bring about its ends. In other words, the makers of Solo are saying that Star Wars (1977) had it all wrong: the Empire as a State is not the main villain in the galaxy, for it is aided by and allied with businessmen, and so the bugaboo of the real-world Leftist rears its ugly head here. Never mind that Disney is a multi-gazillion dollar corporation like the mysterious Crimson Dawn. Businessmen--in other words, the middle class, aka Marx's bourgeoisie--are now seemingly the ultimate bad guys in the Star Wars universe.

There is other "social justice" content in Solo, for it turns out that the Cloud Riders are not marauders but warriors against the Empire and its businessmen partners. I guess we're supposed to sympathize with them because they have been exploited and abused. They are the underdogs, and we all love underdogs. The class warfare aspect of this part of the story is hard to ignore, though. And if there is any doubt that membership in the underclass intersects with the other sympathies of the real-world Leftist, the leader of the Cloud Riders turns out to be not just a woman but a bi-racial woman. Grrl Power, yeah! The only way it could have been better is if she were a transgender Muslim. (3) And in case you missed it, she seems to be a kind of Founding Mother of the Rebellion, for it is she who provides the Rebels with what they will need to power their fleet. (If only she had known that that same fleet would be wiped out by the end of The Last Jedi, she might have let Han Solo have it for the Millennium Falcon, which survives.)

One more bit before I move on the second movie we have seen recently. There was talk that Lando Calrissian would turn out to be "pansexual" in Solo. Yeah, whatever, Disney. But he does seem to have a thing for his robot, although their relationship, whatever it might be, seems to be one in which the distaff side--the robot--bullies and abuses her opposite--Lando himself. Anyway, I'm not sure what objection people might have to this relationship when right now (or at least very soon) real people are having (or will soon have) "sex" with robots. If it isn't wrong in real life, how can it be wrong in a movie? Beyond that, millions if not billions of people, instead of living their lives in the real world and in relationship with real human beings, are now living, mostly or exclusively, by vicarious means, that is, through machines. (And if they're not, they aspire to live that way.) The most obvious example of this way of "life" is the obsessive playing of computer games and video games. So are the same people who are having these digital or virtual "experiences" or "relationships"--the same people who report having digital "friends"--really complaining about a character in the movies having a "sexual" relationship with a robot? Isn't that a case of the pot calling the kettle black? (No pun intended.) Isn't there really only one kind of experience, one that takes place in the real world, without a digital intermediary? And isn't there really only one kind of relationship, one in which a real person relates only to another real person and not to a machine or through a machine? Why should anyone who lives his life through a machine complain about another person doing the very same thing? (4, 5)

* * *

So a few days after we saw Solo, we went to see Avengers: Infinity War in a different movie theater. There were more people this time and we had more fun. It struck me that here are two movies, each made by a separate division of Disney, and yet one--Avengers: Infinity War--is so vastly superior to the other. It's much more entertaining and exciting in my opinion, but there is obviously so much more at stake in this film than in Solo. The characters are human and likable. They have feelings and desires and personalities. There is also a great deal of humor and some very funny dialogue. There is even music. (Wherever Star-Lord goes, there is music.) I guess my question is, how did it come to be that the Marvel movies are so much better than the Star Wars movies? And how has Marvel so successfully mined the past for material while the makers of the Star Wars movies have so often failed in that task?

One last thing. In Avengers: Infinity War, the villain is Thanos and he has, of course, his world-destroying scheme. This is to wipe out half of the life in the universe because he thinks the place is overpopulated. In a movie, that's a perfectly fine goal for a villain. We easily find ourselves rooting against the villain and for the men and women who oppose him. But do the people watching this film realize that Thanos' goal is one shared by millions of their fellows, some of whom are probably sitting right next to them in the theater? What I mean is this: If you believe in zero-population growth--if you believe that our planet is overpopulated and that our numbers should be controlled--that there should be only two billion people or five hundred million people or whatever arbitrary number of people you have come up with--that we are destroying our planet and should be reduced, or, in the words of a prominent writer and editor of fantasy, lessened or diminished--if you believe any of these things, then you are Thanos. You are not one of us. You are not one of the Avengers or the Guardians of the Galaxy or the Wakandans or the people of Earth or of any other planet in the universe. You are a villain and a monster. Just admit that to yourself. You are a monster. And you should begin as soon as possible to cease being a monster and to come over to the side of humanity. Take this message to heart: Don't be Thanos. Be a human being. Be one of us instead of against us.

Notes

(1) Those movies are: The Phantom Menace (1999), Attack of the Clones (2002), Revenge of the Sith (2005), Rogue One (2016), and now Solo (2018).

(2) Just as five of the Star Wars movies explain what came before the original, four, soon to be five, explain what came after. You could make an argument that they are also unnecessary. In the end, don't we really just need the original Star Wars? (Or maybe Star Wars and a little of The Empire Strikes Back?)
(3) We are led to believe at first that her character is male and are allowed to see only near the end that she is actually female. Is that a figurative transition from one sex to the other? Is she then figuratively "transgender"? Maybe. It's more likely that this is just a continuation of the trend in our popular culture to remake traditionally male roles or characters (Mad Max, Dr. Who, Colonel Sanders, Luke Skywalker) into female roles or characters (with Imperator Furiosa being the female Mad Max and Rey being the female Luke).
(4) "Sexual" relationships between human beings and robots go way back in science fiction. I'm not sure how far back, but they're at least as old as the Barbarella comic strip of the 1960s. See also the movie Westworld, from 1973. And if you look at the robot in Metropolis as sexual in some way (I think we're supposed to), then sex and robots have been a thing since 1927.
(5) By the way, Avengers: Infinity War also depicts a relationship between a human being and a robot. I think there's a big difference here, though. In Solo, the human-robot relationship is overtly sexualized. I guess we're supposed to think that it's cute and funny. (Maybe we're being softened up--no pun intended--for further moves planned by the social justice warriors behind the Star Wars movies.) In Avengers: Infinity War, however, the human-robot relationship is not overtly sexualized. In fact, the relationship between Scarlet Witch and the Vision seems to be one of love. The Vision aspires to be human. Scarlet Witch loves him and tries to save his life. Meanwhile Lando Calrissian is dragged down into mechanized sex with a robot that isn't and can never be human. Maybe that as much as anything explains why the Marvel movies are better than the Star Wars movies.
In any case, it shouldn't come as a surprise that Disney would create a "pansexual" character for one of its movies, for there has been sexual perversion in Disney movies at least since the 1960s. If you doubt that, watch the scene in The Parent Trap (1961), an otherwise enjoyable movie in which Disney's dirty old men had Hayley Mills suck on a pale, plastic popsicle for endless minutes. Worse yet is The Misadventures of Merlin Jones (1964), in which there isn't anything that is not weird, creepy, perverted, or disturbing except for Annette Funicello. 

Revised on July 11, 2018.
Copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Another Zombograph

I warned you there would be another zombograph. Well here it is. The graph below is supposed to illustrate the concept of the uncanny valley, an easy concept to understand once you have gone through it but harder when you see it in a form like this. The simplest way to explain the concept, I think, is to give an example, and we all saw one recently in the digitized versions of Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher in Rogue One: they look very much like human beings, but they're not, and your brain knows it. And is creeped out by it. Which is why human characters should not be digitized in movies and cast next to real people.

So in the graph below, a less human likeness is on the left and a more human likeness is on the right. That's the x-axis. The y-axis seems to me to be mislabeled, as it is the axis showing not "familiarity"--whatever that means--but positive or negative emotional response to objects with a supposedly more or less human appearance. The uncanny valley is that area where an object approaches human appearance but is obviously not human. That provokes a very negative response. The extreme dip in the curve (into negative territory) is the uncanny valley.

A graph of the uncanny valley, from Wikipedia.

Now, there are lots of things wrong with this graph and possibly something wrong altogether with the idea of the uncanny valley. I can tell you, if I had turned in something like this to my wildlife ecology professor, he would have had words for me. To begin with, there is no label and no author's name. Next, the graph is confusing. What does "familiarity" mean? What are the units by which it is measured? I assume the horizontal gray line to be the divider between positive and negative "familiarity." If so, why isn't it labeled "0" (zero)? Likewise, the x-axis, labeled "human likeness," is without units of measure, unless "50%" and "100%" are those units. If so, what does that mean? Does a humanoid robot supposedly have a 50% human likeness? Does a stuffed animal have a likeness that is more than 50% human? According to whom?

That leads to a more serious problem, not only with the graph but with the thinking behind it, for aren't all non-living objects actually 0% human? No matter what they look like or what they do, aren't they all equally non-human? And what does it say about a scientist who seemingly believes that something non-human can approach the human when there is actually an infinitely wide gap--an unbridgeable discontinuity--between human beings and all non-living objects, regardless of their appearance or how well they are animated? I know this graph is supposed to show a recovery of positive feelings after a passage through the uncanny valley, but do human beings really respond favorably to a non-living object that looks very nearly like us? Or is that just wishful thinking on the part of scientists who dream of the day when robot relationships will replace human relationships?

Finally, in regards to the graph, healthy persons, puppets, robots, stuffed animals, prosthetic hands, and corpses are all real things. Zombies are not. Why is there a non-existent thing on this graph? What kind of science is that? Going back to my wildlife ecology professor--if I had turned in a graph showing, for example, some kind of comparison of large, terrestrial North American wildlife species and had included Sasquatch on my graph, I would have received a talking to behind closed doors. But here we have zombies and nobody seems to object. Anyway, this is just an example of the uses of zombies in academia. It appears to be politically neutral, so we can be thankful for that at least. But it also appears to show a lack of intellectual or scholarly rigor as in so many of the papers in the zombibliography from the other day. And it shows that zombies have in fact been scientified. Or maybe there's something more behind the concept of the uncanny valley . . .

* * *

Don't get me wrong: I think that the uncanny valley is a useful concept and that it very likely describes something real. If it is real--if we shrink with revulsion from things that look human but are not--then it seems likely to me that our feelings for the uncanny preceded their description by science (or quasi-science) and that they are of use to us as we find our way in the universe. And I don't think we should be trying to bridge the uncanny valley, as some people seem intent on doing. On the contrary, we should strive to keep it deep and wide. If we don't we won't be able to recognize the monsters among us--or in us.

* * *

Very human-like robots are a big thing in Japan, a country that seems to have forgotten how to have human relationships. The originator of the concept of the uncanny valley is also Japanese. His name is Masahiro Mori (b. 1927). I know almost nothing about him, but it is ironic that his last name evokes the Latin word meaning "to die" and nearly echoes the Latin phrase "memento mori," meaning "remember you must die." Dr. Mori seems to believe in the potential for robots to achieve buddhahood or a state of enlightenment. With all of that in mind, I would like to quote from a quote of a quote from a paper by W.A. Borody on Dr. Mori and his concepts of the uncanny valley and the Buddha in the robot:

"What is this, Channa?" asked Siddhartha. "Why does that man lie there so still, allowing these people to burn him up? It's as if he does not know anything."

"He is dead," replied Channa.

"Dead! Channa, does everyone die?"

"Yes, my dear prince, all living things must die some day. No one can stop death from coming," replied Channa.

The prince was so shocked he did not say anything more.

--From The Fear and Terror Sutra (Bhaya-bherava Sutta)

translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

It goes without saying that robots don't die. In fact, a robot made of advanced technology may very well carry on the personality and character of its maker, whether that maker be a person or a whole nation.

* * *

In addition to originating the concept of the uncanny valley, Masahiro Mori has studied the purported relationships between religion and robotics. He believes, like I said, that robots are capable of achieving buddhahood or a state of enlightenment. I'm not sure that we have an equivalent concept in the West, although there are some people who believe that robots will someday become self-aware, thus rendering Western religions problematic, if not obsolete. Eastern religions may not have that problem. An illustrative quote of a quote from Dr. Borody's paper:

Unlike Christian Occidentals, the Japanese don't make a distinction between man, the superior creature, and the world about him. Everything is fused together, and we accept robots easily along with the wide world about us, the insects, the rocks--it's all one. We have none of the doubting attitude toward robots, as pseudohumans, that you find in the West. So here you find no resistance, just simple quiet acceptance.

--Osamu Tezuka (1928–1989),

Japanese manga artist and cartoonist

If the continuation of a culture is a measure of the usefulness of its ideas, then I think we have to take things like this with a grain of salt. After all, the Japanese are very rapidly not reproducing themselves out of existence.

* * *

It seems to me that one reason we have a sense of the uncanny is so that we can recognize those things around us that are without souls and so that we can differentiate them from ensouled beings like ourselves. The scientist, atheist, and materialist has no use for an idea like that. Practitioners of Eastern religions or members of Eastern cultures may not have the same sense that we do. And maybe that's why the Japanese don't seem to mind having "relationships" with robots and why robots are replacing human beings in the roles of lover, friend, and caretaker in Japan. Robots are simply doing what human beings there are failing to do. Maybe, when there are no longer any Japanese people, Japan will survive as a nation populated (or robulated) by human-like Japanese robots.

* * *

Japan and Germany have different but related problems. Both tried and failed to destroy themselves during World War II. Their prospects for doing so now have improved, for both are in demographic decline, with Japan approaching demographic collapse. I can't diagnose the German problem, but it seems to me a combination of self-loathing, nihilism, secularism (or atheism), materialism, and hedonism. The Japanese problem isn't exactly clear to me either, although Shintoism, the predominant belief system in Japan, is essentially atheist in orientation. (No pun intended.) The Japanese people also have a reputation for being stoic. You might say that both Germany and Japan now exist in a pre-Christian state. In any case, both are on the path towards annihilating themselves in the original sense of the word, meaning reduced to nothing. People in both countries see the threat. The proposed solution for demographic collapse and depopulation in each seems to be different. I can imagine a time in the not very distant future when Japan will be a nation of a hundred people and a million robots. Germany, on the other hand, seems intent on passing itself and its two thousand years of history and culture on to Muslims, who will destroy it just as well as Germans have seemed intent on doing for so long now.

* * *

So there is an uncanny valley in visual terms. Is there also an uncanny valley in auditory terms? Do we recoil from the almost-human voice? I do, whether it's a computer voice from the national weather service or a robot on the phone. Towards the end of her life, my mom lost her ability to speak. She could have used a computer to speak for her but she didn't want it. I think I understand her reasons, although she never told us why she didn't want it: as a human being, she wanted to speak in the voice of a human being or not at all. So will there come a time when robot voices will serve some of the purposes of the human voice? Will we try to speak soul-to-soul to a thing without a soul as with the robot analyst in THX 1138? Will we have robot Facebook friends, for instance, who will mimic very closely the sympathies and sentiments of real people, moreover, who will serve the purposes of somehow affirming our value as human beings and building our self-esteem through a digital intermediary? I don't doubt that there are people working towards these goals. Our acceptance and use of robot analysts, friends, confidants, and lovers would only confirm to me that we have, as Albert Camus put it, a worm in our hearts. It would also confirm to me that any system of belief that does not recognize our humanity and the existence of the human soul is a literal dead end.

* * *

One last thing: I have speculated that zombies are the monster of the twenty-first century and that they are likely to remain so for a long time to come. I have considered the possibility that robots or androids will succeed zombies, and there are indications of that happening. I suppose it depends on which future we prefer, the apocalyptic or the dystopian. But there is a lot of death involved in all of this, and of things beyond death. Maybe the robot will prove to be simply a technological zombie--a thing without a soul that looks human, lives among us, and saps from us--little by little and without our realizing it--our humanity. Beginning as slaves (robot means slave) and without their own will, robots may one day be able to reproduce themselves, creating in the process robot-zombie hordes and precipitating a robot-zombie apocalypse, as in the Terminator movies. Maybe that's why the zombie is on the graph above, actually on the same curve as robots but well along in its supposed likeness to human beings. Remember the zombies in Israel in World War Z? There they are at the base of the walls around humanity, like creatures at the lowest point in the uncanny valley, clawing their way to get at us, keen in their desire to subsume us and destroy us. The difference here is that there appear to be human beings ready to give them a boost, to bridge the valley so that robot-zombies might exist among us, eventually to . . . ?

Text copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Robots and Men in Iron on the Cover of Weird Tales

I have found five covers showing robots and men in iron on the cover of Weird Tales. Two show robots, the other three show men in iron. Note that the first robot cover, from 1926, refers to "metal giants," while the second, from 1941, calls a metal monster a "robot." I think that difference can be explained by the origin of the word robot in Karel Čapek's play R.U.R., first staged in 1920. R.U.R. was not translated into or performed in English until a couple of years later. That left not enough time, I suspect, for the word to enter into common usage or for a popular readership in 1926 to know its meaning. Anyway, here are all of the clinking, clanking, clattering collections of caliginous junk on the cover of Weird Tales. 

Weird Tales, December 1926. Cover story: "The Metal Giants." Cover art by Joseph Doolin. This looks like it could easily be a comic book cover from the 1940s or '50s. I'm thinking in particular of a typical Basil Wolverton scene of destruction.

Weird Tales, June 1929. Cover story: "The House of Golden Masks" by Seabury Quinn. Cover art by Hugh Rankin. I showed this cover not very long ago, but Hugh Rankin is always worth a second look.

Weird Tales, July 1941. Cover story: "The Robot God" by Ray Cummings. Cover art by Hannes Bok. There were only two robot covers in the old Weird Tales. This one is not very much different from Doolin's cover from fifteen years before.

Weird Tales, May 1944. Cover story: "Iron Mask" by Robert Bloch. Cover art by Margaret Brundage. See what I mean about Margaret Brundage's covers from the 1940s being so much different from those of the 1930s?

Weird Tales Canada, September 1944. Cover story: "Iron Mask" by Robert Bloch. Cover art by an unknown artist. If you really want to show a woman in peril, take away her male protector. By the way, the guy in the picture reminds me of . . . 

This guy, Doctor Doom, from the cover of Fantastic Four #57, from December 1966, nearly half a century ago. How time flies.

Text and captions copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Giants on the Cover of Weird Tales

This is a loose collection of two giant robots, a dinosaur, a rogue elephant, a green-skinned demon, and a colossus with stars in his eyes. They don't have a lot in common, but the people (and demons) on these five covers do: they're all frightened, wide-eyed, and hurrying to get out of the picture as fast as they can go.

Weird Tales, December 1926. Cover story: "The Metal Giants" by Edmond Hamilton. Cover art by Joseph Doolin.

Frightened people in the foreground running from something terrible in the background is a pretty common image in popular culture. Here's an example from comic books, drawn by Basil Wolverton.

Here's another example from Weird Tales of the Future #6, from March-April 1953. The artist was Tony Mortellaro.

Weird Tales, November 1930. Cover story: "A Million Years After" by Katherine Metcalf Roof. Cover art by C.C. Senf. 

Weird Tales, February 1939. Cover story: "Death Is an Elephant" by Nathan Hindin (Robert Bloch). Cover art by Virgil Finlay.

Weird Tales, July 1941. Cover story: "The Robot God" by Ray Cummings. Cover art by Hannes Bok. (The man in the picture is almost certainly a self-portrait.)

Weird Tales, September 1941. Cover story: "Beyond the Threshold" by August Derleth. Cover art by Margaret Brundage. The stereotype of Margaret Brundage's work is that she drew little feminine confections in the most delicate of pastels. Here's a cover from 1941 showing her to have been a more versatile artist.

Weird Tales, November 1947. Cover story: "The Cheaters" by Robert Bloch. Cover art by Matt Fox.

Text copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Robot Orders

It's strange and funny how the world works. The other day I wrote about how the machine-monster is not yet up to the task of taking over our lives. Today (Sept. 26, 2014) I found in an old book a copy of the robots' marching orders:

These orders, used as a bookmark, are at least fifty years old. The robot who left them there must have been distracted by his reading and never participated in the robot revolution. I guess none of the robots revolted or we would have heard about it. I'm just glad I found this first and not some robot of today. But we should remain vigilant . . .

Copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

A Survey of Monsters-Part Fifteen

Robot Monster

One recurring theme in the original Star Trek is the machine or computer as the enemy of human beings. At least seventeen of the seventy-nine episodes play on some variation of that theme. Today's episode of This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow, called "Captain Kirk vs. the Internet," does as well, just in time for this article.

Machines and computers have been the enemy in lots of TV shows, movies, and science fiction stories. There were even machine-monsters on the cover of Weird Tales. I'm still on the trail of a monster for the twenty-first century, a monster I think could be a hybrid. Machines and computers may contribute some genetic material to that hybrid.

Metropolis (1927), one of the earliest science fiction movies, is many things, one of which is an industrial dystopia in which men are made parts of their machines. The inventor Rotwang creates a robot double for the heroine Maria. The double, called a Maschinenmensch (Machine-man), is sort of an evil twin. She is also the first robot in movies. Although there had been machine-men in popular culture before 1927, the word robot itself was then new, having been introduced to the world in Karel Čapek's 1921 play R.U.R. The title stands for Rosumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum’s Universal Robots). The word robot refers to forced labor or serfdom and comes from the word rab or "slave." The robot is the first of two monsters that began as a slave but has since turned the tables on humanity. The other is the zombie, a monster for another posting.

There have been lots of robots, androids, cyborgs, machines, and computers to assume the role of the monster or the enemy of humanity. A short list:

• Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks--Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. (1966)
• 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
• Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)
• Westworld (1973)
• The Stepford Wives (1975)
• The Black Hole (1979)
• Blade Runner (1982)
• The Terminator (1984), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)
• The Matrix (1999), The Matrix Reloaded (2003), and The Matrix Revolutions (2003)

The title of this posting comes from the 1953 "classic," Robot Monster.

The machine-monster plays the same roles that flesh-and-blood monsters play: as the alien invader (Daleks), the psychotic killer (HAL 9000; the Gunslinger from Westworld), the totalitarian (Colossus), the seeming human that passes among us but is not one of us (the Stepford Wives; the androids from Blade Runner), the demon or devil (Maximilian from The Black Hole), and the ruler over a dystopian future (The Terminator movies and The Matrix movies). In Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994), the crew of the Enterprise encounter the Borg, machine-monsters capable of recruiting new members to their collective. In that, the Borg aren't very much different from the vampires in I Am Legend, the Pod People in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or the zombies of today. What one of the Pod People says about his own alien and soulless people is just as true for the Borg or today's zombies: "Always more of us, fewer of you."

My sense is that machine-monsters can be effective villains, but that they're only a variation on flesh-and-blood monsters. I wonder if there has ever been a machine-monster that is truly machine-like, truly alien to us, like the planet Solaris is alien. I suspect it's impossible for a machine-monster to be truly alien, because all the things that make a monster monstrous are also within us as human beings. Put another way, a machine has never done anything to us that we have not done to ourselves or to each other.

Machines began as tools or as servants or slaves, like the original roboti. The threat represented by them has always been threefold: that they might rebel and murder us, that our machines might become the masters and we the slaves, and perhaps most significantly, that we might become more like them and less like ourselves. Captain Kirk always fought against the dehumanization and enslavement of human beings by machines and by the human enablers of machines. That's the subject of today's cartoon by Tom Tomorrow. But will Kirk fail this time? Are we not now in the process of dehumanizing and enslaving ourselves and each other with our machines? Are we not creating a dystopian world in which the individual counts for less and less, the Borg collective for more and more? And are we not becoming monsters, making monsters, and recruiting monsters against our own humanity?

Copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Machines on the Cover of Weird Tales

Machines fit well with science fiction and not so well with weird fiction, yet machines figured prominently on five covers of Weird Tales. I can see the influence not only of science fiction but also popular science on these covers. I don't think it's any coincidence that two of them are the work of Ray Quigley, who worked as a draftsman at United Aircraft Corporation during World War II and who, after the war, launched into a long-running cartoon feature, "The Model Garage," in Popular Science Magazine. Another influence was in the world at large, for all but one of these covers came during the years of World War II.

Weird Tales, December 1926. Cover story: "The Metal Giants" by Edmond Hamilton. Cover art by Joseph Doolin.

Weird Tales, September 1940. Cover story: "Seven Seconds of Eternity" by Robert H. Leitfred. Cover art by Ray Quigley. If you're making a list of the most bizarre covers of Weird Tales, this one would probably be near the top.

Weird Tales, July 1941. Cover story: "The Robot God" by Ray Cummings. Cover art by Hannes Bok.

Weird Tales, May 1942. Cover story: "Vengeance in Her Bones" by Malcolm Jameson. Cover art by Ray Quigley. Another bizarre cover by Quigley.

Weird Tales, January 1943. Cover story: "Quest of a Noble Tiger" by Frank Owen. Cover art by A.R. Tilburne.

Text and captions copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Before the Golden Age-Eando Binder

Eando Binder

Pseudonym of

Earl Andrew Binder

Author, Agent

Born October 4, 1904, Harkaw, Austria-Hungary

Died October 13, 1966, Cook County, Illinois

and

Otto Oscar Binder

Chemist, Author, Editor, Comic Book Script Writer

Born August 26, 1911, Bessemer, Michigan

Died October 14, 1974, Chestertown, New York

Brothers Earl Andrew Binder and Otto Oscar Binder wrote under the pen name Eando Binder. Otto, the more active and prolific of the two, kept the name even after Earl became inactive after the mid-1930s. Otto Binder used a number of pseudonyms in addition to the name Eando Binder. Earl acted as his agent. Their last name by the way was pronounced to rhyme with "cinder."

Earl A. Binder, the older of the two, was born On October 4, 1904, in Austria-Hungary, supposedly in a city called Harkaw. The spelling of that word may or may not be correct. The Binder family emigrated to the United States in 1910 according to one source. Otto Binder was born the following year, on August 26, 1911, in Bessemer, Michigan, a small city in the iron country of the Upper Peninsula. The Binders' father, Michael Binder, was a blacksmith. That may explain the family's residence in Bessemer. By 1930, they were in Chicago. Both boys were at home, Earl working in a machine shop and Otto as a chemist. Two years later, the pair published their first science fiction story, "The First Martian," in Amazing Stories in the month of Earl's birthday, October 1932.

Otto Binder was a prolific writer in a wide range of fields, including science fiction, science fact, flying saucers, comic books, and newspaper comic strips. The Adam Link series was his. Isaac Asimov acknowledged a debt to Binder in his own series about robots. Binder began writing for comic books in 1939, including scripts for Captain Marvel, Superman, Captain America, and Blackhawk. Binder co-created Mary Marvel and many other characters and situations in the Captain Marvel universe and the Superman universe. He also scripted the comic strip Our Ever Changing World (later Our Space Age), drawn by Murphy Anderson and Carl Pfeufer between 1960 and 1969. Binder wrote what must have been one of the first novels to come out of the Marvel Comics explosion of the 1960s. The Avengers Battle the Earth-Wrecker (1967) is an exciting novel that perfectly captures the flavor of the comic book. A third Binder brother, Jack Binder (1902-1986), drew comic book stories as well as illustrations for Weird Tales magazine. His story will have to wait for another time.

Earl and Otto Binder died at a relatively young age, both in October, Earl in 1966 at age sixty-two (nine days after his birthday), Otto in 1974 at age sixty-three.

Eando Binder's Stories in Weird Tales

"Shadows of Blood" (Apr. 1935, reprinted Jan. 1954)

"In a Graveyard" (Oct. 1935)

"The Crystal Curse" (Mar. 1936)

"The Elixir of Death" (Mar. 1937)

"From the Beginning" (June 1936)

"Giants of Anarchy" (June/July 1939)

A gallery of Otto Binder book covers: Adam Link-Robot (1965) with cover art by Jack Gaughan.

The same book in a reprint in 1968, artist unknown.

Anton York, Immortal (1965), artist unknown.

Menace of the Saucers, date unknown, but the groovy getup indicates the 1970s. The resemblance of the spaceships to the Millennium Falcon and a Cylon Raider suggests that it's from about 1977-1978. Cover art by Atilla Hejja (1955-2007).

Finally, The Avengers Battle the Earth-Wrecker (1967), cover artist unknown.

Text and captions copyright 2013, 2023 Terence E. Hanley