BLOOD AND IRON (5)
By:
December 9, 2023
“Blood and Iron: A Play in One Act,” A Radium Age proto-sf ancestor of The Six Million Dollar Man and RoboCop, was first published in the December 1917 issue of The Strand. (Note that the play predates Karel Čapek’s “R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots” by four years.) HiLoBooks is pleased to serialize it here for HILOBROW’s readers.
ALL INSTALLMENTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8.
SCIENTIST (Recalling an important detail.): And moreover, your Majesty, there is this aspect to be considered. We are manufacturing human extremities on a standard, interchangeable basis. For example, as your Majesty perceives, this left leg — (picks up ruler from desk and raps left leg of 241, which gives out metallic ring), is metal. As is also his left forearm, including the elbow. (Taps it.) And both hands. (Taps them also. 241 receives these attentions stoically as each member of his body clangs in a different note.) Furthermore, your gracious Majesty, if any or all of these parts are shattered in the course of battle, our corps of trained mechanicians, ever at hand, supplies the parts by numbers, and the fighting unit embodied in the individual returns with but little loss of time and the minimum of inconvenience to your Majesty’s service.
EMPEROR: What does he weigh?
SCIENTIST: Equipped? (EMPEROR nods.) One hundred and seventy-five pounds.
EMPEROR: And without his equipment?
SCIENTIST: One hundred and five.
EMPEROR (Brushing his hand across his forehead.) Little more than half a man.
SCIENTIST: True, your Majesty. And therefore requires but half the rations, half the care of a whole unit. There is that much less to nourish.
EMPEROR: You have brought about the greatest advance in the history of civilisation. Tell me, what else of the telescopic eye? That interests me. I shall be surprised at nothing. Your achievements baffle.
SCIENTIST: The telescopic eye, your Majesty — (SCIENTIST circles the left eye of 241 with his finger) is superior to the human eye in two important characteristics. First, it possesses the telescopic quality as you have observed; and, second, its power is undiminished by darkness.
EMPEROR (With incredibility.): You mean he can see in the dark?
SCIENTIST: Just that. And moreover, your Majesty —
EMPEROR: Halt! This is very interesting. We will test that also. Demonstrate.
SCIENTIST (Dubiously.): Does your Majesty object to darkness?
EMPEROR (Hesitates; then replies with an effort.): No. The electric switch is there (points to white button on the table).
SCIENTIST (To 241.): Right about face! Give attention to His Majesty! (SCIENTIST crosses to table and lays his finger beside the button. 241 observes the whole transaction carefully.) (To EMPEROR.) I will switch off the light. Be so kind as to perform any act you may, and he will describe your movements. Are you ready?
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF: “Radium Age” is Josh Glenn’s name for the nascent sf genre’s c. 1900–1935 era, a period which saw the discovery of radioactivity, i.e., the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. More info here.
SERIALIZED BY HILOBOOKS: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague | Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”) | Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt | H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook | Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins | William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land | J.D. Beresford’s Goslings | E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man | Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage | Muriel Jaeger’s The Man With Six Senses | Jack London’s “The Red One” | Philip Francis Nowlan’s Armageddon 2419 A.D. | Homer Eon Flint’s The Devolutionist | W.E.B. DuBois’s “The Comet” | Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Moon Men | Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland | Sax Rohmer’s “The Zayat Kiss” | Eimar O’Duffy’s King Goshawk and the Birds | Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Lost Prince | Morley Roberts’s The Fugitives | Helen MacInnes’s The Unconquerable | Geoffrey Household’s Watcher in the Shadows | William Haggard’s The High Wire | Hammond Innes’s Air Bridge | James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen | John Buchan’s “No Man’s Land” | John Russell’s “The Fourth Man” | E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” | John Buchan’s Huntingtower | Arthur Conan Doyle’s When the World Screamed | Victor Bridges’ A Rogue By Compulsion | Jack London’s The Iron Heel | H. De Vere Stacpoole’s The Man Who Lost Himself | P.G. Wodehouse’s Leave It to Psmith | Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” | Houdini and Lovecraft’s “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs” | Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Sussex Vampire” | Francis Stevens’s “Friend Island” | George C. Wallis’s “The Last Days of Earth” | Frank L. Pollock’s “Finis” | A. Merritt’s The Moon Pool | E. Nesbit’s “The Third Drug” | George Allan England’s “The Thing from — ‘Outside'” | Booth Tarkington’s “The Veiled Feminists of Atlantis” | H.G. Wells’s “The Land Ironclads” | J.D. Beresford’s The Hampdenshire Wonder | Valery Bryusov’s “The Republic of the Southern Cross” | Algernon Blackwood’s “A Victim of Higher Space” | A. Merritt’s “The People of the Pit” | Max Brand’s The Untamed | Julian Huxley’s “The Tissue-Culture King” | Clare Winger Harris’s “A Runaway World” | Francis Stevens’s “Thomas Dunbar” | George Gurdjieff’s “Beelzebub’s Tales” | Robert W. Chambers’s “The Harbor-Master” | Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s “The Hall Bedroom” | Clare Winger Harris’s “The Fifth Dimension” | Francis Stevens’s “Behind the Curtain” | more to come.