“Queen of the Metal Men” (Fantastic Adventures, April 1940)

Bloch, Robert. “Queen of the Metal Men.” Fantastic Adventures, April 1940, pp. 62-69.
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The protagonist, Darro, is a restless young warrior interested in glory and knowledge. He demands of the “Wise One” why the truth has been hidden from him, why stories about an ancient, buried city has been hidden, why they are not permitted to even speak of the idea. The Wise One responds that the knowledge is too dangerous for him and for their society. The dead must stay dead, and the ancient civilization must be forgotten. Ignoring the advice, Darro seeks—and finds—the entrance to the hidden city. He passes through a huge and rusted iron door into a chamber where, sitting on a throne is a gigantic metal man. He reaches out timidly and touches the monster—nothing but cold metal. He is then beset by a saber-toothed tiger. Darro tries to gain cover by leaping behind the metal man, and his fingers latch onto iron knobs on the machine’s back. They turn, and the metal man comes to life drawing the attention of the tiger. The giant metal man crushes the tiger in its arms, crashes to the ground, and breaks into pieces. Darro continues into the cavern, encountering wrecked machines along the way. He opens a door to find a small woman with golden hair. She marvels at the return of a human to her underground realm. 

She remembers the dim past when she met others like him, but the robots had been her only companions for hundreds of years since then. She shows Darro her realm of Subterra. She explains that they had once been a surface-dwelling people, but they were forced underground by an ice age where they built robot servants and a subterranean metropolis. Many years passed, and the leaders among them decided to preserve their conscious minds in electrical tubes so that when the robots determined that the surface was once again safe, they would put the consciousnesses into perfect mechanical bodies and, with their army of robot soldiers, take dominion once again of the surface world. Darro spends the evening with the recorded voices of the founders of the underground realm and learns the awful truth about the golden woman. He feels powerless to stop her as the army of robots marches toward the surface. The woman tries to tempt him: she offers to share surface-world domination with Darro. For a moment, Darro is smitten by her transcendent beauty and is tempted to join her on the planetary throne. Instead, he grabs her by the neck and squeezes. She screams but then begins to crack and spark. She has been a robot all along, and Darro rips her to pieces. Without her leadership, the robot army deactivates. He returns to his village with a tale to tell.

We’ve reached 1940! Fifty-two stories done, and hundreds to go! This is one of the stories that Bloch mined for later use, most notably in the transcendent Star Trek episode, “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” The reveal at the end of the story that the “person” we assume is human actual is a robot, that is an amazing moment in either version of this story. The first part of the story that features Darro consulting with “Wise Old Tabor,” has elements of Conan to it. Thee “Marylander Clan” tell stories of the ancient city of Baltimore, and so we seem to be placed into a world centuries into our future after “the war years” has ended civilization as we know it and reduced the human population to a tiny fraction of what it once was. Interestingly, the point when the end happened must still be in our future, although the idea of uploading consciousness into something resembling what their leader, Rann Silvo, did seems more plausible now than ever: “Into these tubes Rann Sivo planned to place the brains of the men as they died. A simple surgical operation, and then the living brain-tissue, preserved in a saline solution favorable to maintain existence, would be hooked up by means of electrical apparatus, to speaking-devices. Rann Sivo’s science that had discovered the electrical basis of life in creating robots, also extended to the preservation of thought as electricity in human brains. And thus, it was. As men died, their brains were transferred to these cylinders, to live forever, and electrically record their thoughts as speech when the proper wires were connected” (66). This is just good science fiction, for sure, mixed with a lot of other stuff. As a rule, stories with both saber-toothed tigers and robot armies are all I need in life!

Finally, this issue contains a page of Bloch’s finest writing to date: his “Introducing the Author” entry. You MUST read this! 

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