Monster of the Day #759

Flangepart

LOCUST LANCERS TO THE RESCUE!
Ah…now we got bugs. Mayhaps Ken is planning more changeup then we expected.

Cullen Waters

That is one cool cover.

Gamera977

Awesome! This is how ‘The Beginning of the End’ should have ended- Peter Graves to the rescue on his trusty locust mount!

Was this ‘The Lost Race Comes Back’? Or ‘New York Invaded’? Adam Link was a marvelous robot so I doubt this had anything to do with that story.

bgbear_rnh

Brother locust how could you betray me like this?

Ken_Begg

I like how the locust is super realistic while the spider is super goofy.

Rock Baker

I think there’s an old cartoon like this!

Eric Hinkle

Am I wrong, or was there a whole series of Adam Link stories? I could swear I’ve read something about such a series before.

And that spider is certainly ultra-realistic, isn’t it?

Cullen Waters

Oh yeah. It’s the little things like that and the splotch of blood where the lance pierces it. Just classic.

Ken_Begg

There was a series of Adam Link stories. They were popular enough to also be adapted to other media. I remember one story being the basis of both a comics adaptation in one of the Warren magazines (Creepy or Eerie or Vampira) and also an Outer Limits episode.

Gamera977

They were written by Eando Binder. Two brothers named Earl and Otto – they combined their names into E and O Binder. I’ve only seen the Outer Limits episode and have no idea how close it was to the original. I think Adam Link was one of the first mechanical robots in literature as opposed to a golem or other magical artificial human like machine.

Ken_Begg

Very much in the Asimov tradition, as I recall.

Flangepart

“WHAT? You ate my brother, you mutant jackweed!”

The Rev.

I think my favorite part of this is the fact that the spider’s throwing a silk lasso at the guy on the locust with its oddly hand-like claws.

Also, how’d he hang onto that lance when he speared the spider without some sort of vamplate? It seems oddly flexible and uniform in appearance, too.

I almost wonder if he’s using a cat’s whisker. That’d be pretty neat, actually.

Luke Blanchard

If you’ll pardon me, that’s not quite right. What was unusual about him was that he was sympathetic, and the protagonist of the stories in which he appeared.

Adam first appeared in the Jan. 1939 issue of AMAZING STORIES. The story is written in the first person from Adam’s point of view, so it was titled “I, Robot”. Its plot is an ironic riff on the plot of FRANKENSTEIN.

If the dates in Wikipedia’s article on the series are correct, six of the ten Adam Link stories appeared before Asimov’s first robot tale. I take it the publisher of Asimov’s 1950 collection I, ROBOT pinched the title from Adam’s debut story, although Wikipedia’s page on the collection doesn’t quite say that.

A number of the Adam Link stories, but not all, were collected in the 60s in the fix-up novel ADAM LINK – ROBOT. It’s fairly easy to see where in this the component stories begin and end, but they may have been edited somewhat. The early stories in the series were short tales with effective downbeat twist endings, but the character of the tales changed as the series progressed.

The word “robot”, incidentally, was introduced by Karel Capek’s 1920 play R.U.R., in which the robots are artificial humans created to be workers. Capek attributed its coinage to his brother Josef.

Gamera977

Thanks for the correction. As I said I haven’t actually read any of the stories, all of this comes from an old book I have of various SF authors and their works.

Luke Blanchard

My pleasure. Otto Binder also wrote a lot of comics stories, especially for Fawcett (including very many of the best Captain Marvel stories), and later for the Superman titles in the 50s/60s. Online sources tell me he scripted the Warren adaptation of the Adam Link stories that Ken referred to. The first three stories had been earlier adapted in the mid-50s by EC. The same artist, Joe Orlando, drew both versions.

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