The novel “The Humanoids” by Jack Williamson has been published for the first time in 1948-1949 in the magazine “Astounding”. This novel is set thousands of years into the future, when many planets have been colonized by humans. On one of the many inhabited worlds a scientist discovers the secrets of rhodomagnetics and, frightened by the terrible energies that can be released, he tries to use it for peaceful purposes. After years of work he builds the perfect androids whose primary directive is “to serve and obey and guard men from harm”, the Humanoids.

Over the decades the Humanoids move from planet to planet to offer their services, eliminate war and any other problems the residents may have. The Humanoids take over all manual work to allow human beings to fully live their lives and protect them from harm. Using a bike is potentially dangerous too so how far does the Humanoids’ intervention go? Not all human beings are happy with their new situation but for them there’s a drug that artificially makes them happy.

Jack Williamson was one of the fathers of modern science fiction as he published his first story in 1928 and wrote several novels now considered classics in the ’30s and ’40s. These were the years of the “pulp” magazines in which quality level was low and naivete abundant. The stories were adventurous and generally relied on scientific ideas not necessarily plausible.

Over the years the quality of science fiction stories increased, partly thanks to several writers already in business reaching their maturity, partly thanks to new authors (for example Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein published their first stories in 1939) but also because the harsh reality of World War II made ​​some kinds of naivete ridiculous.

As for the stories of robots, in general these machines were the baddies of the situation, with very few exceptions. Isaac Asimov was one of the few to bring the stories of robots to the next level by building around the famous three laws of robotics a series of clever plots.

In 1947 Jack Williamson published his novellette “With Folded Hands”, which introduced the Humanoids. Williamson had World War II fresh in his memory and the idea that technologies developed with good intentions could be used in a disastrous way was the inspiration for the creation of the Humanoids, invincible machines programmed to protect humans against any danger that end up being too protective.

The idea of the negative consequences of a Prime Directive taken to extreme came to Jack Williamson basing on the experience of his childhood, lived in the American frontier between Texas and New Mexico. Williamson’s mother was terrified of the many dangers that a child could run into in that situation and to protect him she basically kept him segregated.

In 1948 Jack Williamson took up the concept of his story rewriting it with a different setting and new characters expanding it to obtain the novel “The Humanoids”. In this new version there’s a typical structure of those days science fiction with a great importance for technological developments but the problem of the man-machine relationship already introduced in a unique way in the novellette is also developed.

The scientific part of the novel is a bit heavy, as in one of today’s hard science fiction novels, but it doesn’t really slow down the narrative because it occupies only a few pages here and there. Among the characters the most developed one is definitely the protagonist Clay Forester, a scientist involved in the defensive program of his planet who realizes that the Humanoids are a threat in some ways worse than the enemy planets.

“The humanoids” is a masterpiece of Jack Williamson and a great science-fiction classic that every fan must have read.