Unearthing Tim Major’s Ingenious Robots Fiction

Book Review – Great Robots of History by Tim Major

I have a soft spot for the silent film era, best of them all in my opinion being either Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS (1927) or Paul Wegener & Carl Boese’s THE GOLEM: HOW HE CAME INTO THE WORLD (1920). Anything that captures their style is likely a win with me. It’s fortunate then that Tim Major has sweeped in with ‘Great Robots of History’, his ongoing series about the automata of history, and discovered the strange hellscape between those two silent films which I didn’t know could exist. 

Two thirds of Great Robots of History by Tim Major is past endeavours of Major collected for the first time, and so their excellence is likely not a surprise. ‘Echec!’ was previously a favourite story of mine, printed as a Saló Press chapbook, and I’m glad to say it holds up upon rereading here; we’re thrown into a vaguely H. G. Wells-meets-William Gibson style situation, where a two-hander between the infamous Silver Turk and its owner runs like a philosophical dialogue until emotions begin to overspill.

Great Robots of History by Tim Major is an electric (ha!) read and is very symptomatic of many of this collection’s themes because for all Major is pursuing the robots of history he’s in equal measure giving them and their human counterparts an outing until only the evocative remains. ‘The Brazen Head of Westinghouse’ in some ways comes to life with the same cogs: the monologue of a robot from 1939, Elektro, coming to life with a keener sense of emotion than even the human mind. Frankly, without revealing the plot, it’s a touching story, as sad as it is sweet, but ultimately disconcerting too. 

‘Wax Caesar Displaying His Wounds to the Crowd’ changes the direction somewhat, written in epistolary form as a school report about someone reconstructing Caesar’s funeral. There’s something almost stigmata-esque about the way Major presents this story, and anyone who has suffered under the yoke of a joint project at school will know this story’s underlying pains well. Of course the classicist in me is immediately receptive to stories like this too, bringing an extra depth I’ll never refuse.

It takes the more predictable uncanny valley route at times, yet it ends up somewhere decidedly weirder than you might expect. And if wasn’t influenced by the Autons from DOCTOR WHO, I’ll be very surprised. ‘The Cardboard Voice’ has similar odes, just more in the way of the works of Thomas Ligotti. A madman story of the most cerebral variety, it knows when to pull its punches and when to let the bruises do their work. The greatest asset however is its sensitive malleability – it will draw you different conclusions every time you think about it.

I admit, ‘The Andraiad’ and ‘The Horizon’ were two stories which didn’t do as much for me. They sort of washed over me in a way that just made me want to skip to the next story. Or at least, I’m not sure whether this collection would have suffered from their exclusion. However I’ll also readily admit nobody is more surprised about this than me, as I could see the seeds of their potential, and the ideas beneath I felt in another light would be infinitely piercing.

There are 6 stories original to this collection too and each has something to offer; they collide fairytale with the mechanical in a way that feels equally preposterous as smarting, but ironically they are never less than human. 

Since ‘Wax Caesar Displaying His Wounds to the Crowd’ tickled the fancy of the classicist within me, ‘The Ichor Ran Out of Him Like Molten Lead’ and ‘Icarus and His Wise Father Daedalus’ were in essence destined to soothe my soul and despite their creepiness warm my cockles. The former story concerns Hephaestus, often seen as the nadir of the Olympic pantheon but who I have a great love for, and his pitiless task to please Zeus. This is one of the less disconcerting stories, but if you liked Netflix’s KAOS (2024), this will do similar things to you.

Ambition and emotion abound so frequently in stories, but few with the energy and precision seen here. The latter story is more of a retelling, but when you feel the tears before they’ve even formed you’ll know it isn’t short on emotion and zeal either. Most of Major’s stories have some elements of ambiguity, letting you draw your own conclusions, but here he’s more of a guide.

The story of Icarus trying to live a normal life – spirit of a party animal and all – dovetails that of Daedalus trying to do his duty, and if you expect that to be told in plain terms, prefer for a trip through the emotional kaleidoscope. Really, the only shame is it isn’t in audiobook form, as it demands lyre music and the supple tongue of a Hellenic bard!

It is with ‘A Box of Hope: A Can of Worms’ that Major really had me enthralled though, and if so many of these stories weren’t so entertaining I’d say it was my favourite. It’s one of those stories why I’m not totally sure why it worked so well, yet I sincerely hope that future generations of writers investigate it to discover how unsettling a story can be.

Taking the context of a review of a DVD boxset, we’re told the tale of an infamously-incomplete silent film – a reference to DOCTOR WHO: SHADA methinks? – because of rifts between the cast which evolved into something far crueller. I said METROPOLIS and THE GOLEM were the sticking places to which these stories felt screwed, yet here you can almost taste it.

Most reviewers of boxsets I know are exotic in their language and opinions, and I could see them easily posting a review such as this. The emotional side of things takes no prisoners here and it’s truly engrossing in a way that almost doesn’t make sense. And while its spookiness is less subtle, it is also wrapped in what feels like a love letter to the genre, and by the end I was kind of sad such a DVD didn’t exist even though I imagine it would erode my soul.

‘Great Robots of History’ contains surprisingly few robots then, but if you’re wondering whether adrenaline and cortisol can be fatal, this collection makes one of the stronger arguments for it. Whether fairytale, sci-fi, or Dennis Potter-shaded drama, there’s a lot of innovation here and the one overriding quality to Major’s prose is surely that it’s far from… robotic (ha!).

Long before the development of AI, humans created automatons in their own image.

These sixteen weird tales explore magical and mechanical representations of humankind drawn from history and myth – from Odin carving humans from wood to Pygmalion’s living statue Galatea, from Julius Caesar’s animated wax effigy to the chess-playing Mechanical Turk, from the first humanoid robot on the International Space Station to online deepfakes.

Further Reading

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