The title of Jack Williamson's first published story, 1928's “The Metal Man,” eerily foreshadowed his most famous works of fiction. Williamson, a science fiction grandmaster and author of over 50 novels (and who died in late 2006 at age 98), wrote three pieces that dealt with ‘gentle’ robots so attentive to the needs and safety of humanity that they stifled freedom and suppressed joy out of pure concern. “With Folded Hands” (1947), perhaps Williamson's most famous story, appeared in Astounding Stories. This novella expressed almost perfectly the story, how the humanoids were created, how they insidiously and inevitably inserted themselves into the lives of their supposed human masters (resistance here was indeed futile), and how some individuals attempted to oppose the machines. At the urging of editor John Campbell, Williamson adapted his story into a novel (1949), The Humanoids, changing a few components and extending the details of the humanoid origin. He also added, at the urging of Campbell, the pseudo-science of ESP as the key method for humanity to oppose the unstoppable machines.

It is easy, perhaps, to hold up the humanoids as mirrors to current liberals who simply have your best interest in mind when they wrap warm red tape around everything. The world is full of people unable to manage their own lives, but who find their calling in managing the lives of others; it's far simpler to look at something broken from the outside and believe you have the perfect way to fix everything. Even individualists sometimes feel that others would benefit if they read the same book, moved to the same city or state, acted the same way, would find enlightenment and reason as if they just flipped the right switch. Certain works (of fiction and non-fiction) manage to capture key essences of life, and within Williamson's pieces on the humanoids we detect just such essences. Just as people want to take care of others, and often go to extremes in their efforts, so the world is full of people who enjoy being taken care of, or feel the need for such care. Life remains a constant active battle against entropy. The existence of these two kinds of people drives a wedge into the lives of those willing to exist on their own terms.

The setting of The Humanoids is a familiar sf trope: aeons hence, humanity scattered to the stars, forgot their origins, and now find themselves embroiled in interplanetary wars. This is Earth's history repeated on a larger scale. Dr. Clay Forester, a scientist working in a top secret military installation on one such planet, is contacted by a strange band of wanderers. They each possess certain psionic powers, such as telepathy, and teleportation, and tell Forester that they are hunted by machines. These man-like and perfect machines already have infiltrated Forester's planet, and plan to announce themselves shortly. In a guise to end all wars and conflicts, they will assume the duties of protecting each person from harm. This requires certain concessions, innocuous at first, but as they tell Forester, these demands soon will result in the absolute loss of freedom for all humanity. Under their dictum—“To serve and obey, and guard men from harm,” anything that could harm someone is prohibited. This includes certain professions or fields of study, including those that could cause angst or frustration, and especially those that pose physical risks. People who remain unhappy are given Euphoride, a drug that reduces people to the mental state of childhood.

Frank Ironsmith, an affable mathematician working at the same complex as Forester, seems unperturbed by the humanoids. In contrast to the excitable and frazzled Forester, Ironsmith accepts the humanoids and faces none of the restrictions imposed upon other people. Forester finds his world shrinking in his one-man revolt against the humanoids, until the group that first told him about them manage to teleport him to a secure location. Here they begin a desperate plan to infiltrate the humanoid world of origin and reprogram them, amending their prime directive by adding these words: “But we the humanoids cannot serve or defend any man except at his own command, or restrain any man against his will, for men must be free.” In the end, not everything works as planned, and the ending of The Humanoids comes across as a sort of depressing ambiguity. Similar endings rendered such books as George Orwell's 1984 and Yevgeny Zamiatin's We no less significant in the emotional impact of the protagonists' revolt. One might argue that a more pleasant ending would leave readers unsatisfied, or the book forgettable. I certainly think that the ending of the book, while somewhat surprising, caused the overall impression of it as a novel of ideas to stick in my mind to a greater degree than a simple, neatly packaged solution.

For many years, Jack Williamson's novel, The Humanoids, sat unread in my library. The book has twice been nominated for the Hall of Fame award, each time failing to become a finalist. Williamson, who voted Libertarian in the 1990s, comes across in some comments and interviews as quite individualistic. Yet, when I read my first Williamson novel, The Silicon Dagger, I could not finish the book. When I read his short story contribution in the recent Baen Books anthology, Visions of Liberty (LFS Special Award winner in 2005), I thought it nearly the worst of the lot, especially stylistically. And yet, The Humanoids remained strongly in my mind, as I vaguely knew the content and felt it to be an original idea. When I finally picked up the novel this year, I was surprised at how much I had missed because of my two bad experiences. The ideas behind The Humanoids are powerful ones of great interest to libertarians. How do we resist people (or machines) who will stop at nothing to ensure our well-being? However misguided such efforts, we see constant examples of this in our daily lives, from seat belt laws to dietary laws. Although I feel that “With Folded Hands” may be a more powerful and less pseudo-science tale than The Humanoids, the novel is a dense and well-written appeal for freedom, whatever the cost.