A Round Trip to the Year 2000

Cook, William Wallace. A Round Trip to the Year 2000; OR a Flight Through Time. New York: Street & Smith, 1903. The Adventure Library #4. Rpt. New York: Street and Smith, 1925. Westport, CT: Hyperion, 1974.

Cited by Sargent (1988; q.v. under Reference) as a satire featuring robots—obviously an early (and reprintable) robot satire.

"In A Round Trip [… the] hero is a scientist on the run from the law for a crime he didn’t commit. A mysterious stranger invites him aboard his time machine for a journey to the future, and he understandably accepts. Once there, he discovers his own 'theory of the subconscious ego' has been exploited in the creation of robots ('muglugs'), who have displaced humans in most jobs. […] Cook’s comic melodrama involves both the scientist’s efforts to elude a detective who manages to follow him into the future, and a conspiracy to destroy the muglugs and the plutocratic oligarchy they maintain." — J. J. Pierce unpublished ms. "Imagination and Evolution" ch. 4.

RDE Initial Compiler 12Ap18