Frank Reade and His Steam Horse

Frank Reade and His Steam Horse is one of Luis Senarens’s earliest Frank Reade Library dime novels, working in the proto science fiction adventure mode and featuring the original Frank Reade rather than his son Frank Reade Jr. who would later become the central protagonist of the long running series. The steam horse of the title was an early Frank Reade invention, a steam powered mechanical horse that could pull a carriage at remarkable speeds across remote terrain.

The steam horse stories were among the foundational entries in the wider Frank Reade Library, establishing many of the conventions that the long running series would develop. The mechanical horse concept itself was a kind of early version of the various mechanical and engineered vehicles that the wider dime novel tradition would explore, with the steam power source representing the kind of cutting edge engineering speculation that the period’s actual technology was just beginning to develop.

For scholars of early American popular literature, of the prehistory of science fiction, or of the dime novel as a publishing phenomenon, Senarens’s work is essential. The early Frank Reade stories with the steam horse and other foundational inventions established the patterns that the wider series would develop across many years. Many of his stories are now in the public domain.