Frank Reade, Jr., and His New Steam Man

Frank Reade, Jr., and His New Steam Man is one of the foundational entries in Luis Senarens’s Frank Reade Library, the long running dime novel series that established many of the conventions of what would later become science fiction. The steam man of the title was a particular invention that recurred across multiple Frank Reade stories, a steam powered humanoid robot of sorts that could pull a carriage or wagon at speeds beyond what conventional horses could manage and that could traverse terrain that ordinary transport could not handle.

The steam man was actually inherited from an earlier dime novel, Edward Ellis’s The Steam Man of the Prairies from 1868, which is sometimes credited as the first American science fiction novel. Senarens picked up the steam man concept and developed it across multiple Frank Reade stories, with the various improvements and new versions that Frank Reade Jr. built giving Senarens room to explore the kind of plausible engineering speculation that his stories were known for. The steam man is one of the most distinctive of the various inventions that recur across the Frank Reade Library and is one of the clearer examples of how the dime novel tradition contributed to the imaginative vocabulary that the later science fiction genre would inherit.

The Frank Reade stories typically follow a young American inventor and his crew of friends and engineers as they build a remarkable new machine and use it to explore some remote and dangerous corner of the world. The stories combined adventure plotting with an interest in plausible engineering speculation, which made them important precursors to the science fiction that would emerge as a distinct genre in the early twentieth century. Senarens corresponded for years with Jules Verne, who admired the American writer’s work, and the influence ran in both directions across the Atlantic.

The prose is brisk, the action moves, and the period assumptions about race, empire, and the American frontier are very much present in ways modern readers will need to navigate. The dime novel format imposed certain limits on character development and on prose polish, but within those limits Senarens was a craftsman who knew his audience and delivered what they came for.

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 steam man stories in particular have continued to attract scholarly attention for their role in establishing the robotics and mechanical engineering imaginative tradition that science fiction would later develop. Many of his stories are now in the public domain.