Fernand Fleuret - In 1920s Jim Click invents a robot in the image of his friend, Admiral Horatio Gunson, on the eve of a great battle. Everything starts going wrong when the robot kills his model

 

Fernand Fleuret, Jim Click, Intro., Afterword

and Notes by Brian Stableford, Hollywood

Comics, 2015 [1930]

I confided to Horatio my ambition to construct the automaton in his image...

Jim Click invents a robot in the image of his friend, Admiral Horatio Gunson, on the eve of a great battle. Everything starts going wrong when the robot kills his model. Frightened, the inventor then sets up a fabulous hoax, in which his automaton will act as if he were the real admiral. And after the fake Gunson wins the battle, no one discovers the deception, not the king nor his sailors, or even his mistress...

Fernand Fleuret's Jim Click (1930) was written at a time when androids were much in fashion throughout Europe, thanks to the widespread distribution of Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. (1920) and Fritz Lang's film Metropolis (1927), and, like those works, it is both a significant reflection of the spirit of its era and a work of enduring appeal and value, as readable and as effective today as it was then.

Fernand Fleuret (1884-1945), French poet and author, involved in the proto-modernist literary world of Paris before World War One whose Jim Click ou La Merveilleuse Invention (1930) describes Click's Invention of an Android so perfectly constructed that – after it kills the eminent admiral on whom it was modeled – it succeeds in taking over the dead man's profession and his woman. [JC]