The Steam Man figure was born in "Steam Engine Time" and its literary imagination first appeared in Edward Sylvester Ellis's The Steam Man of the Prairies. This image has a transitive significance in the history of Western robot narratives, partly inheriting the dystopian tradition of early European robot narratives, but also incorporating existing technology in the form of pulp fiction that launched the popular Steam Man narrative model, an exotic adventure with the invention of a boy as an element and technological optimism as its core. The Steam Man figure is the embodiment of the technological achievements of the industrial revolution and a combination of technological romance and racism in American literature after the Civil War. Its birth, appearance, gender, function, and acceptance are typical. It shows imaginative and diverse attitudes to new technologies from people of different cultural and religious backgrounds, as well as the American public's existing understanding and future speculation about, and achievements in, robot technology.

Steam Engine Time  /  early American science fiction  /  robot imagination