Jim Click

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 Capek'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.