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The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868) by Edward Ellis (his Deerfoot the Indian novels, nine in the series, are wonderful realistic stories set in early America with spiritual depth) had a giant steam-powered man that would carry its inventor quickly across the prairies. In some of the ancient Greek myths, Hephaestus, the god of metal-working, built sentient metal men to help him in his work. Closer to the present, but before the advent of modern science fiction in the 1920s, L. Frank Baum in 1914 invented Tik-Tok of Oz, a mechanical man that appeared in several books of the Oz series. Carol Ryrie Brink has built upon this tradition of mechanical men in her book, Andy Buckram’s Tin Men. Andy likes building what he calls robots, which really are humanoid mechanical toys made out of scrap wood and metal that have painted faces and can perform a very limited range of motions. One day, a great storm floods the area of his town and a stray lightning strike electrifies his tin men and makes them come to life. His survival, and the survival of his baby sister and his friend Sparrow, depends on the aid of his tin men.
One might think that this book was quite a different venture for the author, Carol Ryrie Brink, who is best known for her Newbery Award book, Caddie Woodlawn, about a girl growing up in pioneer times, maybe around the time of Laura Ingalls Wilder. However, she wrote a wide range of children’s novels, including The Highly Trained Dogs of Professor Petit, The Pink Motel, and my favorite of hers, Baby Island. She was born in 1895 in Moscow, Idaho and because of much family tragedy (father died when she was five, maternal grandfather was murdered when she was six, mother committed suicide when Carol was nine) she was raised by her widowed maternal grandmother. Carol did end up having a long, happy marriage to a mathematics professor (STEM people make good spouses!) and had two children. She wrote nearly all her life, some journalism but mainly children’s novels, and died in 1981.