Jack Williamson's "The Humanoids" is literally out of this world. His field of operations are planets within 100 light-years of the earth, 100 centuries after Hiroshima. His hero, a beleaguered physicist, preparing for interplanetary war with a planet-destroying projectile, has to cope with Humanoids—super-robots who "serve, obey and guard man from harm" with all sorts of super gadgets including Euphoride, a drug inducing forgetfulness. The scientist's struggle against this superservice and the total mental inactivity it spells is in the superscientific tradition.

Mr. Williamson's adventure is imagination run riot. It is prophecy carried to its utmost as well as a maze of manufactured extensions of present-day scientific knowledge, which is close enough to the occult to mystify. His prose, abounding with such nuggets as rhodomagnetism, telekinesis and teleportation, is intriguing to a point but mostly rough going.

A. H. Weiler, "Out of This World," in The New York Times...