To salve his conscience about his literature-destroying work, he rescues random pages from the maw of the mechanical monster and reads them aloud to the commuters on the 6.27am train.

The dark and grotesque story of a married couple: the wife - a mechanical monster made up of iron parts, and her henpecked husband.

A fair number of his mechanical monsters fail to achieve a sculptural buzz.

And how do we deal with the mechanical monsters of the 21st century?

His view that robots are more than mechanical monsters eventually spread throughout science fiction.