The opening scene of The Terminator has autonomous flying machines hunting down humans.
Season 2 - Episode 20: “Beware The Wrecker”
The 1896 SF Novel In the Deep of Time by George Parsons Lathrop (in collaboration with Thomas Edison) apparently features automated flying machines that deliver the mail.
The person who wrote the summary for that episode put more time and effort into it than the original scriptwriter spent.
And one of the workers in his factory during WW II was the young Marilyn Monroe, still Norma Jean.
I have a story from a 1929 Amazing where a murder was committed by basically a drone, really an RC aircraft that was flown into the window with the victim. The innovation was that the murder had tied another airplane backwards to it, so it could be flown back.
I wrote a chapter on drones for my book.
The drone was first made in England, and was called The Queen Bee. Hoyt Taylor of the Naval Research Lab gave the reason for the name - “The drone has one happy flight, and then dies.”
Which the drones between the wars mostly did.
That brings us back to the “do robots count as drones” issue.
The largely forgotten Michael Crichton film Runaway staring Tom Selleck, Kirstie Alley, and Gene Simmons (yes, that Gene Simmons) as a mad scientist who used small drones and “smart bullets” to kill people.
I suppose I think of “robots” are multipurpose and humanoid or anthropomorphic while “drones” are simple and purpose built.
Drones also have the ability to loiter and make some decisions, separating them from a simple guided munition.
I thought about the device that hunts the hero at the climax of Fahrenheit 451 but that is a ‘mechanical hound’ and not a flying drone.
We do have ground and sea drones, not just flying ones.
Brian Aldiss’ 1962 book Hothouse featured a gadget called a “ꓤƎ⅂ꓘϽƎH” which
flew around shouting political slogans.
Same year that Batman has the Batmobile drive itself over to his location in one scene, and in a later scene has it drive into the chemical plant to drop off a bomb and then drive back to him.
I have one.
The Phillip K Dick short story Second Variety (1953) describes a war where to defeat the Soviets after a nuclear war, the UN develops small autonomous attack robots that go after anything that moves.
The story was adapted into the 1995 film ‘Screamers’ (with the Soviets and UN replaced by warring off-world corporate factions).
The story is also a bit of a precursor to The Terminator with the robots evolving into human-appearing infiltration units.
I had remarked previously how the current drone war in Ukraine reminded me of the film Screamers Small isolated pockets of largely ineffectual collapsed units of soldiers hiding in dug in positions, listening for the terrifying whine of an incoming quadcopter drone.
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 has what he calls a mechanical hound–basically a creepy robotdoglike thing that chases down a suspect and delivers a lethal injection on the spot. Sorta droney and autonomous.
Trying to drill down on where I heard the quote, maybe Vannevar Bush mentioned something similar, but here’s General Harley “Hap” Arnold - in 1945
“We have just won a war with a lot of heroes flying around in planes. The next war may be fought by airplanes with no men in them at all.”
Going way back, The Barsac Mission was serialized in 1914 and published in book form in 1919, credited to Jules Verne (and clearly finished by his son Michel, since Jules had died in 1905. I first encountered it in a two-volume paperback edition from Ace – Into the Niger Bend and The City in the Sahara, when it was still thought to be by Verne.
It’s since been shown to be almost completely the work of Michel, who took an outline and bare beginning of a novel that Jules Verne wrote but never finished. The original has since been made available and translated into English.
Michel is usually condemned for his additions, but I have to point out that he added some real science fiction touches. In the present case, he wrote about what he called “wasps”, which remotely piloted and remotely powered tiny flying devices – definitely i the class we would call “drones”. They’re not in Jules Verne’s original.
Robert Sheckley wrote a story in the 1950s entitled “Watchbird” (Galaxy, 1953) about flying rechargeable autonomous craft that were supposed to protect life, but their programming started to develop a very generous view of what constituted “life” and they became a positive nuisance. So the company that made the watchbirds came up with a “watchbird killer” to get rid of them. Except that , at the end of the story, the new killers developed an enhanced idea of the things they could kill…
When the series Masters of Science Fiction announced that they were doing Shecley’s “Watchbird” I was interested, but the series stopped airing episodes before they got to that one. You could get the DVD of the series and watch it. On Feb 12, 2012 the Science Channel finally broadcast it.
I was severely disappointed. They took the simple, straightforward story and utterly bollixed it up. I thought they’d be able to make a statement about drone technology and its abuses – that seemed pretty natural and straightforward. But they didn’t. Like most of the other entries in the series, it was a lost opportunity.
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?
46236https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Science_Fiction
By the way, I forgot to point it out, but the reason they were called “wasps” is that they had a “sting” – Michel Verne’s “wasps” were weaponized drones that shot things down, including manned flying machines.