A post from the every star wars character bot led me to Wookieepedia and the discovery there was a 1989 West End Games Star Wars tabletop RPG adventure that effectively was System Shock on Cloud City. I kind of want to track it down and read it, but I'm also wondering now - what was the first story to deploy the idea of an AI takes over a space and turns all the people inside it into cyborgs or robots under the AI's control? What was the first "System Shock?" It's such a prevalent trope but also one that could only have developed in the past hundred years or so.
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in reply to @Clouder's post:
There might be precursors but I’d put money down on Ellison’s I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, dating back to 1967.
That's one I mostly know from reputation, but yeah, that mostly fits the bill, huh. Evil computer tortures people in body horror ways, right?
My gut was to go to early Doctor Who episodes, but I don't think the evil robots in those would go the "capture and control" route with their stories till much later in that franchise's life.
Probably a step in that direction. It was a contained environment with a deadly AI. But HAL was trying to kill them, not turn them into cyborg drones. But definitely a step in that direction!
In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), the Tin Man's bewitched ax (his technology) cuts off his limbs piece by piece, and so he has to replace them all with tin replacements. You could argue this is a malevolent machine-based intelligence that coerces roboticization!
If Oz doesn't count, the 1966 Doctor Who episode The Tenth Planet seems to feature Cybermen who intend to take humans back to their planet Mondas to convert them into more Cybermen.
I wouldn't consider the enchanted axe to fit into this specific trope, though the Tin Woodsman is definitely a precursor to robots or cyborgs.
I am inclined to agree that The Tenth Planet is probably the earliest flavor of this trope in mass media, from the incredibly minimal internet sleuthing I've done. It doesn't sound like it quite gets to the whole thing - the Cybermen are kind of a decentralized intelligence, not an AI - but it hits on the "we'll convert people to cyborgs" thing.
Is the distinction that AI is software, not hardware? If so, that level of abstract thinking about computers was illegal in media until 1980 at the earliest. I think what happened is two tropes, The Tenth Planet and a general fear of "what if machine think too good" (the latter of which was also just starting to look relevant), had a baby and it's this