This is a pen name for Eric Frank Russell who wrote Symbiotica above, and something recommended by an MIT alum which I haven't read yet called Wasp.
This is an early robots-gone-wild story. The robots are entirely mechanical -- pure clockwork. They end up acting much like bees.
It's an interesting start. The main character has invented an imagination enhancer, although the author doesn't let it be just that. Instead it's a window into the future. But, in essence, the main character has found a way to dispense with most of Edison's famous "ninety nine percent perspiration" in the invention process. But, in the process, he's also dispensed with Edison's directedness -- Edison always knew what he wanted his invention to be.
It's interesting how much clockwork was associated with intelligence in these pre-electronics days. It was gears grinding much more than relays snapping that were associated with brains. This work typifies that.
It also follows the theme of the inventor who doesn't know what he invents -- the theme behind Padgett's work in Proud Robot and Time Locker. Once again, very un-Edison.
Interesting... this appears to be pre-blueprint technology, the blueprints are called drawings. There is mention of electricity, there are flashlights, called torches, but no mention of electric logic.
The imagination machine -- the psychophone -- is described as allowing the imagination to time travel into the real future. It's time traveling but there's no sense of quantum mechanics-style alternate universes -- no Schrödinger's cat (conceived in 1935). The machine is choosing between alternate imaginations, but not alternate realities.
Russell does a nice description of future history. It's what now seems like fairly classic depiction of totalitarian/anti-totalitarian struggle, ala 1984, but this is written five or ten years earlier.
I like Russell's scale. This story is about people, not kingdoms, and they are solving problems such as a handful of mysteriously dying cats, and a jewelry theft in which only watches are taken. The hero first attempts to catch one of the robot mice by smashing it with a length of pipe. This is human scale at its finest. This is not evil emperors or save-the-world tasks. This is nice. This is what I try to do with my stories.
This is a two ending story. In the first end Russell tries to explain off future travel as impossible because of the classical physics constraint of a completely determinist universe. No quantum uncertainty or multiverses here! Then... uh oh!... the little robot mice head off into the distance -- another queen mother has come to life! The second ending, finding the new mother, is quick and satisfying.