Automated Futures in Early English Science Fiction: Eliot and Butler

Abstract

Greatly debated but rarely analysed in science fiction, automation rose to prominence as a topic of discussion since the 1940s. However, the futures that it harbours, either utopian (leisureful society) or dystopian (machine takeover), loomed in XIX century literature already, at the same time as the Machinery Question was debated in England and contemporary of a seminal text in the study of capitalist appropriation of machinery like Marx’s “Fragment on Machines”. But a literary history of automation is yet to be entertained, although many writers can be seen as having spearheaded an effort to imagine the social outcomes of mechanization. Adopting a close and thematic reading of two of these authors – George Eliot and Samuel Butler – the article probes how early English science fiction confronted the rise of machinery; how it anticipated certain ideas regarding the progress of technology; and how it shaped the affective perception of automatic objects.