Interlude #14: Do Automatons Dream of Steampunk Sheep?
Dr D. Wostyn: Start recording.
You will be aware of how matters are progressing from Captain MacCaulay’s reports, so I will just explain this brief sidetrack in the historical narrative. This is partly, admittedly, due to us shifting base and having to obtain access to a new library in Dublin, so I don’t have all the books I would wish to digitise at the moment. However, I do think the field of ‘paracthonic romance’ (as the natives of this timeline dub a collection of literary genres approximately corresponding to our ‘speculative fiction’) is worthy of study in its own right, for it provides insights into the different cultural background of this world—and, importantly, give us clues as to whether they are likely to deduce the existence of the Portals and crosstime travel. One feels it would be much easier for a man of the early twentieth century to understand the concept of time travel if he had already had the opportunity to read H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, for example, than for his father a generation before. But I do not wish to waste any further space with this recording, so...roll the digitiser (click!)
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“Is God simply capable of making smaller and finer gears and mechanisms than Man could hope to?”
—Frederick Paley, 1834
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From: “An Unofficial History of the Paracthonic Romance” by E. B. Stark (1979)—
Unquestionably one of the greatest landmarks in the field was the publication of
The New Eden in 1818 by Clara Keppel (née Roberts) who, like many female novelists of the time, used a male nom de plume—Cuthbert Lucas. She was a disciple in many ways of the school of realist social commentary in English literature pioneered by Elizabeth Austen a generation before.[1] However, whereas Austen and most of her imitators were firmly grounded in the realities of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century life, Lucas transposed that realist approach towards characters and dialogue into an alien setting. It has been argued (see, for example, White and Avramenko,
Proc. Ac. Hist. Lit. (Prom-Multilang),[2] vol. 89, 1955) that Lucas’ apparently dramatic and original approach was in fact only the most prominent part of a wave of thought embracing escapist settings in English literature, prompted by the shock of the French invasion of 1807, the ensuing authoritarian regime of the Churchills, and the country’s transformation by the First Industrialisation. However, contemporary accounts suggests that Lucas’ novel stood out considerably from the milder attempts of her rivals—whom, like proto-paracthonic romantics since ancient times, regarded an escapist setting as an imagined trip to a fictional Pacific island or the moon.[3] Lucas, instead, looked forward to the future by extrapolating current trends. Precisely what can be defined as the first work of scientific romance[4] is, naturally, a matter for hot speculation among scholars, but
The New Eden is perhaps the most commonly cited claim.
Lucas built upon those trends not simply observed and discussed in newspapers and around the dinner table, but those she recognised herself in her life due to her husband being an industrialist and factory owner. Her own diaries are prized to-day not simply due to their connexion with her literary career, but because they also provide a telling account of social change during the Marleburgensian period, with the emergence of the middle class and power shifting from the landed gentry and traditional old money to industrialists from fairly modest backgrounds. She also noted the problems that industrialisation was causing for the working classes and in particular the way that new machines, touted by their inventors and touted by her husband for the way they saved labour, were viewed as a threat by the workers as they effectively destroyed the need for some jobs. She records the Sutcliffist rioters of the 1810s before they became politicised, and their interaction with the proto-Mentians.
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Like many scientific romantics who would follow her, Lucas took these trends and took them to their logical conclusion. It is worth remembering that at the time this was a fairly new idea, and so readers did not view
The New Eden with the same sceptical goggles that we moderns would when reading such a romance which exaggerates current trends and ignores the idea that attitudes could ever change. Also, there is a powerful argument that
The New Eden was itself part of the
catalyst for those attitudes changing after the Inglorious Revolution.
Lucas’ narrative follows a protagonist named Zmit (said in a footnote to be a futuristic spelling of ‘Smith’ after one of those grand spelling reforms that always seem far more readily possible in fiction than they ever are in reality). Zmit is a farmer, like many such people in his unnamed land—implied to be either England or a fictionalised version of same. But unlike the farmers of the present day, he does not work with animals—he has never seen an animal in his life. His plough is powered by steam, his ‘cows’ are vaguely bovine-shaped machines that ingest grass and produce synthetic milk, his ‘sheep’ grow ‘wool’ of steel wire, gutta-percha and anything else that industry needs. Several chapters are expended in describing the setting of his farm in great detail, as a sort of anti-Arcadian image in which the only living things are plants. Zmit explains to the reader, via the plot device of a conversation with his neighbour, that all animal life on the planet died centuries ago, initially due to the unintended effects of man’s industrialisation, but later through deliberate policy as man sought to gain mastery of nature by destroying everything he could not directly control. Both Zmit and his neighbour, Zhoanz, seem fairly apathetic about the issue—ancient history. Later we meet Zmit’s son Zhaimz and daughter Lizbet, who have stronger, but opposing views on the question: Zhaimz is boldly defensive of the scheme, while the more romantic Lizbet wishes she could have heard the song of a real, living bird in the morning, rather than the music-box twinkle of the avian automatons her mother built to sing to her.
An element of the class issues Lucas notes in her diaries comes out in the book when Zmit goes into ‘the City’ (probably based on London) to visit his younger brother Ptr. Whereas Zmit is content to remain on his farm, Ptr is a high-flying industrialist who proudly shows his sibling around his factory. Everything is automated, with machines operating apparently without any supervision at all. Zmit inquires (with the voice of the reader) what happens when the machines break down, only for Ptr to introduce a group of humanoid automata with simple problem-solving abilities which are capable of repairing both the factory machines and themselves. This is often regarded as an allegory for the position of the working class in the contemporary mines and factories Lucas observed—the industrialist, Ptr, considers his maintenance automata just another set of factory machines (as indeed they are) but there is the unspoken implication that the contemporary factory owners believe the same about their common workers.
The main plot of the book takes hold when Zmit begins having heart problems (possibly inspired by those of Lucas’ uncle, though the question is controversial). The curmudgeonly old farmer stereotype to the core, he refuses every attempt by his family to persuade him to go to see the doctor, until it is almost too late—he collapses while out in the fields. A tense sequence of events follows in which Zhaimz and Lizbet rescue him and are forced to put aside their own quarrels. Zmit is rushed to the hospital just in time—but not so swiftly that Lucas does not stop to inform us about how even the hospitals of Zmit’s time are mechanised. The specifics are glossed over, but Lucas did predict something akin to an artificial respirator[6] and goes into detail about a system by which messages, medicines and even meals are shuttled about the hospital by means of a system of pneumatic tubes.
Matters are anxious as Zmit is operated on to replace his defective heart with a mechanical pump capable of performing the same task. The surgeon uses other wonders of futuristic technology (vaguely described) in his quest. Finally, in a happy ending, Zmit emerges from the operating theatre to be greeted by his grateful family.
It is at this point that Lucas makes one of the most celebrated twist endings in literary history—so celebrated that there can be few inhabitants of the Earth unfamiliar with it, and indeed there are not a few that do not realise it was ever intended to be a twist ending, and subconsciously miss the deliberate vagueness of some of Lucas’ descriptions earlier in the book. Some later editions even have cover artwork which blatantly give away the ending.[7] But to the earnest readers of the 1810s, the ending was genuinely shocking and thought-provoking.
It is revealed that Zmit’s operation was to replace one artificial heart with another—not a transplant, but simply replacing a malfunctioning part. Zmit and his fellow men and women are in fact automatons themselves, possessing no organic parts at all. When Zmit and Zhoanz reflected that there was no animal life left on the planet, they included humans in that. In an Afterword, Lucas goes into more detail about how this situation came about: man grew proud, became learned and skilled enough to construct artificial organs as good as natural ones, and—at first the rich, later everyone else—gradually replaced one organ after another with technology as they failed. Finally, centuries later, the last vestiges of humanity have been replaced with cold iron, and no-one on this world seems to have noticed that this represents a significant change.[8]
Lucas’ work provoked much debate and discussion amid literary and philosophical circles at the time (and thereafter) and is considered an important part of the trigger for the Steward movement, which would later form a key part of the Regressive Party in post-revolutionary British politics.
The New Eden was viewed as a cautionary tale by many, a much more coherent and intellectual challenge to the technological progress of the early nineteenth century than the blunt opposition of the Sutcliffists or Francis of Austria. Needless to say, industrialisation played a sufficiently key role in the Phoenix Party regime that
The New Eden was banned in Britain and Lucas and her husband were forced into exile in Ireland. And, as usual, such a ban only encouraged more interest in illicit copies of the book just to see what all the fuss was about.
The New Eden prompted an upsurge in interest in Automata, clockwork versions of which had been popular conversation pieces for nobles throughout the eighteenth century—Kempelen’s chess-player, Vaucanson’s Digesting Duck, Jacquet-Droz’s Musician and Merlin’s Silver Swan.[9] But the great revolution in technology sweeping across the world turned these one-off curiosities into the potential vanguard of something greater...
One factor mistakenly attributed to Lucas was the role of the steam engine. Lucas herself was careful not to give details about the means by which the automata populating the New Eden powered themselves, and tended to avoid contemporary technologies so as not to be caught in real-world limitations (a common tactic of the scientific romantic ever after[10]). It was the Saxon thinker Albrecht Bergner, writing in 1821, who introduced the idea in his critique of
The New Eden (which had just been translated into German at Heidelberg, the Electors of Hesse being keen to promote an anti-technology image). “We are all familiar with the automaton operated by clockwork...such automata are amusing toys, but nothing more, for clockwork is nothing without someone to wind it up, and machines cannot wind each other up thanks to the law against perpetual motion...but what of the steam engine? Imagine an automaton that runs on coal, capable of mining for more coal to ‘feed’ itself, drawing upon an infinite supply of fuel[11]...if such an automaton could think like a man, then what need would he have for that man, for the whole human race?”
While Bergner’s writings have inevitably left the popular consciousness with the indelible impression that Zmit and company walked around emitting whistles of escaping steam,[12] they were also instrumental in the tone of Lucas’ many imitators, the so-called “Automata Craze” of the 1820s. Bergner’s open question was answered in
The Iron Revolution by Yves Buillard. Using the French Revolution as a source of allegory, Buillard painted a picture of a world whereby class divisions among humans have been eliminated, with every man living the life of a king, all thanks to the use of automata to replace the workers. But the automata are themselves sentient and equal in intelligence to the humans, and rise up in a revolution to overthrow their oppressors. Unlike many of the rather dull and passable ‘automata revolt’ writers who copied him, who viewed the setting as simply an exotic one in which to set gun-toting heroes having swashbuckling adventures and fighting the evil automata, Buillard carefully made his story ambiguous in quality. We are never quite sure if the automata feel human emotions and are thus genuinely equal to humans and held unjustly in slavery, making at least part of their revolt justified, or whether they are cold machines who simply fake emotion to manipulate their overlords. Paralleling the French Revolution that was his inspiration, Buillard has the initial ‘Le Diamant’ revolution—where the automata simply demand equal rights to humans and an end to their slavery—followed by ‘Robespierre’ and ‘Lisieux’ figures who turn the whole thing into a war of extermination against humans and, later, even other automata who differ from their concept of what automata should be. Buillard keeps the ending of his story ambiguous, as the human narrator escapes on a shipful of refugees to a distant continent and he ponders whether an all-automata society is ultimately self-destructive...and, if so, what that says about the race that made them.
Automata writings spread widely and in many languages. In 1826 Luciano Piraneo, a Neapolitan, linked the concepts of
The New Eden with that of
The Iron Revolution by suggesting that the former was ultimately the result of the latter, with the victorious rebel automata having successfully exterminated humanity and then lied to themselves (or lied to by a repressive government) that they are in fact the descendents of humanity. In
The Cogwheel Turns, Piraneo uses the simple maintenance automata in Ptr’s factory in Lucas’ book as a plot device, suggesting that as the original rebel automata grow lazy and delegate more of their tasks to the maintenance automata, the latter grow more intelligent, become angry that they are kept in slavery, and start a revolution of their own. Having set forth this cyclic idea, Piraneo then wanted to make the mind-bending possibility that humans were not the first turn in the cycle—that humans are themselves a form of automata, and were originally made by a yet earlier race (which he would identify with the various pagan gods and angels in old writings) but overthrew and slaughtered them in prehistory. However, the idea was too controversial for the Neapolitan censorship laws at the time, and so only circulated in certain unauthorised folio editions as an addendum. The official published version of
The Cogwheel Turns therefore ends rather abruptly.
Other writers were anxious to extend the popular paradigm elsewhere. The Lithuanian writer Jonas Sasnauskas, who had lived for some time in Prague and knew its history, wrote the first Golem novel in 1828, called simply
The Golem. Drawing upon the Jewish legend of the Golem, a man of clay with the Word of God printed on its forehead to give it life (in imitation of how Man was made by God, for if God made Man in his own image and God is a creator, then Man must also be a creator) Sasnauskas essentially applied the same ideas as the Automata writers, but in a past setting. He presented the same anti-technology moral as most (but not all) the Automata writers, suggesting that Golems made by the Jews of Prague had almost turned society upside down in the 1600s but had been destroyed and suppressed by the Hapsburg authorities. As a praising of their past and a useful excuse to be anti-Semitic,
The Golem was widely promoted by the Austrian government and the German and Czech translations were best-sellers. Like the existing Automata books, it soon spawned imitators and by the time the Popular Wars were over, ‘Golem Literature’ was considered a separate (though related) genre. There were some attempts to relate the Automata craze to other mythological beings, such as the Vampires of Eastern Europe or the Zambees [zombies] of Hispaniola and Guinea, but at these did not suit the zeitgeist of the time and would only be discovered by paracthonic romance decades later.
The Popular Wars themselves would have a significant effect on the field of Automaton Literature. Just as these writings in part inspired the class-based and Steward tendencies to characterise many of both the Populist and Regressive movements, they were in turn affected by the social changes the Wars unleashed. Perhaps the best-known among the new wave of Automaton Literature was
The Venator (from the Latin word for ‘hunter’) by the American writer Errol Robinson (1841). The story is told from the point of view of the titular Venator, an Automaton designed to be the ultimate warrior, and is set in the post-apocalyptic world struggling to survive that so many American paracthonic romantics are so enamoured of as a setting. The backstory of this world, told in snippets that the reader must assemble himself—none of the spoon-feeding excuse conversations that characterised
The New Eden of a generation before—is that countries raised armies of Automata as soldiers, only to fight a war that (it transpired) was started by those Automata as an excuse to kill off their human masters. The humans narrowly won the war but were more than decimated in the process, and built the Venators to hunt down and destroy the last Automaton remnants. The Venator of the book is the last of his kind, genuinely believing that all Automata are a menace and happily going to the last rebel Automata down—even though he knows he is required to destroy himself afterwards to complete his programming.
The Venator recounts how he is forced to reconsider his assumptions, and ends on an ambiguous note of whether he does kill the unexpectedly peaceful Automata remnant and himself or not. Of course, time marches on, and a few decades later,
The Venator would inspire the reimagining
All Steel is Steel, an early anti-Societist piece which emphasises the point about the rebellious Automata soldiers betraying their national masters by collaborating across the lines...
[1] An ATL ‘sister’ of Jane Austen. Her works aren’t the same as OTL, but are basically similar in tone.
[2] Abbreviation for “Proceedings of the Academy of Historical Literature (Promoted Multilanguage edition).
[3] Some examples of the earlier works the author is alluding to include Lucian’s 7th century Latin work “True History”, Cyrano de Bergerac’s “Voyage dans la Lune” (1657) and the Adventures of Baron Münchhausen, which all feature a voyage to the moon, and Thomas More’s “Utopia” (1516) and Francis Bacon’s “New Atlantis” (1627) which feature voyages to fictional islands.
[4] Broadly speaking, terminology in TTL goes like this: “scientific romance” = OTL “science fiction” (but with an emphasis on futuristic settings—aliens landing in the present day would not be put in this category), “fantastic romance” = OTL “fantasy” and some “horror” (settings involving supernatural elements other than mainstream religious ones) and “speculative romance” = OTL “alternate history”, but a broader category drawing in the aforementioned aliens landing in the present day. Speculative romance is often considered the most ‘realist’ school of the three, focusing on how strange events change the world as it actually is (or was), not how the author wants it to be to make a point, as is often the case in scientific romance. All three schools are collectively referred to as ‘paracthonic romance’ (from Greek para-cthon ‘beyond the world’).
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(Dr Wostyn’s note) You may note a blank space here. I was puzzled at the occasional presence of these gaps in the narrative of some of the books I obtained for digitising until Lieutenant McConnell happened to overhear the reason in an unrelated conversation. It seems that some of these books are printed in a single edition for all three British Isles nations. However, England and Scotland seem to have more pervasive censorship laws than relatively liberal Ireland. The solution is to provide editions with suitable blank spaces into which a secondary printing on the mainland may insert the propaganda addendums of their choice. In this case I would surmise from context that the English or Scottish version adds something about how while the classes were divided by strife then, this is a thing of the past and now all men are considered equal, though the different cultural types descending from the old class divisions are of course respected as a legacy.
[6] OTL “iron lung”.
[7] For an OTL analogy, compare all those DVD versions of
Planet of the Apes which show Charlton Heston screaming at the Statue of Liberty
on the cover.
[8] Compare the original origin story for the Cybermen in
Doctor Who in OTL.
[9] All OTL creators of working Automata, although the ones following the POD did slightly different work to their OTL versions.
[10] What we would deem ‘hard’ sci-fi is instead considered a branch of speculative romance in TTL, and apart from scientific romance.
[11] This being based on a scientific theory of the time that the supply of coal regenerates over a relatively short timescale.
[12] Compare how people are convinced in OTL (due to later film adaptations) that Frankenstein’s monster was stitched together out of body parts and animated by lightning, when in the original novel Frankenstein creates the creature from scratch by deliberately unspecified means and certainly does not cannibalise parts from existing bodies, and lightning is not involved.
).
