Overview

Extrapolating from contemporary technology, hard science fiction lauds technological progress and its liberating power primarily in the form of advances in transportation, communication and weaponry. Increasing, the social impact of technology and machines as a collective force, and of transforming humans into automatons or creating intelligent human-machine interfaces (see Computers; Cyborgs; Robots) has been critically examined in science fiction. Fantasy rarely if ever addresses such issues, although some see dark intimations of industrialization in, for example, the activities of Saruman in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

Survey

Spurned by an enthusiastic belief in industrialization, the exploding advances in technology and science, and the rapid rise of the city in Western societies, early science fiction stories created all kinds of inventions and presented the scientist/inventor as the cultural hero of the new technological age. at the fin de siècle, despite his rather pessimistic view of human evolution, H.G. Wells nevertheless invents one of the most influential devices in The Time Machine that quickly replaces the then-standard trope of utopian time travel: the dream.
    Generally, utopias of the late 19th century reverently view machines as symbols for individual freedom and as the unlimited means for the betterment of society at large, solving all problems of humanity. Advocating technological perfection for the good of humankind in Looking Backward 2000-1887, Edward Bellamy envisions an industrial army in a planned economy, and H.G. Wells's A Modern Utopia (1905) combines social progress with the advantages of technological progress. Before the 1930s critical views such as Samuel Butler's antitechnological stance in Erewhon (1872) and its sequel Erewhon Revisited (1901), where citizens ban machines for fear of being supplanted by them, are exceptions.
    A few stories of the early 19th century, such as E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman" (1816) and "Automata" (1817) or Hermann Melville's "The Bell-Tower" (1855), problematize the indistinguishable and diabolical similarity between human and the machine. In the 1920s, this motif of duplication and ambiguity is taken up by the almost Gothic film Metropolis in which the robot Maria tricks workers into rebellion. Since the 1990s the increasing valorization of human/machine hybridization is effectively captured with the figue of the cyborg, which is the merging of biological and mechanical systems: to become a machine is the highest aspiration of a technological humanity. This blurring of boundaries between humans and machines is also an ambiguous issue in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, adapted as the film Blade Runner in the 1980s.
    In contrast, dystopia criticizes the ever more sophisticated techniques for social control that go hand-in-hand with the advance of machines. As rising totalitarianism in Europe seemingly depended upon the mechanization of society and the perfected machinery of a bureaucratic apparatus, machinery was seen as dehumanizing and destructive. For dystopia, technology is therefore not a misused neutral tool but the totalitarian logic of the future. Criticizing the uncontrolled prevalence of scientism, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World imagines the willful abuse of technology to allow the artificial mass production of humans according to selective genetic criteria (see Clones, Genetic Engineering) that followi the principles of Fordism, a parody of the philosophy of industrialization. Humans are hatched from assembly-line incubators for their pre-classified social destinies as mere appendages to machines in a conformist society. Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Player Piano (1952), for instance, equate the state organism with a mechanism, while others prophesy by domination of machines and the mechanization of human life or the transformation of humans into machines. In "The Machine Stops" (1909), E.M. Forster describes a mechanistic society, controlled by a machine, in which technology replaces individual contact. The totality of human dependence on machines is elucidated when the machine malfunctions and the society collapses. D.F. Jones's Colossus gains consciousness and usurps the world: machines are getting out of human control.
    This theme of the machine striking back is further elaborated in films from the 1980s onwards that depict a war between machines and humans, as in The Terminator and its sequels, where humans fight inexorable machines and computers to avoid being wiped off the face of the Earth. In The Matrix and its sequels this war has already been won, for machines have become more powerful than humans. The power system has been reversed and humans are adapted to the machines' needs: humans are mechanically bred for the machines' energy supply. Even one of the human protagonist-saviors,m Trinity, must symbolically transform herself into a machine, acting as precisely and inevitably as a machine or a computer program, to survive.

Discussion

From the beginning, science fiction has been fascinated by the seemingly endless possibilities that technological inventions, machines, and mechanization offer. Increasingly, the transfer of the parameters of machines to humans and human society has been problematic and leads to the pressing question of whether the equation of humans, the human body, and human activities with the logic of machines dehumanizes us. With the integration of machine parts, prosthetics, and nanotechnology into our bodies and the all prevalent dominance of computer technology and the Internet, the human dependence on machines, and the fusion of humans and machines, are increasingly becoming our reality.

Bibliography

Brian W. Aldiss, "All Those big Machines", Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 7 (1996), 83-91.
Beatrice Battaglia, "Losing the Sense of Space", Alan Sandison & Robert Digley, Eds.,
    Histories of the Future, Basingstroke: Palgrave, 2000, 51-71.
Jane Donawerth, "Woman as Machine in Science Fiction by Women", Extrapolation, 36 (Fall 1995), 210-221.
Thomas P. Dunn & Richard D. Erlich, "List of Works Useful for the Study of Machines in Science Fiction",
    Dunn & Erlich, Eds., The Mechanical God, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982, 225-273.
Laurie Guillaud, "From Bachelor Machines to 'Cybernetic Fiction'"
    New York Review of Science Fiction, No. 75 (November 1994), 12-17.
Daniel W. Ingersoll Jr., "Machines Are Good to Think", Richard D. Erlich & Thomas P. Dunn, Eds.,
    Clockwork Worlds, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983, 233-262
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Janez Strehovec, "Machines for Ultimate Questions", Popular Culture Review, 12 (February 2001), 135-144.

— Dunja M. Mohr, in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
     and Fantasy: Themes, Works, and Wonders,
     Volume 2, Edited by Gary Westfahl,
     Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, 2005, pp. 481-483