Chapter 47 of Tess of the d'Urbervilles has a good scene in which a mechanized thresher is brought to Flintcombe Ash farm. Tess had to work hard all day feeding it with wheat. It was operated by a northern man, who only described himself as an engineer and otherwise did not speak to the farm labourers. It was like an intrusion by the industrial world into the rural world.
According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of Dickens.
Charles Dickens, by George Orwell
London Orbital by Iain Sinclair.
In Conversations with Lord Byron (available of google books) Byron discusses airships going to Mars in a discussion about technology.
Day of the Triffids discusses biological engineering and I suppose you could have Neville Shute's On the Beach which is thoroughly depressing reading about nuclear warfare. The nuclear nightmares of the cold war and the feeling that you might be only six minutes from annihilation certainly had an effect upon one's attitude to life. It certainly doesn't seem to feature as strongly now, although technically the threat is still present.
Crash, definitely. A lot of Ballard's work is concerned with this theme. I would also recommend High Rise in which people use video cameras to film violent acts and his short story The Intensive Care Unit which is along similar lines to The Machine Stops. Both seem stories were written in the mid-70s and seem extremely relevant today.Originally Posted by kelby_lake
Also you might want to look into the futurist art movement although I don't know if it produced much literature.
Oh yes, High Rise is quite good, though I see it more as the effect of the building and the suffocating atmosphere that these people's lives are lived solely in this building.
I'm surprised no one mentioned John Steinbeck, who wrote vividly about the farm machinery that supplanted a generation of farmers in The Grapes of Wrath.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote