1888 scientific romance novella. A new self-fuelling railway
locomotive turns out to be rather more effective than anyone had
supposed.
The story is told by a Scottish engineer, in Mexico to work on a
new railway line to support the anticipated gold rush. The local man
(a descendant of Montezuma, unlike the universally lazy and
superstitious Spanish-descended Mexicans, yes, it's that sort of book)
is a febrile genius, and works in his spare time on his new
locomotive, which can gather trees from beside the track, chop them
apart, and thus fuel itself. But when it gathers and burns the
expensive telegraph poles, the authorities are unimpressed.
Things go downhill, and soon enough the genius is dead by his own
hand, and there are rumours of a demon on the increasingly unused
track. Attempts at exorcism fail, of course, and it's up to our hero
to try to do something, especially as the machine has taken to
including incautious humans in its fuel supply.
(And of course I consider this from an energetic point of view. Given
how much water there is in a human corpse, I strongly suspect that the
actual energy gain from burning one in a firebox would be minimal; a
friend suggests about 600MJ available energy or about 8.7MJ/kg even if
time had been taken to dry it, compared with 16-20 for wood. But it's
a pleasingly macabre moment all the same.)
Things get stranger; by some mechanism not entirely worked through (if
thought in humans is the product of burning food, apparently thought
in machines might be the same?), the engine has gained the ability to
perceive and avoid hazards. (And if it didn't have this at first, how
did its claws find and grab trees rather than waving randomly?) But
rather than cut the tracks to strand it in one place, our hero is
determined to hunt it down and destroy it, by cutting off its
opportunities to resupply with fuel and water. There's some pleasing
action, but in the end the engine develops (somehow?) the ability to
cross country, and years later it's still out there…
It's short and amusing, notable now mostly for being one of the first
"revolt of the machines" stories (Butler's Erewhon (1872) mentions
the idea but doesn't show it.) Basically impossible to find, thoughi
the sequel The Wreck of the World turns out to be on
WikiSource.