1890 scientific romance novella. In the far distant future of 1948,
the machines are revolting…
The frame story is told as by the same John Smith who narrated A
Mexican Mystery; this manuscript, we are to suppose, was a record of
a dream, found among the papers of the febrile genius who created the
autonomous locomotive of that book. (It's all a very old-fashioned
sort of story-setting to my sensibility, reminding me of the
contortions that mediaeval writers go through to avoid admitting that
they just made something up: I had a dream, I found this in an old
French book, and so on.)
There does however seem to be a gap in the middle of it. We're told of
the world's great technological developments; we're told of the
appearance of the first "offspring" machines; and suddenly there's a
wall of engines advancing on the narrator's town. But it's never quite
clear what they do; the suggestion is that they would run over and
smash the human defenders, but in practice the humans' morale breaks
and they run away first. Only our hero and his prospective son-in-law
have the moral fibre to fire on them.
(Grove does not mention the internal combustion engine, though Benz
was selling vehicles using it in 1886. Clearly it won't come to
anything. And steam ships will be fuelled by "naphtha-cakes"!)
So then the only thing to do is to get himself acclaimed dictator for
life (this goes very smoothly) and evacuate the town; but every other
habitation the convoy passes on the way down the Mississippi is
already deserted, and we never find out what happened to the people.
Did the machines crush them? Did they run away and starve in the
desert, or die in shipwrecks? Even at the convoy's ultimate
destination of the Sandwich Islands (i.e. the Hawai'ian archipelago),
where the machines have not reached, there's no sign of the erstwhile
human inhabitants. The closest the narrator can manage to suggest to
an idea is that there wasn't enough God in the world so nobody had any
moral fibre, or something.
This failure to deal with what Dave Langford called the "background
megadeaths" leaves me feeling that Grove's heart wasn't really in it.
Even The Day of the Triffids, very much a personal story, does at
least mention that you really don't want to stay in a city where a lot
of people have died. Anyway, there are fights, in which the
outnumbered humans manage nonetheless to prevail by clever tactics;
there's a love triangle of sorts, rendered a little ridiculous by
there being only one named female character in the whole book; but
mostly the narrator is satisfied to rule his Hawai'ian redoubt, and
not even particularly curious about what may have happened to the rest
of the world.
So again, interesting as an early "revolt of the machines" story, but
it has only the outline. There are machines. They revolt. Why? What do
they want? How do they perceive the humans they're chasing? None of
this is ever mentioned; it reminds me of the sort of horror story in
which everyone is too busy screaming and running to care about what
they're running from. Which is fine if you like that sort of thing,
but I prefer a bit more thought alongside the action.
I got this text from
WikiSource and
it does stand alone apart from the introductory section.