Dystopian literature uses as a central technique the satirical method of reductio ad absurdum: reduction to the absurd, taking something to its logical, if improbable, and – in satire – grotesque conclusion. Dystopias take a problem that exists in the author’s present time and place it sometime in the future, as if to suggest that, without intervention, “If this goes on,” the dystopian world is inevitable.
While dystopian literature is a subset of utopian literature, which is a subset of satire, dystopic works are often also classified as science fiction. As a genre, science fiction, says Darko Suvin, “is distinguished by the narrative dominance or hegemony of a fictional ‘novum’ (novelty, innovation) validated by cognitive logic, ” this innovation “running from the minimum of one discrete new ‘invention’ (gadget, technique, phenomenon, relationship) to the maximum of a setting (spatiotemporal locus), agent (main character or characters), and/or relations basically new and unknown to the author’s environment” (63-64). It has always been the aim of science fiction writers to imagine what scientific progress may bring in the future. Dystopian writers are skeptical of scientific progress and meld the imaginary innovations of science fiction with their own pessimistic prophecies, inventing future worlds that use new scientific innovations as tools of oppression. These innovations, more often than not, appear in the form of new technologies that could, in a different world, have been used for human good, but are instead used for ill in dystopic societies.
The science fiction-based dystopian work “fuses two fears: the fear of utopia and the fear of technology” (Beauchamp, “Technology” 53). The dystopias of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We utilize technology to assist in establishing and maintaining their oppressive societies. In Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano and E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” the technology itself that is represses human beings, steals their humanity, and leads to a dystopian condition. The end result of these different societies is the imposition of machine-like values onto human beings, making them more efficient or easier to control.
Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1920) is considered the precursor to Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World. Citizens of the One State live as machines, but are not themselves controlled by machines. Individuality, in theory, no longer exists: each person is designated by a number. The One State venerates mathematics and the inherent order of mathematics. Citizens’ lives are controlled by a complex schedule which ensures that they are always where the One State wants them to be. The One State has turned human beings into cogs in a giant machine. The protagonist, D-503, embraces this mechanization because of his mathematical mind. The narrative is told in the form of D-503’s diary, and since D-503 bases his worldview on mathematics, he utilizes a mathematical formula, the square root of negative one, to describe his anxiety toward all things irrational:
One day Plapa told us about irrational numbers, and, I remember, I cried, banged my fists on the table, and screamed, “I don’t want √-1! Take √-1 out of me!” This irrational number had grown into me like something foreign, alien, terrifying. It devoured me – it was impossible to conceive, to render harmless, because it was outside ratio. (39)
The square root of negative one cannot be evaluated with rational numbers; the answer is irrational and can only be expressed using imaginary numbers. To believe that something irrational could be allowed to exist in such a perfectly rational system as mathematics is upsetting to D-503. He has been trained to operate, like a machine in a perfectly rational way, and yet, there exists something in him – as in mathematics – that cannot be contained within the set of rational numbers (by which the One State’s citizens are known). For D-503, the square root of negative one is a metaphor for an imperfection he sees in himself, one of emotion or imagination amidst a sea of almost perfect reason. It is an imperfection that haunts D-503 in his quest to become a being of pure reason, something that he considers the ultimate ideal.
The Benefactor, the ruler of the One State, explains to D-503 that the purpose of the One State’s cold rationality is an altruistic one: eliminating the disturbing and upsetting elements from human beings and society. “Remember: those in paradise no longer know pity or love. They are only the blessed, with their imaginations excised (this is the only reason why they are blessed)—angels, obedient slaves of God,” he says (214). Emotions only get people into trouble; they can cause pain and suffering, and the very fact that they have the potential to cause pain and suffering makes them evil. D-503 even goes so far as to compare love to hunger, calling it “the other ruler of the world” (21).
The innovation or novelty that enables D-503 and every other citizen of the One State to repress the irrational within him is not a machine, but a process: the Taylor system, devised by Frederick W. Taylor. Taylor sought to make humans more efficient in labor by making them behave more like machines. The Taylor system was considered “scientific” and emphasized “science, not rule of thumb. Harmony, not discord. Cooperation, not individualism” (Beauchamp, “Man” 88). The machine was the epitome of efficiency due to its pure rationality. It had no feelings: it did what it was told and did not complain. Though Taylor applied this system to labor, Zamyatin, says Gorman Beauchamp, turned it into a seemingly utopic social system and then looked at the dystopian implications of a world in which human beings desperately tried to behave like robots with a “commitment to a purely rationalistic idea of efficiency” (“Man” 88). The result is a society where emotions are discouraged and pure reason – an attempt to become like a machine – is the ultimate goal. D-503 achieves that goal at the end of the novel, thanks to a surgical procedure which removes the portion of his brain responsible for imagination. The final chapter in D-503’s diary is a reflection on the rest of the diary. In his emotionless state he wonders, “Can it be true that I, D-503, have written these two hundred pages?” (231). He feels that the removal of his imagination is like “a kind of splinter [that] was pulled out of my head” (231).
In We, the application of the Taylor system and the novum of an imagination-removal procedure allow human beings to deny the existence of their irrational selves in the name of greater happiness. Of course, human beings are not machines, and their irrationality – suppressed after so long – escapes violently, but metaphorically, as the Wall that separates the “civilized” One State from the rest of the “primitive” world is breached and hundreds of primitive humans pour in. At the same time, chaos ensues in which people do not do what they are supposed to and D-503 sees “male and female numbers copulating shamelessly – without even dropping the shades, without coupons, at midday . . .” (219). This explosion of passion is brief, as the Guardians of the One State seal the Wall, restore order, and punish the people responsible for such an insurrection. The imposition of a machine-like psyche upon the citizens of the One State allows them to be happier than they would be in a society which tolerated irrationality. After his surgical procedure, D-503 is “free of anything extraneous that might interfere with smiling (a smile is the normal state of a normal man” (231). He no longer has to worry about √-1, as it has been taken out of him – and out of a number of other citizens, as well. It can be safely ignored and locked away, resulting in the kind of happiness that only a robot could have.
In Huxley’s dystopic Brave New World (1932), the citizens of the “civilized” world are grown in bottles, “decanted,” and then subjected to years of “hypnopaedia” conditioning. Their civilization operates in the same way as an assembly-line, with Henry Ford venerated as their cultural hero and god. They count years beginning with the year in which Ford’s Model-T was introduced (1908) and cross themselves with the sign of the T. Ford-like industrial processes are even used to produce people: low-class gammas, deltas, and epsilons are produced by a process which creates ninety-six identical human beings from a single embryo – “the principle of mass production at last applied to biology,” the narrator tells us (7). Mechanization is prized in Brave New World; the more synthetic, the better. “Civilization” is smooth, sterile, and artificial. “Savagery” is rough, dirty, and natural. Lenina, Bernard Marx’s female friend (for lack of a better term), is appalled when they visit the savage reservation, where things are dirty and the people are ugly. Back in London, everything is synthetic, from the nutrients given to fetuses (“blood-surrogate”) to music (“synthetic quartet”) to smells (“scent organ”). Even women are described borrowing terms from machinery; ripely plump and voluptuous (zaftig) women are described as “pneumatic,” which usually refers to a machine powered by air.
The world of Brave New World prides itself on superficiality, on tactile pleasures that do not merely exclude thought, but actively work to keep it locked away. Technology is at work here, as well, in the form of “feelies,” movies that allow the audience to experience tactile sensations as well as see and hear the film. John the Savage, who comes from the “Savage Reservation” outside the borders of the “civilized” world, is repulsed by the feelies, calling them “base” and “ignoble” (170). They represent a degradation of sex – all the physical pleasure with none of the emotional or spiritual intimacy. From his reading of Shakespeare and his Native American background, John has learned that sex is a sacred act, but civilized people consider sex no more sacred than taking a bath or going to work. John shows us how we should feel about the feelies. We should feel as though the feelies make light of something which should not be taken lightly. The sex act is degraded into a form of mere entertainment. But this is as it should be in Brave New World, for sex no longer exists for reproduction. Any biological significance that sex may have had has been stripped away. The Malthusian belt (a utility belt armed with contraceptives) is a synecdoche for a physical means of preventing sex from becoming a reproductive act, while feelies are a psychological means of removing any underlying meaning from sex. It becomes another way to have physical intimacy without emotional intimacy, an act without purpose, like so much else in this world.
The goal of technology in Brave New World, as in We, is to insulate civilized people from the harsh realities of being human. But where We attempts to repress the irrational elements of the human condition, Brave New World comes from the other side of the political spectrum and overloads people with irrational, physical pleasure. Mario Varricchio observes that the technologies employed in Brave New World “render persecution unnecessary” and “dispense with the need for repression in the fordian society” (105). Soma, an opiate, allows people to immediately feel euphoric; the process of genetic and environmental manipulation of children – the latter through subliminal messaging (the “hypnopaedia”) – allows them to feel completely at ease with their place in society (the secret of happiness and virtue, says the Director, is “liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny” [16]). The industrial processes ending in “decanting” of human beings eliminates familial ties while Malthusian belts, “freemartining” (the production of sterile females), and “feelies” undermine interpersonal ties. Strong interpersonal bonds bring with them emotions that can be both positive and negative. To allow negative emotions to pervade this society would spell its destruction, as negativity could lead to dissatisfaction, which in turn could lead to rebellion.
Nevertheless, Huxley’s dystopia is not one in which the machines are in control. There are clearly intelligent human minds at work – like Mustapha Mond’s – that control the dystopic world. The denizens of Brave New World are not controlled by technology; they are controlled by Mustapha Mond and the other World Controllers via technology. Mond, one of the powerful World Controllers, is genuinely interested in ensuring that people remain happy. When John the Savage tries to tell him that people who are given too much stimulation are dehumanized, Mond answers him:
“Are you sure?” asked the Savage. “Are you quite sure that the Edmund in the pneumatic chair hasn’t been just as heavily punished as the Edmund who’s wounded and bleeding to death? The gods are just. Haven’t they used his pleasant vices as an instrument to degrade him?”
“Degrade him from what position? As a happy, hard-working, goods-consuming citizen, he’s perfect. Of course, if you choose some other standard than ours, then perhaps you might say he was degraded.” (236)
In Brave New World, and psychological, sociological, bilogical, and political techniques produce human beings who are merely consuming animals who do not think or feel, but merely exist to perpetuate the society of “happiness” in which they live.
Orwell’s dystopia, like Huxley’s, shows effective social techniques, but in a very “low-tech" society. Nonetheless, technology is important in the subjugation of the populace of Oceania in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948). The most stressed use of technology for ill purposes is the “telescreen,” a television-like screen built into the wall that is capable of both sending and receiving information simultaneously. Except – possibly – for members of the Inner Party, Party members cannot turn the telescreen off, meaning that they are constantly under surveillance. The telescreen, says Varricchio, “is an instrument to spy on people, the extension of the Police eye, an essential element of the heavy-handed, brutal nature of the totalitarianism shown in Nineteen Eighty-Four” (104).
The telescreen is also at the center of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s argument about the malleability of the past. It is integral to Winston Smith’s job at the Ministry of Truth. There, he re-writes the past whenever the past has become inconvenient for the party. To do so, he orders up any back-issues of the Times, makes the necessary changes, and then saves them:
Winston dialed “back numbers” on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of the Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes’ delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify. [. . .] As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of the Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. (39-40)
Such a sophisticated level of control over history would not be possible without some sort of device to make erasure of the past quick and efficient. As soon as the corrections to the original are made, the instructions and the original are destroyed, leaving no trace of any change behind. The Party’s domination of the past is total, made possible by elaborate technologies and processes that quickly and quietly allows them to completely erase from existence any fact with which it disagrees:
There were huge printing shops with their sub-editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs. There was the teleprograms section with its engineers, its producers, and its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices. There were armies of reference clerks whose job it was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals which were due for recall. There were the vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored, and hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed. (43-44)
Orwell makes references to other machines besides the telescreen and speakwrite; Julia, for example, is a mechanic who works on novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department (10). The Party, which has a monopoly on culture and information, mass-produces “newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programs, plays, novels” (44) to ensure that citizens are entertained and distracted enough to ignore the fact that they live in a horrible, oppressive environment.
Technology plays only a supporting role in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It allows the Party to remain in control of people’s lives through the telescreen and in control of their minds through the system in the Ministry of Truth that erases facts. True to the party’s goal of “power entirely for its own sake” (279), the telescreen acts as a panopticon in that the Party may always view its members, but the Party members can never not be viewed by the Party. Technology reinforces the power relationship: it is not the party members’ choice to decide whether or not they are viewed by the telescreen. Again, like Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four’s dystopia keeps a human being in the driver’s seat. As far as the reader is concerned, this human being is O’Brien, a high-ranking member of the Inner Party, who tortures Winston and reveals to us the reasons for the dystopia’s existence.
The goal of technology here is not to take away from human beings that which makes them human and replace that human-ness with machinery or technology. The goal of technology in Nineteen Eighty-Four is to efficiently take away human freedom – and the human mind – in a way that would not be possible without that technology. As O’Brien tells Winston during the “Grand Inquisitor” scene, the Party’s total control of its members would have been impossible in an earlier era. In the past, “no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance,” but with the development of new technologies, the government’s power over its citizens only increased, culminating with the invention of the television. At that time, “private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed” (211).
The technological dystopia of Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952), unlike those of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, or We, is the focal point of the novel. Vonnegut’s dystopia is very prophetic for the twenty-first-century audience, dealing with the takeover of the workforce by computers and machines. At the center of the story is Paul Proteus, a brilliant engineer who senses something wrong in the society in which he lives. This society, which exists sometime after World War II, is utopic in as much as no one starves or goes without clothes and shelter. Material needs are met by the government. The only problem is that machines have taken over most skilled and unskilled jobs, leaving the unemployed with the choice of joining the “Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps” (a group of glorified maintenance workers who became unemployed when their jobs were taken by machines) or the army. A few people remain self-employed, but they are few and far between.
The world of Player Piano is controlled by machines, but behind the machines is a bureaucracy that turns human beings themselves into machines. A group of elite engineers and bureaucrats are the de facto government, since these people are in control of the nation’s machines. (Even the president is powerless; he “becomes a diminished figure, in Player Piano scarcely more than a PR man to the computer,” EPICAC, which controls all national administrative tasks [Seed 119]). He who controls the machines is like a god, controlling the fate of everyone else in this society, since they are the servants of the machines. In this world, everyone takes a single IQ test that will determine his future (and “his” is correct; this is a patriarchal society), and that future is forever written on a computer punch-card. Human beings become nothing more than numbers and consumers, and when a rebellion occurs at the end of the book, one of the rebels’ first acts is to go the police station and destroy the punch-cards (323), effectively freeing themselves of the tyranny of EPICAC (a humorous acronym that reflects Vonnegut’s attitude toward technology: it simultaneously sounds like ENIAC, a historical U.S. computer, and ipecac, a substance that induces vomiting). In fact, the visiting Shah of Bratpuhr uses his language’s word takaru, meaning “slave,” to refer to the workers he sees in Ilium.
The Shah’s observation is astute; the workers who have joined the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps (derisively nicknamed “Reek and Wrecks” by the engineers and bureaucrats in charge) are like slaves in their alienation from their labor. Their human dignity has been taken away. Human beings want to work. They want to feel useful and productive and create things. They do not want their every need to be provided for them. “Maybe the actual jobs weren’t being taken from the people, but the sense of participation, the sense of importance was,” says Lasher (91), a minister who first arouses in Paul the feeling that something is wrong with his society.
Like Huxley’s criticism of the assembly line, Vonnegut criticizes the American drive for efficiency, for doing more things for less cost in a given time period. “Machines and organization and the pursuit of efficiency have robbed the American people of liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” says Paul Proteus in the courtroom scene, where he is grilled about his beliefs regarding humans and machines (314). Like Brave New World, even art is produced in a cheap and efficient way. “Matter of fact, culture’s so cheap, a man figured he could insulate his house cheaper with books and prints than he could with rockwool. Don’t think it’s true, but it’s a cute story with a good point,” says a stranger speaking to the Shah of Bratpuhr (243).
As with his later works, Vonnegut is unwilling to deliver a happy ending where the human beings triumph over the machine. At the end of the story, as the rebellion against the machines and their controllers appears to be dying down, a scene occurs where several men are attempting to fix a machine for dispensing an Orange Julius-like drink. Bud Calhoun, formerly of the Ilium Works, manages to get the machine working again. Watching the scene occur, Vonnegut writes, “The man had been desperately unhappy then. Now he was proud and smiling because his hands were busy doing what they liked to do best, Paul supposed – replacing men like himself with machines” (338). Despite their best attempts to overthrow the machines, the machines will still win, because humans need them. They cannot live without them. Our dependence upon technology runs through all of human history. What would a human being be without technology? A Stone Age family without their spears, clubs, and daggers would be nothing more than food to a saber-toothed tiger. Man’s ingenuity enables him to create technology to augment his own physical frailties: computer punch-cards make up for man’s limited memory capacity; a computer-powered lathe makes up for his inability to perform tasks perfectly all the time. But, suggests Vonnegut, technology invariably goes too far, usurping human control over our own minds and bodies. This is a never-ending cycle, Player Piano suggests, one that will continue, no matter what.
E.M. Forster’s short story “The Machine Stops” (1908), like Player Piano, is a dystopia in which the technology itself is the oppressive force. People in “The Machine Stops” live underground the Machine, in individual small rooms, like the cells of a bee hive. Peoples’ every needs are taken care of by the Machine and its sub-machines, learning occurs through a sort of portable screen, and no citizen lacks food or shelter or opportunities to receive electronically lessons and conversation. Nevertheless, Forster’s story contains a satiric norm character – in his world, a misfit – who, like D-503, Bernard Marx, Winston Smith, and Paul Proteus, feel that there is something wrong with a society that is so dependent upon technology. He is Kuno, son the Vashti, the first Machine-dweller we see. Having left the Machine on a great adventure, Kuno sees that stars and tells his mother, “I want to see these stars again. They are curious stars. I want to see them not from the airship, but from the surface of the earth, as our ancestors did, thousands of years ago. I want to visit the surface of the earth” (141). Kuno is talking about the constellation Orion, the hunter. Orion, as a hunter, is an idealized, powerful man composed of stars, which represent a pure nature – distant from the corruptibility of man – but also a powerful nature. Orion, a human being composed of stars, is the ultimate synthesis of man and nature, and his veneration by Kuno suggests that he has in mind a higher ideal of man, a perfect synthesis of human and nature. Such a synthesis is impossible, however, since humans are no longer in contact with nature and, indeed, are discouraged from contacting it. Kuno escapes to the surface and is threatened with “Homelessness” (being ejected to the surface) for going to the surface without an Egression permit.
The intent of technology in “The Machine Stops” is to better human existence. Its effect is to separate human beings from nature, and this is the object of attack. In Forster’s opinion, nature in this story is inherently good, and anything that prevents human beings from coming into contact with nature – like technology – is necessarily evil, in spite of the many creature comforts that technology may offer. “All the old literature, with its praise of Nature and its fear of Nature, rang false as the prattle of a child,” Vashti says, with complex ironies (144). The Machine even causes the human mind – perhaps one of nature’s greatest achievements – to atrophy, as evidenced by the kind of “lectures” that Vashti views from the comfort of her room. The idea of first-hand experience and first-hand ideas is scoffed at:
“Beware of firsthand ideas!” exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. “Firsthand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation, who could erect a philosophy? [. . .] Do not learn anything about this subject of mine – the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought Lafcadio Hearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution.” (154)
The Machine represents technology that serves to make man “seraphically free / From taint of personality” (154), technology that destroys the natural, spontaneous nature of humans. Forster, like many other modernists, was suspicious of industry. His contemporary, D.H. Lawrence, “was convinced that Western industrial culture debased man; it overemphasized the rational, analytic intelligence at the expense of man’s synthetic, intuitive, natural instincts,” says Charles Elkins (49). In a soul-filled soliloquy, Kuno insists that human dependence upon the Machine is detrimental:
We created the machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch; it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, and it has paralyzed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops – but not on our lines. The Machine proceeds – but not to our goal. We exist only as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die. (151-2)
When the Machine stops functioning, the situation is only slightly tragic. Human beings will have to go to the surface and re-make their civilization there, and in the process of doing so, they will have to re-make the interpersonal relations that the Machine stilted. Though a dystopic story, “The Machine Stops” has utopic implications, since the destruction of the Machine means that human beings will necessarily gravitate toward nature – and each other – again.
In spite of their differences, these technological dystopias share a common element. Each one of them, in the words of Beauchamp, “posits as its minatory image of the future an advanced totalitarian state dependent upon a massive technological apparatus – in short, a technotopia” (“Technology” 54). Whether the purpose of the dystopia is happiness, efficiency, or raw power, technology is used in some form to take rights away from human beings so that they may be happier, more efficient, or more subjugated. The goal of a technotopia is a machine-like perfection: machines are wholly rational and yet, even though reason is a virtue in an Enlightenment-based society such as ours, our natural reaction to a world ruled by coldly rational machines is disgust. (Even Nineteen Eighty-Four demands that human beings become robots, subject to the party’s programming via the telescreen.) We are beings of reason, but at the same time, we are being of emotion. To separate a human being from emotion is to separate him from his soul, which is to separate him from the transcendental qualities that make him more than an animal. A human being is special; a machine is not. Machines can be created on an assembly line by the thousands. To suggest that a human being is like a machine or to use technology to separate him from his transcendental qualities is to put a human being on the same level as a machine – that is, to make him nothing more than the sum of his parts. This is the real criticism inherent “technotopias”: they dehumanize the human and make him nothing more than an organic machine with no hope of growing beyond the boundaries of his feeble body.
The authors of these various narratives use fiction as a means to criticize what they see as the ever-growing problem of technology slowly taking over previously human offices. This technology, they argue, will not work for us, but will instead subjugate us or allow us to become subjugated. Regular people, thinking that technology is working for them, and clouded by the new prospects and conveniences of such technology, will become blind to any problems that technology causes. Society will become complacent, save for a few people who, like the “misfits” (D-503, Winston Smith, Kuno, etc.), recognize that the technology is not utopian, but dystopian. The theme of hubris (pride) clouding a hero’s sight to the point where he dies as a result of his pride is transformed into a warning: “If man cannot control his technology, it will – runs the corollary of this view – control him, shape his society willy-nilly” (Beauchamp, “Technology” 54). A reasoning being is turned not into the overly passionate deviant Mr. Hyde, who disregards all cultural norms, but something on entirely the opposite side: an overly rational automaton who obeys every cultural norm and does not – or cannot – think for himself.
Beauchamp, Gorman. “Man as Robot.” Clockwork Worlds: Mechanized Environments in SF. Eds. Richard D. Erlich and Thomas P. Dunn. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983. 85-93.
———. “Technology in the Dystopian Novel.” Modern Fiction Studies 32.1 (1986): 53-63.
Elkins, Charles. “E.M. Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’: Liberal-Humanist Hostility to Technology.” Erlich and Dunn, 47-61.
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Varriccho, Mario. “Power of Images / Images of Power in Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Utopian Studies 10.1 (1999): 98-114.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Player Piano. 1952. New York: Dell, 1999.
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