Victorians and the Machine: The Literary Response to Technology

Sussman, Herbert L. Victorians and the Machine: The Literary Response to Technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1968.

Includes a discussion of S. Butler's Erewhon; also includes HLS's "The Machine and the Future: H. G. Wells" (162-93, cited in David Y. Hughes, "Criticism in English of H. G. Wells's Science Fiction," q.v. under Reference). Deals with important aspects of the use of the machine as a metaphor for the conflict in Western philosophy between determinism and free will—a conflict aggravated by the rise of modern science, with its apparent support for determinism (Warrick 43).