Acronia

Capanna, Pablo. "Acronia." First published Argentineans on the Moon (Los Argentines en la luna), 1968. Andrea Bell, translator. Cosmos Latinos, which see.

According to the Cosmos Latinos introduction to their translation of "Acronia," "It depicts a [...] corporate world where human beings have willingly become incapable of anything but working for companies that provide for their every need at all hours of the day. A straightforward denunciation of the dangers of mechanization that foresees the online workplace [...]" (p. 92).

Allows figurative overlap between the biological and mechanical, but sets up explicitly a human/robot opposition in terms of labor: "Later on, once again, the spiral transporter, the lights of the programming machine, purring softly like a fat, metallic cat, and the tedium, the tedium that only intensive work could dispel [sic on syntax]. It wasn't true that the same tasks could be done by robots: 'Only man can do executive-level jobs,' he thought, although not as convincingly as he used to, 'and only man needs to occupy his time by working" (p. 93).

The "adaptation program" of P, the protagonist — cf. Franz Kafka's K — had been flawed but he could note that clocks in Acronia (appropriately) lack hands, and he knows

that back in ancient times, when people we're said to be slaves to the clock, the clock was a disk with two needles or "hands" that went in pursuit of symmetrical signs, once for each fraction of time. Clocks no longer measured time in Acronia, although they still served a function. It wasn't necessary to measure time, because all the stages of life were registered in the fabulous Planner's Memory: clocks were there only to communicate changes in activity with their flashing lights and musical tones. (p. 94)

Cf. and contrast METROPOLIS, "Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman," and Zamiatin's We; and see above, introductory comments by the editors/translator. For an enforced "Plan" cf. "the Plan of Man" enforced by "the Machine" in Pohl and Williamson's Starchild Trilogy (1963 f.). Against the Plan, although possibly implicit in it, were dreams: more generally, "oneiromancy."

The sickness would start with frequent distractions and digressions that distanced the patient from his or her specific task. Some [...] began to ramble on about humans not having been born for the Acronian way of life, about all that useless work, those meetings and that hustling and bustling of dossiers. They claimed that all the real work, including the most complex forms of programming, was done by the machines and that their lives had no meaning. (p. 98)

Also contrasted with the Plan (and Bioplan), bureaucracy and robots is nature and a Romantic idea of the feminine: pp. 99-100, and an old, philosophical robot (p. 101) — and poetry, specifically T. S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men: (pp. 104-05).

RDE, finishing, 7Sep20