A Tale of the Twentieth Century for Advanced Thinkers
Wells, H.G. “A Tale of the Twentieth Century for Advanced Thinkers.” 1887. The Complete Short Stories of H.G. Wells. Ed. John Hammond. London, UK: Dent, 1998. 697-700.
Note date: Wells's The Time Machine was published in 1895, so this short story is a very early work.
Discussed in some detail for so short a story by Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint in "Learning from the Little Engines That Couldn't: Transported by Gernsback, Wells, and Latour," which see (key passage quoted below).
In the Tale, an inventor — a "solitary genius" — dies wretchedly in a garret:
Isolated from his fellows [...], he consumes what little he has and then himself, but “though the Inventor was dead, the Thought was not” (697). Among his pawned patents is the design for a revolutionary locomotive, and a limited company is formed to exploit it. Unlike [Hugo] Gernsback, who fantasizes a heroic technocrat [in Ralph 124C41 +], Wells establishes the autonomous existence of the thought as something divorced from its inventor, something operating in the social realm, negotiating human and nonhuman actants into the network necessary for its own realization. [* * * However — ]
Wells not only conceived of technology as happening within a social milieu, but also acknowledged some very specific actants — politicians, bankers, and so on — beyond the realm of nature with which the technological project must negotiate. These are not the only actants involved in the realization of the new tube line. Later, “the scientific manager (a small and voluble mechanism)” explains that the components of the train are “of English manufacture,” made by “the great firm of Schulz and Brown of Pekin (they removed there in 1920 in order to obtain cheap labour)” (699), extending the train’s network of actants to include unemployed British engineering workers as well as the cheaper Chinese labor that has replaced them and the global communications and transportation systems necessary for their profitable exploitation. Although their relationships to the train might seem [...] tenuous [...], they indicate [...] the extent to which a technological project must negotiate and recruit actants into a network in order to become real. (Bould and Vint, pp. 138-39 in print version)[1]
RDE, finishing, 7Nov22
