The Anguish of the Machines

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Vasari, Ruggero. The Anguish of the Machines (L’angoscia delle macchine). In Robots Robots Robots. 1923. Harry M. Geduld and Ronald Gottesman, editors. Boston, MA (sic): New York Graphic Society, 1978. Classified by Internet Speculative Fiction Database as short fiction, novelette in its English translation.[1] / L’angoscia delle macchine e altre sistesi futuriste. A cura di Maria Elena Versari.Palermo: Due Punti, 2009.[2]

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Raun (1927). See

Vasari, Ruggero. The anguish of machines and other futurist syntheses, curated by Maria Elena Versari. Palermo: Duepoints, 2009.[3]

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

From Maria Elena Versari, "Enlisting and Updating: Ruggero Vasari and the Shifting Coordinates of Futurism in Eastern and Central Europe."[4]

In his plays, these programmatic texts resurface every now and then as indirect citations. Vasari presented them as the core ideology of despotic societies ruled by machines. As such,The Anguish of the Machines and Raun fit in the tradition of Expressionist and post-Expressionist plays dealing with the dark side of technology. But they were also quite consonant with the political critique of mechanical utopias that was put forward at that time in the burgeoning field of dystopian science fiction literature, exemplified by Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. (p. 290)

Cited in Mariano Martín Rodríguez's "Science Fiction Drama in the Age of Scientific Romance 101," SFRA Review #310 (Fall 2014): p. 39.[5]

RDE, finishing, 3Aug21