The Hall of Machines

Jones, Langdon. "The Hall of Machines." New Worlds #180, March 1968. Collected The Eye of the Lens. New York: Macmillan, 1972; Collier Books, 1973. Reprinted England Swings SF New York City: Doubleday, 1968; Ace, 1970. See link at note for The Internet Speculative Fiction Database for other publications and translation.[1] Companion piece to "The Coming of the Sun" and "The Eye of the Lens," all three of which appeared in New Worlds #180.

From the MPorcius Fiction Log (lightly edited)

"The Hall of Machines" consists of the notes of a scholar [...] about an indescribably vast building which houses massive automatic machines of numerous types. Most of the text is detailed description of various of the machines: one that consists of shiny blades making elaborate cuts (a "Death Machine"), one which extrudes tiny machines from a tube ("The Mother"), a colossal "Clock" made up of a huge spring and innumerable precise gears whose face is turned away from any possible viewer, and more.

I'm going to have to guess that the mysterious Hall of Machines represents the universe, and that the story is about how the laws that govern our lives seem mechanistic, predictable, and open to close inspection, but are so complex as to be practically indecipherable, and are bereft of any values or spiritual meaning. Jones provides a clue, however, [...] that he is making, or the reader is expected to make, some kind of ethical judgement: the word "Auschwitz" is inscribed on one of the three Death Machines.

The MPorcius reviewer compares the story to H. Melville's "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" — text here[2] — for allegorical machinery, described in detail (and we'll add: paper-making machinery, anthropomorphized, and described with satiric intent and/or political critique).

Lisa Yaszek and her students note that "much of the story is about the narrator's emotions as he encounters the machines, rather than about the machines themselves" (personal communication) — making the story particularly appropriate for thinking about "the human/machine interface."

RDE, finishing, 11/12May21 (with thanks to Lisa Yaszek)