Trapped in the Bureaucratic Pinball Machine

Erlich, Richard D. "'Trapped in the Bureaucratic Pinball Machine': A Vision of Dystopia in the Twentieth Century." Selected Proceedings of the Science Fiction Research Association 1978 Convention. Thomas J. Remington, ed. Cedar Falls, IA: U of Northern Iowa P, 1979: 30-44.

Treats mechanism and containment in a number of S. F., dystopian, and generally pessimistic works of what in SF was the high Modern period. (Note shift from electromagnetic mechanisms such as 20th-c. pinball machines to far more electronic video games of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Pinball machines have moving parts, and skill for a player — or survival for a human trapped within — requires dealing with the natural forces such as gravity; video games and computers establish in the figurative world behind the screen environments that are totally human-made, and run by laws that are human code. Cf. shift from manual typewriters to electric typewriters to word-processing devices with printers to desk-top, laptop, and smaller computers.)