sdo (08/31/82)
By the most amazing set of coincidences I came across a manual for a
course I took four years ago. On the front cover I had written a
reference that the instructor had given. It was for a book
called - ready for this one - "Erewhon" by Samuel Butler. The BTL
library didn't have the book so I looked in the Encyclopedia Britannica
for information. Here are excerpts from the section on Butler:
Samuel Butler (1835-1902) "Erewhon" (1872)
"The certainties of the Victorian Age met their match in
Samuel Butler, the English novelist, essayist, and critic,
whose "Erewhon" ("nowhere" rearranged) foreshadowed the
collapse of the illusion of eternal progress as later
exemplified in the satiric utopias of Aldous Huxley's
"Brave New World" (1932) and George Orwell's "Nineteen
Eighty-four" (1949) ...
...To the New Zealand "Press" he contributed several
articles on Darwinian topics, of which two ... were later
worked up in "Erewhon." Both show him already grappling
with the central problem of his later thought: the
relationship between mechanism and life.
...he tries out the consequences of regarding machines as
living organisms competing with man in the struggle for
existence and so likely to win that they must be at once
destroyed.
...he takes the opposite view that machines are
extracorporeal limbs and that the more of these a man can
tack onto himself the more highly evolved an organism he
will be.
...a satire on contemporary life and thought conveyed by
the time-honoured convention of travel in an imaginary
country.
The Erewhonians have long ago abolished machines as
dangerous competitors in the struggle for existence..."
So there you have it. I don't know if the erewhon on the net is
based on this one, but it does make sense now.
Scott Orshan
BTL
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