First published in
Amazing Stories, November 1987
If you thought
transhumanism and the singularity were new ideas, think again! 1927
is the year that that Fritz Lang released Metropolis, Charles
Lindberg made his first tarns-Atlantic flight and The Jazz Singer
came out in the cinemas. Radio was still radical and new, and even
evolution was a relatively novel - and dangerous - concept. But SF writers were already
imagining the creature that these two new and forces could bring
about and the consequences of such a profound change.
While studying, the
narrator suddenly sits up from his desk to see a bizarre apparition
before him: a shrivelled human form encased in a mechanical cylinder.
Glass and metal tubes ‘run at places into the body’ apparently
sustaining it’s life. It claims to be from 28,000 years in the
future and appeared in the narrator’s
study by accident while travelling in time on a study trip elsewhen.
It’s hard to imagine how extraordinary this idea
must have felt to the readership at the time. A plausible demon or angel – not really either, but
a man as unlike the man of today as the caveman was from the
pulp-reading classes of the USA.
Poor prehistoric mammal, how could you, groping in the dawn of human existence, comprehend what is beyond your lowly environment! Compared to you, we are as gods.
Thousands of years of
evolution don’t appear to have improved humanity’s manners.
Perhaps the consequence of merging with its tools has made humanity a
bit of a tool in the process.
For some reason this
one starts with the narrator reading a copy of Engel’s Origin of
the Family, Private Property and the State. Before the Machine
Man appears, he had been intending to ‘make a few notes from
Engel’s work relative to plural marriages.’ I’m not entirely
sure what Engel’s does have to say on the topic. From what I can
gather from wikipedia and obscure academic papers that turn up in a
google search, it’s probably a bad thing that maintains bourgeois
property rights.
I wonder if Flagg’s
making a subtle dig at Marxism here. Maybe the Machine Man is the
product not of technology and evolution, but technology and Marxism.
After all 28,000 years is pretty small beer in evolutionary terms but
is perhaps enough for the emergence of the ‘workers paradise’
imagined by Marx and Engles.
The story has it’s
own ‘end of hsitory’ moment that brings to mind Marxist rhetoric. The Ardathians themselves consider
anything before the Bi-Chanic era, fifteen thousand years before their own day as prehistory, lost in the mists of time. It’s like the singularity, a point in history that
occludes historical insight – old fashioned humanity can no longer
comprehend ascended humanity, but ascended humanity can equally not
fully comprehend the character of primitive man.
Flagg doesn’t seem
much impressed by the idea.
At last I began to get an inkling of what the Ardathian meant when it alluded to itself as a Machine man. The appalling story of man’s final evolution into a controlling centre that directed a mechanical body, awoke something akin to fear in my heart. If it were true, what of the soul, the spirit...?
Like The Coming of theIce, this story also focuses on the chief draw back of being
super-human:
What joy can there in existence for you? You have no sex; you cannot mate. It seems to me that no hell could be worse than being caged alive inside that thing.
The story doesn’t
really go anywhere beyond this. When the narrator’s journalist
friend arrives, the Machine man promptly disappears before any
witnesses can corroborate the story. It’s tailed by a larky
epilogue of the ‘it could all be true!’ variety, but it’s thin
stuff. The bulk of this story is good fun as the narrator and the
Machine Man swap barbs, and the epilogue is at least very short. I
suppose Flagg either had no idea what to do with the idea, or just
wanted to indulge the bizarre dialogue and then get out.
Would such a weak plot
get through today’s slush-pile? I wonder!
Themes: transhumanism,
singularity, vastness (gulfs of time), asexuality, futuristic
dystopia, soulless technology
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