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The World All Watched Over By Machines The twentieth century was characterized with the rapid growth of technical industrial and military progress. The number of inventions made in twentieth century exceeded the scope of all the inventions made during the all history of mankind. Such rapid progress changed the guise of our world forever and the conscience of people. The writers could not keep out of these changes and there appeared such literature style as Science Fiction.
The Industrial twentieth century gave us the great number of writers from many countries who wrote the stories about the role of people in the industrial world and how such progress might influence the future of mankind. The task of his work is the analysis of four works: The Pedestrian by Ray Bradbury, Escape by Ilya Varshavsky, By the Waters of Babylon by Stephen Vincent Benet and the poem All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace by Richard Brautigan and determination of how these authors express their attitude towards the rapid growth of technologies and what kind future they foresee. In all four works the authors portray the future. The future has always been the most interesting topic for the authors of science fiction since Herbert Wells The Time Machine. Each author through the prism of his present tried to picture the possible future and how it could be influenced by the present events.
Each historical epoch has its own Myths and the analyzed stories are based on the Myths of the contemporary society, in which we life today. Two of this works, The Pedestrian by Ray Bradbury and the poem All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace by Richard Brautigan show the contemporary technological Myth or the Utopian dream about the peaceful everyday life in future, where everything is better then in our time, everything is handled by the machines, the pursuit of technology on the service of people. The works Escape by Ilya Varshavsky and By the Waters of Babylon by Stephen Vincent Benet both reflect the greatest fears of the contemporary society. Escape shows the loss of physical and mental freedom by people. Freedom has always been the Force of Society and Technology development, hard won by many generations and the loss of it is one of the great fears of the society. By the Waters of Babylon reflects even greater fear, the collapse of the whole world and mankind in the Nuclear War.
Technology plays great role in all four stories. Ray Bradbury and Richard Brautigan introduce very logical and desirable result of development of the contemporary society, where people assign machines to service all their needs and free their time for more useful business. The new technologies serve, protect, watch over everything and everyone and even think for people. The police car in The Pedestrian is not controlled by human, the car is absolutely independent mechanism and it is enforced to decide persons destiny: "To the Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies. " (Bradbury, p. 27) In All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace the picture is similar, people, animals, nature and whole world live happily under the intent watch of machines: where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace. (Brautigan) In Escape and By the Waters of Babylon the technology and machines are still the tools, controlled by people.
But it is questionable what is more destructive, the rule of the machines, or the wrong use of the machines by people. Despite the difference of themes the attitude of authors towards the portrayed pictures is not very different. Escape and By the Waters of Babylon show the terror of peoples own making, where people use technologies to enslave or destruct their own kins. Ilya Varshavsky in Escape show the Apocalypse of conscience and Stephen Vincent Benet in By the Waters of Babylon show the Apocalypse of existence brought by machines in wrong hands. If the Utopian worlds of The Pedestrian and All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace are not so apocalyptic, they turn out to be very pessimistic. The authors hold contempt to their characters: none of them express any desire to fight the situation.
Leonard Mead from The Pedestrian understands that people became the slaves of their own laziness, but being the writer he does not use his voice, his ability to wake up people. The author of All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace ironically portrays the narrator who is singing the Ode for technology. The minions in Escape are cruel, but the author is more disgusted by the prisoners, who are used to follow the lead of others and get into new traps. The Gods, also known as Men in By the Waters of Babylon made a terrible mistake and paid for it with their own existence. But the author has not belief in future of John the Priest and his people.
They are already in the state of war with the Forest People, they start learning about technologies, and someday in the future they might cause the same mistake as the Men... The writers of the twentieth century could experience the destructive power of technology and their portrayal of technological Anti-Utopia had more ground and insight. They observed two World Wars which were very destructive due to the ample growth of military technologies. Despite the fact, that the characters of the stories analyzed in this work all fall the victims of technologies and machines, the message of the authors lies not in danger of technologies. The author show that people are not ideal, they are full of drawbacks and faults. Technologies can not solve all problems and until we all get rid of our greed, envy, animosity and follow the ethical laws, the future of the mankind would be questionable.
Bibliography 1. Benet, Stephen Vincent. All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace. Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections website, 23 Mar. 2005, < web > 2. Bradbury, Ray. S is for Space.
Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968, 3. Brautigan, Richard. By the Waters of Babylon. Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections website, 23 Mar. 2005, < web > 4. Varshavsky, Ilya.
Escape. Best SF: 1973, ed. Harry Harrison & Brian W. Aldiss, G. P. Putnam, 1974
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Research essay sample on The World All Watched Over By Machines
