Today I caught a replay of Mechanical Marvels: Clockwork Dreams, a BBC4 documentary on the history of robots. It is by Professor Simon Schaffer, and it looks at clockwork automata, from the earliest mediaeval clocks through the magnificent toys of renaissance courts and on to the invention of industrial robots such as automatic looms. It is worth watching just for the early automata that he has working, but at one point during the program Schaffer says:
A science fiction novel written in the 1770s to attack the aristocratic regime described courtiers as: “Bodies without souls, covered in lace. Automata that might look like humans, but weren’t.”
Given that this was in the run-up to a section on the French Revolution, I suspect that the novel in question was written in French. Probably that’s why Schaffer didn’t mention the name or the author. But he does call the book a science fiction novel, and the date puts it before Frankenstein (though after The Blazing World). I want to know what it is. Can anyone help?
I can’t help on that, but… Was there no mention of Heron of Alexandria? Or the Banu Musa brothers?
Sadly not. It was very Eurocentric.
The book is Louis Mercier, ‘L’An 2440: Rêve s’il en fut jamais’ (“The year 2440: a dream if there ever was one”), chap. 6: “De mon temps un luxe puéril et ruineux avait dérangé toutes les cervelles ; un corps sans âme était surchargé de dorure, et l’automate alors ressemblait à un homme”. Mercier is cited in Minsoo Kang’s excellent book, ‘Sublime dreams of living machines’ (Harvard, 2011), page 164. Hope this helps.
Thank you very much. And I see now that the book is cited in the SF Encyclopedia. I wish I’d know about that when I was doing the Dystopias panel at Cheltenham.
And thanks also for a fascinating documentary.