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By her side, on the little reading-desk, was a survival from the ages of litter — one book. This was the book of the Machine. – E. M. Forster
Welcome, my son.
Welcome to the machine.
— Pink Floyd
Writers of fiction are obviously not bound to set their work in their own times. The recreation and interpretation of history produces novels as varied and distant from one another in the time in which they are set as Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers, Robert Graves’ Claudius novels, and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. But writers can also look into the future, predicting or merely entertaining, attempting to delineate what H. G. Wells called the shape of things to come. A great deal of this literary prognostication is to be found in the genre of science fiction.
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