The Spanish Basque essayist, novelist, poet, playwright and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo was born in 1864 in Bilbao, Spain. He is best remembered for The Tragic Sense of Life (1912), a philosophical essay that had a powerful influence on the world psychoanalytic community. His most famous novel was Abel Sánchez: The History of a Passion (1917), a contemporary exploration of the Cain and Abel story. Unamuno was one of a number of notable interwar intellectuals, along with Karl Jaspers and José Ortega y Gasset, who resisted the intrusion of ideology into Western intellectual life. “Mechanopolis” illustrates a loss of faith in science, and a suspicion of technology, that would not emerge fully in science fiction before the 1960s “new wave”. In 1936 Unamuno was placed under house arrest by Spain’s dictator Francisco Franco. He died ten weeks later.
While reading Samuel Butler’s Erewhon , the part where he tells us about an Erewhonian man who wrote The Book of Machines, and in so doing managed to get most of the contraptions banished from his land, there sprang to mind the memory of a traveler’s tale told me by an explorer friend who had been to Mechanopolis, the city of machines. He still shook at the memory of it when he told me the story, and it had such an effect on him that he later retired for years to a remote spot containing the fewest possible number of machines.
I shall try to reproduce my friend’s tale here, in his very words, if possible:
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There came a moment when I was lost in the middle of the desert; my companions had either retreated, seeking to save themselves (as if we knew in which direction salvation lay!), or had perished from thirst and fatigue. I was alone, and practically dying of thirst myself. I began sucking at the nearly black blood that was oozing from fingers raw from clawing about in the arid soil, with the mad hope of bringing to light any trace of water. Just when I was about to lie down on the ground and close my eyes to the implacable blue sky to die as quickly as possible, or even cause my own death by holding my breath or burying myself in that terrible earth. I lifted my fainting eyes and thought I saw something green off in the distance. “It must be a mirage,” I thought: nevertheless. I dragged myself toward it.
Hours of agony passed, but when I arrived I found myself, indeed, in an oasis. A fountain restored my strength, and, after drinking, I ate some of the tasty and succulent fruits the trees freely offered. Then I fell asleep.
I do not know how long I slept, or if it was hours, days, months, or years. What I do know is that I awoke a different man, an entirely different man. The recent and horrendous sufferings had been wiped from my memory, or nearly. “Poor devils,” I said to myself, remembering my explorer companions who had died in our enterprise. I arose, again ate of the fruit and drank of the water, and then disposed myself to examine the oasis. And—wouldn’t you know it—a few steps later I came upon an entirely deserted railway station. There was not a soul to be seen anywhere. A train, also deserted, was puffing smoke without engineer or stoker. It occurred to me out of curiosity to climb into one of the cars. I sat down and, without knowing why, closed the door, and the train started moving. A mad terror rose in me, and I even felt the urge to throw myself out the window. But repeating, “Let us see where this leads,” I contained myself.
The velocity of the train was so great that I could not even make out the sort of landscape through which I sped. I felt such a terrible vertigo that I was compelled to close the windows. When the train at last stood still, I found myself in a magnificent station, one far superior to any that we know around here. I got off the train and went outside.
I will not even try to describe the city. We cannot even dream of all of the magnificent, sumptuous things, the comfort, the cleanliness that were accumulated there. And speaking of hygiene, I could not make out what all of the cleaning apparatus was for, since there was not one living soul around, neither man nor beast. Not one dog crossed the street, nor one swallow the sky.
On a grand building I saw a sign that said Hotel, written just like that, as we write ourselves, and I went inside. It was completely deserted. I arrived at the dining room. The most solid of repasts was to be had inside. There was a list on each table, and every delicacy named had a number beside it. There was also a vast control panel with numbered buttons. All one had to do was touch a button, and the desired dish sprang forth from the depths of the table.
After having eaten, I went out into the street. Streetcars and automobiles passed by, all empty. One had only to draw near, make a signal to them, and they would stop. I took an automobile, and let myself be driven around. I went to a magnificent geological park, in which all of the different types of terrain were displayed, all with explanations on little signs. The information was in Spanish, but spelled phonetically. I left the park. A streetcar was passing by bearing the sign “To the Museum of Painting,” and I took it. There housed were the most famous paintings in the world, in their true originals. I became convinced that all the works we have here, in our museums, are nothing more than skillfully executed reproductions. At the foot of each canvas was a very learned explanation of its historical and aesthetic value, written with the most exquisite sobriety. In a half-hour’s visit I learned more about painting than in twelve years of study in these parts. On a sign at the entrance I read that in Mechanopolis they considered the Museum of Painting to be part of the Museum of Paleontology, whose purpose was to study the products of the human race that had populated those lands before machines supplanted them. Part of the paleontological culture of the Mechanopolites—the who?—was a Hall of Music and all of the other libraries with which the city was full.
What do you wager that I shall shock you even more with my next revelations? I visited the grand concert hall, where the instruments played themselves. I stopped by the great theater. There played a cinematic film accompanied by a phonograph, but so well combined that the illusion of reality was complete. What froze my soul was that I was the only spectator. Where were the Mechanopolites?
When I awoke the next morning in my hotel room, I found the Mechanopolis Echo on my nightstand, with all of the news of the world received through the wireless telegraph station. And there, at the end, was the following news brief: “Yesterday afternoon—and we do not know how it came about—a man arrived at our city, a man of the sort there used to be out there. We predict unhappy days for him.”
My days, in effect, began to be torturous to me. I began to populate my solitude with phantasms. The most terrible thing about solitude is that it fills up by and by. I began to believe that all of those factories, all those artifacts, were ruled by invisible souls, intangible and silent. I started to think the great city was peopled by men like myself, but that they came and went without my seeing or coming across them. I believed myself to be the victim of some terrible illness, madness. The invisible world with which I populated the human solitude in Mechanopolis became a nightmare of martyrdom. I began to shout, to rebuke the machines, to supplicate to them. I went so far as to fall on my knees before an automobile, imploring compassion from it. I was on the brink of throwing myself into a cauldron of boiling steel at a magnificent iron foundry.
One morning, on awakening terrified, I grabbed the newspaper to see what was happening in the world of men, and I found this news item: “As we predicted, the poor man who—and we do not know how—turned up in this incomparable city of Mechanopolis is going insane. His spirit, filled with ancestral worries and superstitions regarding the invisible world, cannot adapt itself to the spectacle of progress. We feel deeply sorry for him.”
I could not bear to see myself pitied at last by those mysterious, invisible beings, angels or demons—which are the same—that I believed inhabited Mechanopolis. But all of a sudden a terrible idea struck me: What if those machines had souls, mechanical souls, and it were the machines themselves that felt sorry for me? This idea made me tremble. I thought myself before the race that must dominate a dehumanized Earth.
I left like a madman and threw myself before the first electric streetcar that passed. When I awoke from the blow, I was once more in the oasis from which 1 had started out. I began walking. I arrived at the tent of some Bedouins, and on meeting one of them. I embraced him crying. How well we understood each other even without understanding each other! He and his companions gave me food, we celebrated together, and at night I went out with them and, lying on the ground, looking up at the starry sky, united we prayed. There was not one machine anywhere around us.
And since then I have conceived a veritable hatred toward what we call progress, and even toward culture, and I am looking for a corner where I shall find a peer, a man like myself, who cries and laughs as I cry and laugh, and where there is not a single machine and the days flow with the sweet, crystalline tameness of a stream lost in a forest primeval.
(1913)
Translated by Patricia Hart