Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (1864–1936) was a Spanish writer and philosopher, well known around the world during his lifetime, who taught at the University of Salamanca. Unamuno was always a controversial figure—a socialist to start before then lapsing into nationalism—in part because he stood in opposition to the monarchy as well as the dictatorships of Miguel Primo de Rivera. As a result, Unamuno was fired from the University of Salamanca in 1920 and exiled from Spain until 1930. During the Spanish Civil War, Unamuno supported the republican government, which had allowed him to return to Spain—but then became a rebel sympathizer.
Much of Unamuno’s writing is influenced by his own personal philosophy, which changed significantly multiple times in his life in response to different religious and political crises—his beliefs captured in such treatises as “The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations” (1913) and essays like “Our Lord Don Quixote” (1905) and “The Agony of Christianity” (1925).
Much of his fiction has allegorical dimensions in relation to morality and Christian thought, such as Abel Sánchez (1917), which uses the story of Cain and Abel for a then-modern exploration of envy. His story “Mechanopolis” (1913) is actually a rarity for him, in that he wrote very little science fiction.
In a prior translation, this story was previously reprinted in Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain, whose editors included the work because “it illustrates (from the vantage of 1913) the loss of faith in science and the fear of technology characteristic of much science fiction in the twentieth century.” The story serves as an excellent early example of Spanish-language science fiction in the twentieth century.