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Samuel Butler

Lifespan
1835 – 1902
Nationality
British
Active
1901
Works held
1

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) wrote Erewhon (1872), a satirical utopia whose famous ‘Book of the Machines’ argues that machines might evolve consciousness and supplant humanity, one of the earliest and most influential meditations on artificial intelligence and technological evolution. Its wit and prescience make Butler a key ancestor of the machine-anxiety strand of SF.

The works

  1. 1901
    Cover of Erewhon Revisited Twenty Years Later, Both by the Original Discoverer of the Country and by His Son Erewhon Revisited Twenty Years Later, Both by the Original Discoverer of the Country and by His Son

Wrote across

1900s

Recurring themes

UtopiaSocial SF

Kindred authors shared themes

A. K. RuhAlfred Charles MichaudAlice Ilgenfritz JonesAnna Bowman DoddArend Fokke SimonszArthur BirdBenjamin LumleyBernard Alexander Canter

Contemporaries writing in the same era

L. Frank BaumH. G. WellsE. NesbitLuis SenarensAnonymousFrances Hodgson BurnettJack LondonAlgernon BlackwoodJohn Kendrick BangsRudyard Kipling

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