In every child's life there comes a time when he begins to see himself as a personality, and to make plans, however fantastic, for a long future. He determines to be a pirate or an engine-driver. Similarly man is just beginning to be conscious of his racial past, and of his prospects, and to ask himself whether he has any part at all to play in relation to the stars. Perhaps he has none. On the other hand, perhaps he is not wholly unimportant. At present he cannot possibly tell. He is too ignorant and dull-witted. But clearly, whatever his cosmical function, the first thing for him to do is to fulfill those human capacities which are at present so feebly exercised in him, those capacities in virtue of which he justly considers himself the finest of terrestrial animals.

But very possibly, long before he can fulfill his capacities, long before he can even attain spiritual adolescence, let alone maturity, some accident may destroy him. Astronomical or terrestrial events beyond his control may easily disinfect the earth of the microbe, man. More likely still, he will commit some huge folly which will ruin him for ever.

Machinery and Labour

Late in 1934, at the depth of the worldwide economic Depression, Stapledon spoke in a B.B.C. series on the history and future of mechanization. By then he had earned a reputation for visionary prophecy and was a natural candidate or the broadcasts. He had also made clear his socialist politics, most recently in Waking World, published earlier in 1934, and the subject of machines and workers could not elicit from him an uncritical technophilia. In his twenty-minute talk, Stapledon imagined a future in which all strata of society would benefit from technology, but he warned against taking such an outcome for granted. His utopianism often had a grim underside, and here his ambivalence is evident in the structure of the speech. The utopian vision is bracketed by an unforgiving analysis of how rapacious bosses might harness an advanced technology to tighten their grip on their employees. The fantastic tour of a city of the future in the broadcast has visual images similar to those in the final, utopian section of H. G. Wells's screenplay for Things to Come, which was not released until the following year. But the apocalyptic epilogue to the vision, a pure Stapledonian touch, prevents the speech from becoming a piece of Disneyfied world-of tomorrow fantasy. Printed here for the first time, the text is from Stapledon's handwritten manuscript in the B.B.C. Archive; the profusion of underscored words suggests that he used this script to rehearse the emphases and inflections of his delivery.

IF I WERE FEARING UNEMPLOYMENT, I should not be quite happy about this series of talks. I should say, "Here are these blighters, who thrive in a mechanized world, trying to persuade us, who have been knocked out by it, that what we want is more and more mechanization. For them it means life and comfort. For us it is a living death."

Now that's the plain truth. There's no getting over it. And before saying anything else I want to make it clear that I think mechanization has proved quite as much a curse as a blessing. It might be used to give everyone a full, interesting, happy life; but actually it has turned us all into slaves. Some of us are far more wretchedly enslaved than others, but in one way we are all slaves. Very many, of course, are forced to spend their lives grinding and sweating for others.