Clockworks 2

Abstract

At start, there was Marshall Tymn founding his series Greenwood Press, Contributions to Study of Science and Fantasy, in which first volume was The Mechanical God: Machines in Science (1982). This volume was edited by Thomas P. Dunn and Richard D. Erlich, Introduction by Brian W. Aldiss and collected eighteen essays by eighteen scholars on subtitle's topic. Mechanical God was followed in 1983 by Number 7 in Contributions series, Erlich and Dunn's Clockwork Worlds: Mechanized Environments in SF.Mechanical God and Clockwork Worlds decent reviews and a somewhat surprising number of positive informal comments on Dunn/ Erlich contribution of a of Works Useful for Study of Machines in Science Fiction and a of Works Useful for Study of Mechanized Environments in SF: a biblio-, filmo-, video-, discographical effort to provide a briefly annotated list of basic works for study of each theme. So Dunn and I decided that our most immediately useful project for academic study of sf might be to join scholars putting together basic tools for research. We got professional help in areas outside our expertise, and produced a combined and expanded volume ungainly title Clockworks: A Multimedia of Works Useful for Study of Human/ Machine Interface in SF. The formal credits list Erlich and Dunn as compilers, Assisted by Edward K. Montgomery, Catherine Mills Royer, and D. Scott DeLoach, though others helped project, including Chad Dresbach (who supplemented Dunn's extensive knowledge of pinball machines his own expertise in that area and in developing medium of video games and their early successors), and Jeffrey R. Wilson and Vincent Moore, who compiled core of section on music.Multimedia was a necessary phrase for us to use because appeared in Greenwood series Bibliographies and Indexes in World Literature (Number 37), and word Bibliography had to appear in title. The multimedia part, though, was crucial, or at least our most original contribution.In our Introduction, Dunn and I-I've moved voice here to just Rich Erlich-described as an analytical, selected list, comments, of works useful for study of human/machine interface in SF, stressing English-language works produced 1895-1990, and expanded upon analytical by noting sections into which List had been divided, with works arranged alphabetically within each section:(1) Reference Works(2) Anthologies and Collections(3) Fiction(4) Literary Criticism(5) Stage, Screen, and Television Drama(6) Stage, Screen, and Television Drama Criticism(7) Graphic and Plastic Arts(8) Music(9) Background ReadingClockworks was published in 1993, and Dunn and I mostly moved on to other things, including, in my case, film studies and occasional consulting on movie scripts. Now and then, though, friends would recommend books relevant to the human/machine interface, and I saw on my own a number of relevant movies. As cyberpunk and its successors rolled on, human relationships our machines-in a widening sense of machine-became still more pronounced, intimate, and unavoidable. And, significantly for usefulness of project, those relationships continued to be expressed in a number of different artistic media, which reflected ways of life that, for good and for ill, were becoming increasingly science fictional. Somewhat to my snobbish and/or philistine expectations, even graphic novels and video games evolved into sophisticated art forms that often addressed human/machine interface.So I found myself fitfully preparing a Supplement to List, a Clockworks 2, and eventually had a significant number of entries. For my convenience, and that of my students, I put supplement online. …