Ivan Vendrov

All quotes, unless otherwise marked, are Tolkien's words as printed in The Letters of J.R.R.Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition. All emphases mine. Machinery is Power is Evil Writing to his son Michael in the RAF: > [here is] the tragedy and despair of all machinery laid bare. Unlike art which is content to create a new secondary world in the mind, it attempts to actualize desire, and so to create power in this World; and that cannot really be done with any real satisfaction. Labour-saving machinery only creates endless and worse labour. And in addition to this fundamental disability of a creature, is added the Fall, which makes our devices not only fail of their desire but turn to new and horrible evil. So we come inevitably from Daedalus and Icarus to the Giant Bomber. It is not an advance in wisdom! This terrible truth, glimpsed long ago by Sam Butler, sticks out so plainly and is so horrifyingly exhibited in our time, with its even worse menace for the future, that it seems almost a world wide mental disease that only a tiny minority perceive it. Even if people have ever heard the legends (which is getting rarer) they have no inkling of their portent. How could a maker of motorbikes name his product Ixion cycles! Ixion, who was bound for ever in hell on a perpetually revolving wheel! Well, I have got over 2 thousand words onto this little flimsy airletter; and I will forgive the Mordor-gadgets some of their sins, if they will bring it quickly to you The Sam Butler reference is to Samuel Butler's Erewhon, a science fiction novel which is the first known work to warn about self-replicating machines and the possibility of machine consciousness. The 'Butlerian Jihad' from Dune is another famous reference to Butler. A quote from Erewhon: > I fear none of the existing machines; what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity with which they are becoming something very different to what they are at present. No class of beings have in any time past made so rapid a mov