sub rosa

Machine Nation began life in 1997 as a 2,000 word short story entitled Between A Man And A Machine, originally part of an unpublished multimedia project called Bio-Mechanica.

Several of the short stories from Bio-Mechanica involved the Monroe Institute (which later became BioMimetica's labs in Machine Nation) and one story in particular, List Directives, also concerned a female android created at Monroe. List Directives looked at the issue of memory and its part in social conditioning, as the android had lost its memory and had no concept of itself or how it should behave. Subsequently, elements of that tale were absorbed into Machine Nation as the novel took shape. Altered memories are not only a fictional device - it is alleged that the CIA used drugs to remove memories from patients in a bid to create a conscienceless assassin in the 1960s and, of course, a computer's memory is changed every time a file is uploaded, amended or deleted.

The history of living machines is surprisingly old, dating back much further than the modern era of science fact and fiction, right back to the Sanskrit poem the Bhagavad Gita written in 2,000BC, which contains some of the earliest references to an artificial woman. The ancient Greeks had their tales of Pandora and Galatea, both recreations of people, the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh had synthetic men, and there is the Jewish tradition of the Golem – an artificial humanoid protector animated through the use of occult symbolism. Myths and legends from all around the world are littered with stories of human surrogates. Extensive use is made in these myths of magical symbols and special incantations, of breath and of organic matter to activate otherwise lifeless humanoids. The android creator in Machine Nation, Professor Nathan Bach, uses a secret incantation - in the form of a computer password - to perform this same function when he whispers into Kim’s ear in order to first give her life.

In the tale, the world’s weather is depicted as being out of control and many of the scenes are set against a dreary cityscape of grey skies and ever-present rain. This has a purpose other than just to paint a picture of environmental chaos and of a future urban dystopia. Rain is symbolic of emotion – the very subject that Kim is designed to discover. By setting most of the action in a rain-soaked city and on its damp and frozen streets, it is representative of the world of developing feeling which Kim and Sorber must encounter as the story progresses.

obscura

There are a number of other references throughout the tale, such as the Caidin Building, which is named after Martin Caidin, the author of Cyborg - the source novel for TV’s Six Million Dollar Man. Machine Nation's Sandmen are a link to Der Sandmann, a 19th Century book by E.T.A. Hoffman about a female automaton named Olympia. Der Sandmann was a character who stole eyes from human cadavers to implant into automata.

Chapter titles also have a significance; for example, 'Doppelgänger' is from German mythology - to encounter one’s own double is seen as a portent of one’s imminent demise; 'The Tower' is from the Tarot card of the same name - it symbolises a world being turned upside down. The use of Latin words and phrases throughout the book comes from Latin's current status as an apparently dead language; the android too is a creature not alive in the conventional sense - instead it lives in some new, undefined category of existence. Finally, the basis of Machine Nation is the development of an intelligent android - the express aim of numerous projects being carried out by research institutions, private companies and military agencies around the globe.

reissued, reprogrammed, redesigned

The 2005 Figo Books edition of Machine Nation features some small changes to the version published in 2002 - while the story is identical, there are some formatting amendments, minor changes to the narrative and revisions to certain character names.