Download Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, by Rosalind Williams PDF

By Rosalind Williams

The underground has regularly performed a popular position in human imaginings, either as a spot of shelter and as a resource of worry. The overdue 19th century observed a brand new fascination with the underground as Western societies attempted to deal with the pervasive adjustments of a brand new social and technological order. In Notes at the Underground, Rosalind Williams takes us within that severe old second, giving equivalent assurance to real and imaginary undergrounds. She seems to be on the real-life invasions of the underground that happened as sleek city infrastructures of sewers and subways have been laid, and on the simultaneous archaeological excavations that have been unearthing either human historical past and the planet’s deep prior. She additionally examines the subterranean tales of Verne, Wells, Forster, Hugo, Bulwer-Lytton, and different writers who proposed substitute visions of the arriving technological civilization.

Williams argues that those imagined and genuine underground environments supply versions of human lifestyles in an international ruled by way of human presence and supply a prophetic examine today’s technology-dominated society. In a brand new afterword written for this version, Williams issues out that her booklet lines the emergence within the 19th century of what we might now name an environmental consciousness—an knowledge that there'll be effects whilst people stay in a sealed, finite atmosphere. at the present time we're extra acutely aware than ever of our constrained biosphere and the way weak it really is. Notes at the Underground, now much more than whilst it first seemed, bargains a advisor to the human, cultural, and technical effects of what Williams calls “the human empire on earth.”