ABSTRACT
The technological fears and dreams of an earlier generation, expressed in metaphor, prophecy and fiction, were incarnated in the style of a later one. Swift's Lagadan Word Machine is one of the first literary uses of the machine as a metaphor. The power of the machine to focus attention and symbolize the blind devotion to "logical" method, recognized by Swift, remains more or less constant through two and a half centuries of its depiction in literature. Cybernetic fiction presents itself as a machine, but only ironically, for underneath the mask lies the softness, vulnerability and instability of our humanness. On the technological side of the creative dialectic between cybernetics and fiction lies cybernetics itself. If cybernetics succeeds in its goal of explaining systematically and completely the mechanisms by which information governs behavior among human beings, it will provide a powerful philosophical weapon against the notion of free will and a powerful technique for control and manipulation of human activity.
