**A revealing study of the connections between nineteenth-century technological fiction and American religious faith.**
In __Gears and God: Technocratic Fiction, Faith, and Empire in Mark Twain’s America__, Nathaniel Williams analyzes the genre of technology-themed exploration novels—dime novel adventure stories featuring steam-powered and electrified robots, airships, and submersibles. This genre proliferated during the same cultural moment when evolutionary science was dismantling Americans’ prevailing, biblically based understanding of human history.
While their heyday occurred in the late 1800s, technocratic adventure novels like Twain’s __A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court__ inspired later fiction about science and technology. Similar to the science fiction plotlines of writers like Jules Verne and H. Rider Haggard, and anticipating the adventures of Tom Swift some decades later, these novels feature Americans using technology to visit and seize control of remote locales, a trait that has led many scholars to view them primarily as protoimperialist narratives. Their legacy, however, is more complicated. As they grew in popularity, such works became as concerned with the preservation of a fraught Anglo-Protestant American identity as they were with spreading that identity across the globe.
Many of these novels frequently assert the Bible’s authority as a historical source. Collectively, such stories popularized the notion that technology and travel might essentially “prove” the Bible’s veracity—a message that continues to be deployed in contemporary debates over intelligent design, the teaching of evolution in public schools, and in reality TV shows that seek historical evidence for biblical events. Williams argues that these fictions performed significant cultural work, and he consolidates evidence from the novels themselves, as well as news articles, sermons, and other sources of the era, outlining and mapping the development of technocratic fiction.

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Williams, Nathaniel

Fire Ant Books

University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, 2018

United States, United States of America

2nd ed., PS, 2018

Jul 31, 2018

Memory of the World Library

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Memory of the World Librarian: Calamitous Annunciation

Source title: Gears and God: Technocratic Fiction, Faith, and Empire in Mark Twain's America (Amer Lit Realism & Naturalism)

A revealing study of the connections between nineteenth-century technological fiction and American religious faith.
In Gears and God: Technocratic Fiction, Faith, and Empire in Mark Twain’s America , Nathaniel Williams analyzes the genre of technology-themed exploration novels—dime novel adventure stories featuring steam-powered and electrified robots, airships, and submersibles. This genre proliferated during the same cultural moment when evolutionary science was dismantling Americans’ prevailing, biblically based understanding of human history.
While their heyday occurred in the late 1800s, technocratic adventure novels like Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court inspired later fiction about science and technology. Similar to the science fiction plotlines of writers like Jules Verne and H. Rider Haggard, and anticipating the adventures of Tom Swift some decades later, these novels feature Americans using technology to visit and seize control of remote locales, a trait that has led many scholars to view them primarily as protoimperialist narratives. Their legacy, however, is more complicated. As they grew in popularity, such works became as concerned with the preservation of a fraught Anglo-Protestant American identity as they were with spreading that identity across the globe.
Many of these novels frequently assert the Bible’s authority as a historical source. Collectively, such stories popularized the notion that technology and travel might essentially “prove” the Bible’s veracity—a message that continues to be deployed in contemporary debates over intelligent design, the teaching of evolution in public schools, and in reality TV shows that seek historical evidence for biblical events. Williams argues that these fictions performed significant cultural work, and he consolidates evidence from the novels themselves, as well as news articles, sermons, and other sources of the era, outlining and mapping the development of technocratic fiction.
**

Introduction: This Is Religious, And Totally Different -- Part I. Gears -- Inventing The Technocratic Exploration Tale: God, Gears, And Empire -- Building Imperialists: The Steam Man, Used Up Man, And Man In The Moon -- Imagining Inventors: Frank Reade And Dime-novel Technocratic Exploration -- Part Ii. God -- Discovering Biblical Literalism: Frank Reade Redux -- Confronting Fol-de-rol: Mark Twain, Technocracy, And Religion -- Reconstructing Biblical History: Technocratic Explorations, 1899-1910 -- Conclusion: Technocratic Exploration's Legacy. Nathaniel Williams. Includes Bibliographical References (pages 183-198) And Index.

"A revealing study of the connections between nineteenth-century technological fiction and American religious faith. In this work, Nathaniel Williams analyzes the genre of technology-themed exploration novels--dime novel adventure stories featuring steam-powered and electrified robots, airships, and submersibles. This genre proliferated during the same cultural moment when evolutionary science was dismantling Americans' prevailing, biblically based understanding of human history"-- Provided by publisher

Provides a revealing study of the connections between nineteenth-century technological fiction and American religious faith. In Gears and God, Nathaniel Williams analyses the genre of technology-themed exploration novels - dime novel adventure stories featuring steam-powered and electrified robots, airships, and submersibles.

2021-10-05