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Notes on the Underground, New Edition
An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination
Rosalind Williams
With a new afterword by the author
The underground has always played a prominent role in human imaginings, both as a place of refuge and as a source of fear. The late nineteenth century saw a new fascination with the underground as Western societies tried to cope with the pervasive changes of a new social and technological order. In Notes on the Underground, Rosalind Williams takes us inside that critical historical moment, giving equal coverage to actual and imaginary undergrounds. She looks at the real-life invasions of the underground that occurred as modern urban infrastructures of sewers and subways were laid, and at the simultaneous archaeological excavations that were unearthing both human history and the planet’s deep past. She also examines the subterranean stories of Verne, Wells, Forster, Hugo, Bulwer-Lytton, and other writers who proposed alternative visions of the coming technological civilization.
Williams argues that these imagined and real underground environments provide models of human life in a world dominated by human presence and offer a prophetic look at today’s technology-dominated society. In a new afterword written for this edition, Williams points out that her book traces the emergence in the nineteenth century of what we would now call an environmental consciousness—an awareness that there will be consequences when humans live in a sealed, finite environment. Today we are more aware than ever of our limited biosphere and how vulnerable it is. Notes on the Underground, now even more than when it first appeared, offers a guide to the human, cultural, and technical consequences of what Williams calls "the human empire on earth."
About the Author
Rosalind Williams is Bern Dibner Professor of the History of Science and Technology in MIT's Program in Science, Technology, and Society. She is the author of Retooling: A Historian Confronts Technological Change (MIT Press, 2002).
| Praise for the first edition:
"Williams has written a book that is clear and enjoyable ..... Notes on the Underground's moral imperative not only makes for fascinating criticism, but also encourages a rethinking of our ecological priorities."
—John Miller, Artforum Praise for the first edition:
"'What are the consequences when human beings dwell in an environment that is predominantly built rather than given?' An uncommonly astute and provocative array of answers are examined through the metaphor of living underground, literally and in literature.... A spellbinder."
—J. Baldwin, Whole Earth Review |
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| "Rosalind Williams has brilliantly and eloquently explored the too often ignored, but salient, concept of the underground in past and present."
—Thomas Hughes, author of Human-Built World, and Professor Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania
"How good to have a new edition of this classic book. Rosalind Williams describes one of the great transformations of the human world, and hence the human psyche—a transition still underway, and still hidden in plain view."
—Bill McKibben
"Notes on the Underground artfully demonstrates the triumph of the modern imagination, at once literary and technological, in exploring the least-explored sector of our habitat: the mysterious depths beneath its hard, seemingly impenetrable, surface."
—Leo Marx, Professor Emeritus, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, MIT
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