Notes on the Underground, new edition: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination

by Rosalind Williams

Real and imagined undergrounds in the late nineteenth century viewed as offering a prophetic look at life in today's technology-dominated world. 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 essay 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.”

Genres: Technology, History, Nonfiction, Essays, Academic

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

Reviews

[Jason Gignac · Rating 3 out of 5]

So, every once in a while, I go totally geeky, and read a book like this. Notes on the Underground is, in short, a cultural history of technology, focusing particularly on underground spaces, particularly in the 19th century. Why? Because underground spaces are the perfect example of something (generally) manmade and devoid of 'nature' in the traditional sense, so it's a perfect place to see how people throughout the period grappled with technology. Taking a pretty loose definition of underground (20000 Leagues Under the Sea is included, for instance, and that makes more sense in the book than it sounds), the book covers a lot of ground, talking about everything from labor practices to architecture to Thomas Edison to androids.

I loved this book, simply because of the sheer breadth of what the author undertook to describe. A book that is this cross-topic does a great job of making you think of connections betweem vastly different disciplines. In a sense, it reminded me of Building Jerusalem, which I read a few months ago. Unfortunately, the breadth sometimes comes through as a sort of dissipation of the theme, and the book has stretches where it feels unfocused, even irrelevant to the topic at hand. Nonetheless, if you're interested in literature (particularly early scifi like Jules Verne, HG Wells), or architecture, or cultural history, or the industrial revolution, you'll find a lot to chew on in this volume. If nothing else, I added several books to my to-be-read list, just by reading this one...

[Nicholas Goode · Rating 3 out of 5]

semi interesting, hella dense

[Firat Erdim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Traces the relationship between 19th century fiction (often about the underground) and the development of the concepts of the natural sublime, the technological sublime and the social sublime. Williams uses these sources and ideas to expose the false dichotomy between metaphor and technology as tools for understanding the world. It is also a good source for much obscure and fantastic 19th century fiction.

[Kai · Rating 3 out of 5]

mostly a commentary on turn of the century sci fi (verne, wells, etc.) tons of excellent ideas but sometimes suffers from reducing strange worlds to either natural, social, or technological