The Ego Machine
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers who want a short story to quickly grasp the style of golden-age American science fiction
- Science fiction fans interested in personality, consciousness, and identity
- Learners who need lightweight reading material in original English
- Researchers gathering materials on genre literature or the history of science fiction
Not a good fit for
- Hard science fiction readers who prefer long-form worldbuilding and rigorous technological extrapolation
- Readers expecting the pacing and narrative techniques of contemporary science fiction
- Beginners unfamiliar with mid-twentieth-century English expression
Reading tips
- Read it through in one go first to grasp the plot turns, then go back to see how the machine premise corresponds to the characters' changes.
- While reading, note the differences in speech and behavior before and after the "self" is intervened in, and sort out the author's attitude toward personal identity.
- If reading the original English, read it through first and look up unfamiliar words afterward, to avoid frequent pauses that break the rhythm of a short story.
- After reading, compare it with other identity-swap science fiction shorts on similar themes and discuss the ethical boundaries of technological intervention in people.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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FAQ
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About the author
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) was an American writer of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, born and also died in Los Angeles. He wrote with elegance and was skilled at creating dark, eerie atmospheres in short fiction, often dealing with supernatural forces, mistaken identity, and psychological transformation; his plots move briskly and frequently shift from everyday settings into inexplicable terror. He worked closely and for many years with his wife, C. L. Moore, and some works appeared under pseudonyms such as Lewis Padgett. This partnership gave his writing both delicate emotion and cold imagination. The collection holds three of his works, including Where the World is Quiet, The Ego Machine, and The Secret of Kralitz, which show him moving freely across the borders of fantasy and science fiction. He died of a heart attack in 1958 at the age of 42. Public information is limited, but his works are still regarded as an important part of mid-twentieth-century American genre fiction.
