Erewhon

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Erewhon: or, Over the Range (, ERR-eh-hwon) is a utopian novel by English writer Samuel Butler, first published in 1872, set in a fictional country discovered and explored by the protagonist. The book is a satire on Victorian society. Its name is the word “nowhere”, erroneously spelt "nohwere", read backwards, sharing the same meaning as “utopia” (nowhere). The first few chapters of the novel dealing with the discovery of Erewhon are based on Butler's own experiences in New Zealand; as a young man, he had worked there as a sheep farmer on Mesopotamia Station for four years (1860–1864), exploring parts of the interior of the South Island and writing about it in A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863). The novel is one of the first to explore ideas of artificial intelligence, as influenced by Darwin's recently published On the Origin of Species (1859) and the machines developed out of the Industrial Revolution (late 19th to early 20th centuries). Specifically, it concerns itself, in the three-chapter "Book of the Machines", with the potentially dangerous ideas of machine consciousness and self-replicating machines. In Erewhon, illness is crime and crime is illness. As a result, citizens are imprisoned for offenses like physical ailments, misfortune, or ugliness while those who commit conventional crimes like fraud or theft are seen more sympathetically as exhibiting symptoms of moral afflictions and prescribed sessions with a "straightener" (essentially a psychologist) for treatment. The lack of compassion for physical sickness is reflected in the role of physicians in Erewhonian society, which is described as something more akin to that of a judge or law enforcement officer than that of a doctor. This system of law and medicine is a satirical inversion of the pattern in western society where crimes are punished and physical illnesses are treated—immorality is a...