Science and Science Fiction: Ancient Dreams of Technology

Copyright 2018, InterAmerica, Inc.

The book pictured here was just published this week by Princeton University Press.

The author, Adrienne Mayor, is a research scholar in classics and the history of science at Stanford University. (She has written books on the Amazon women and the legendary Mithradates.)

In this, her highly illustrated new book, Ms. Mayor, the book cover tells readers, provides “The fascinating untold story of how the ancients imagined robots and other forms of artificial life – and even invented real automated machines.”

I’m just now reading the book, which contains examples of “Greek, Roam, Indian, and Chinese myths [that] envisioned artificial life, automata, self-moving devices, and human enhancements.” [From the cover]

It’s an academic enterprise, of course, and one that the Ancient Alien/Astronaut crowd will glom on to for their theoretical sustenance, but I think their potential side-swiping of Ms. Mayor’s extensive scholarship will go awry, if persons read the book firstly.

It (the book) is a cornucopia of great mythical tales, that belie outside (interplanetary) influence, showing early mankind (and early civilizations) had the wherewithal to imagine and conceive ideas that science and we are contending with in the modern era.

It’s a fabulous book, and I shall have much more to write (and say) about it, upcoming.

RR