Claim · 1872 · publication · Stated in source · Supported

Erewhon (1872) describes a civil war, some five hundred years before the narrator’s visit, between parties styled the machinists and the anti-machinists, which the anti-machinists won.

One recorded claim. The claim panel gives its qualification, the source passages with their place in each source, and how it was checked.

What it connects

Erewhon, or Over the Range → bears on → Conflict over building superhuman machines

Where it appears

Machine succession, scale and acceleration: propositions in located texts, 1863–2026 →

Claim and evidence

Erewhon, or Over the Rangebears on ↓Conflict over building superhuman machines

Machine-checkedStated in sourceSupported

Supporting evidence: primary · 1 source

Date: 1872 · publication Records dated 1872 →
Role: Context
Register (kind of text): Fiction
Missing element: The dispute is over keeping existing machinery after the treatise’s argument, not over whether superhuman machine intelligence should be built; the novel does not describe the machines in dispute as superhuman intelligence.

Scope and limitsFiction. The narrator says the civil war is said to have halved the population; the closing paragraph of the treatise chapters mentions ‘reactionary civil wars’. Recorded as context because the criterion’s object (superhuman machine intelligence) is absent.

The evidence 01

primary sourceSupports the claim

Erewhon, or Over the Range

Trübner & Co. · 1872

Cite the original source

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Source excerpt

“The parties were styled the machinists and the anti-machinists, and in the end, as I have said already, the latter got the victory”

Location in source Chapter XX, pp. 187–188

How it was read Retrieved directly from the publisher

Machine-checked · 2026-11-04

Source details and check notes

Authors: Samuel Butler (published anonymously)
Version: Internet Archive scan of the 1872 printing (ErewhonOverrang00Butl, Smithsonian Libraries copy); quoted passages read on the page images of pp. 191, 196, 197, 200, 201 and 221. The OCR text was used to locate them.
Canonical address: Open the canonical source ↗
Accessed: 2026-10-06
Language: English (en)
Attribution: [Samuel Butler], Erewhon, or Over the Range (London: Trübner & Co., 1872), Internet Archive scan.
Reuse: Public domain (published 1872; the author died in 1902).. Bibliographic metadata, editorial paraphrases and short attributed quotations (at most 50 words each) under Selekoa’s quotation policy. Public-domain text.
Check notes: Candidate pack passage, antecedent texts (research/prehistory). The quotation (23 words) matched a fresh retrieval of 2026-11-04 (SHA-256 4c0b3116d03b…, the file the candidate pack read). Matching ignored differences of whitespace, case, quotation marks, dashes, line-break hyphens and Unicode compatibility forms, so the source’s typography can differ. The preceding sentence says civil war raged for many years and is said to have reduced the inhabitants by one half. No human editorial review.

Status and meaning

Editorial status. Machine-checked. Machines found this record and checked it against its sources; no person accepted it individually. Each evidence record above shows how it was checked.

Relation. A passage of the document bears on the proposition without meeting its criterion; the record names the missing element. It is not an articulation and implies no influence.

Date. Year on the title page of the inspected 1872 Trübner printing (Smithsonian Libraries copy, catalogued as the first edition). Butler’s later prefaces give March 1872.

Record ID pre-w04-erewhon-1872-context