About the Authors and Texts
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s background was alluded to in the introduction. A poet, novelist and relentless provocateur, he founded the Futurist Political Party in 1918, which swiftly merged with Benito Mussolini’s nascent movement. In 1919 he co-wrote the Fascist Manifesto, the founding document of Italian Fascism. While he quarreled at times with the regime, Marinetti remained involved in Italian Fascist politics for the rest of his life, and championed the Futurist aesthetic he set forward in 1909 until his death at sixty-seven.
Note that for lack of a full public domain translation, The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism appears in a new English translation prepared by the editor, with assistance from both Google Translate and Claude (Anthropic). The editor is aware of the irony.
During the Great War, Ernest Hemingway could not enlist in the U.S. Army due to poor eyesight. He instead served as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in Italy. On his first day in Milan he was sent to the site of a munitions plant explosion, where he helped recover the remains of the workers killed in the blast. One month later, on the Italian front, Hemingway was severely injured by mortar fire, sustaining shrapnel wounds in both legs. He spent six months recovering in a hospital, back in Milan.
Anzia Yezierska emigrated as a child from Poland, then part of the Russian Empire, to New York’s Lower East Side, among the waves of Eastern European Jews arriving in the 1890s. While her brothers were sent to school, Yezierska worked in sweatshops before becoming a writer. The Lost “Beautifulness” appeared in Hungry Hearts, her first collection of short stories, which caught the attention of Samuel Goldwyn’s film studio. On her arrival in Los Angeles, publicists dubbed Yezierska the ‘sweatshop Cinderella,’ but she felt alienated in Hollywood, turned down a $100,000 screenwriting contract and returned to New York to resume writing about tenement life on the Lower East Side.
Hector Hugh Munro started his career as a newspaper journalist before branching out into political satire, using the pen name Saki. His short stories are full of mischief and biting irony, much of it informed by his upbringing, reared by strict aunts in a puritanical household. He was also forced to hide his sexuality all his life, as homosexuality was at the time illegal in Great Britain. In November 1916, while serving as a lance sergeant in the Great War, he was gunned down by sniper fire while sheltering in a crater during the Battle of the Ancre. His last words were reportedly, “Put that bloody cigarette out!”
Langston Hughes, quintessential poet of the Harlem Renaissance, grew up in the American Midwest but moved to New York City to attend Columbia University. He left after a year, repelled by the racism he experienced at Columbia and drawn instead to Harlem’s rich cultural and intellectual scene. Hughes spent years working on ships, living in Paris and across Africa, before returning to write the poems that would define a movement. The Weary Blues, the poetry collection where Summer Night appears, was published in 1926 when he was just twenty-four years old. Hughes would spend his next four decades writing in every form he could reach.
Herbert George Wells was born in 1866 to a lower-middle-class family whose economic situation deteriorated throughout his childhood; as a teenager, he apprenticed at a drapery shop in exchange for room and board. A scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London changed everything for him: studying under Thomas Henry Huxley, Charles Darwin’s most famous defender, he discovered firsthand how knowledge could remake the shape of the world. Between 1895 and 1901 he published a dazzling stream of what he called “scientific romances”: The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds.
Note that one sentence in The New Accelerator, which contained racial stereotypes, was removed from the text as originally published.
Edward Morgan Forster is not generally thought of as a science fiction writer, but his work does deal with people trapped by systems, be it the class collisions of Howards End, the colonial tensions of A Passage to India, or the criminalization of desire. His novel Maurice, a love story between two men set in Edwardian England, was penned in 1913 but not published until 1971, a year after the author’s death. The Machine Stops was Forster’s direct reaction against the techno-optimism of his time; decades later, he introduced this story as “a counterblast to one of the heavens of H. G. Wells.”
This anthology was originally assembled by Oddly Specific Objects as a gift for the attendees of the 2026 Open Hardware Summit.