This anthology of mostly 19th century fiction about automatons, steam men, cyborgs, androids and machine life includes full-texts of short works by E. T. A. Hoffmann, Giacomo Leopardi, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, E. P. Mitchell, M. L. Campbell, Ambrose Bierce and E. M Forster and excerpts from novels by Edward Ellis, Samuel Butler, Villiers d'Isle-Adam, Cyrus Cole, and L. Frank Baum.