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Masterworks Of Technology: The Story Of Creative Engineering, Architecture And Design by E.E. Lewis
01/12/2007 . Source: Geoff Willmetts 
pub: Prometheus Books. 328 page illustrated and indexed hardback. Price: $28.00 (US). ISBN: 1-59102-243-6. Buy Masterworks Of Technology in the USA - or Buy Masterworks Of Technology in the UK  check out website: www.prometheusbooks.com
Probably the most over-looked aspect but most used side of Science Fiction is technology. There might be technobabble about how things are made to work but without applied technology it won't have any bearing in reality. When I chose this book, I was thinking more in terms of adding perhaps a couple pages to my science chapter of SF Nomenclature explaining the importance of application. This book, released originally in 2004, has made me think about and that there is a need to give the subject a chapter it needs.
Oddly enough, author E.E. Lewis makes the subject easy to digest. In fact, he's darn right sneaky. He'll start a chapter on something by making a connection to the present and what he's seen and then dabble into the history and the significance. He does this with the early car and how Ford developed the production line and how reducing the manual tasks that required expert tooling down to manual labour competence that brought the price down. Removing labour costs by turning factory labour into computer-controlled devices put it back to the experts again. In some respects, it's a shame that Lewis didn't look at the British Industrial Revolution with that particular chapter and how the earlier fabric making loom industry did a similar route. In retrospect, I guess American readers can relate more to car manufacture than making cloth.
The important lessons from this book is how technology develops, often by trail and error and a lot of testing to ensure that the machinery will do what is expected of it. The initial stages of which being virgin territory because things like it have never been done before and just needed an employer to see a way of cutting costs, the direction his business is going or both. The final chapter is especially important as it looks at the space race where media attention watched development.
Lewis' style is easy-going and shouldn't scare off any of you who think yourselves techno-phobes. He looks at many significant people from Galileo to Edison. With the latter, I hadn't realised that it was Edison who coined the term 'mucker' for his scientific staff's nickname. Certainly, the world is built off people with technological expertise. If you're going to be into world-making in your stories then a book such as this is invaluable for showing how technology evolved. If you can learn off of it to give your world's infra-structure a better grounding then reading this book is a worthwhile venture.
GF Willmetts
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