Lionel Britton, Brain: A Play of the Whole Earth, 1930
A Brain is constructed in the Sahara Desert -- presently It grows larger than the Desert ... It controls the whole activities and does all the thinking of the world. Ultimately a star collides with the sun while man is still tied within the limits of the solar system. The Brain describes the approaching process, Its helplessness in comparison with Its former omnipotent power over the world. It deplores mankind's delay in not co-operating earlier, which makes it impossible now to escape the catastrophe. It has visions, premonitions of what might have been.
One Sunday in April 1930, actors in “little shiny pants” performed an extremely strange play in London titled, “Brain: A Play of the Whole Earth.”
A blurb summarizing the plot stated: “A Brain is constructed in the Sahara Desert — presently It grows larger than the Desert — out of pure mechanism, by the whole of the human race, It controls the whole activities and does all the thinking of the world.”
Written by obscure outsider Lionel Erskine Britton, a working-class intruder within London’s literary elite who had first worked in a factory at age 13, the play depicted the construction of an artificial superintelligence, in the form of a synthetic brain “creeping over the world.”
Humans in the play slowly lose all autonomy and come to function — in strict unison — like neurons making up one vast global ganglion. The play revolted most critics.
But Britton, an ardent socialist with Stalinist sympathies, openly celebrated this imagined future. While he was not alone in predicting something like it, others, by contrast, portrayed it as an oncoming catastrophe.
Whether they were cheered or chilled by the prospect, multiple forecasters imagined contemporary developments culminating in some kind of planet-sized brain that would perform executive function at an intercontinental scale, dictating affairs like a global frontal lobe.
This, after all, was not only an era of collectivism and roiling mass movements. It was also the moment when entomologists were first making popular the notion of a “superorganism.” Just as ants cooperate to forge an anthill — generating a whole far more potent than the sum of its parts — it became pertinent to ask whether globalizing humanity might — intentionally or not — be birthing a new form of planetary intelligence, fathoms more sovereign than any individual or national institution.
What follows is the story of how a century ago, forgotten voices foresaw the present dawning age of synthetic intelligence: envisaging futures wherein humans might cede their role as the apex cogitator and become subsumed within budding systems of nonhuman cunning. - Thomas Moynihan
https://www.noemamag.com/are-we-accidentally-building-a-planetary-brain/
When I first began studying Lionel Britton, and having some knowledge of his family background, it rapidly became clear to me that his only published novel Hunger and Love (1931) is to a certain extent an attack not just on religion, war, the monarchy, the business world, and the judiciary, but also on his own family who represented most of those institutions. I knew nothing of his half-uncle Reginald Britton, although Lionel must have, and at least part of his venom must have been aimed at him: it would be difficult to imagine a better representative of the Establishment than Rex, as his family call him.
I've named the sub-title of this post 'What Lionel Britton Was Up To' by way of an ironic comment on a chapter in Hunger and Love: 'What Evolution Is Up To'. It would have been ironic to Lionel because he would not have associated his half-uncle's life with evolution - quite the reverse, in fact. To say that Lionel was the black sheep of the family somehow doesn't say enough, but it'll have to do until I think of something better. - Tony Shaw
https://tonyshaw3.blogspot.com/2011/01/reginald-ernest-james-britton-what.html
Tony Shaw: Lionel Britton — A Brief Biography
This thesis is the first long study of the forgotten novelist and playwright Lionel Britton, whose creative works were all published in the 1930s. Throughout, the emphasis is on his only published novel, the very long and experimental Hunger and Love (1931). The Lionel Britton Collection at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, U. S. A., along with many unpublished materials of Britton's, holds former states of the novel, and I use a large amount of this material in my thesis; I suggest reasons why the content of the typescripts was gradually changed from the 1920s to 1930. Another vital issue is Britton's status as a working-class author, and it is my contention that Hunger and Love is an important working-class novel, although it has been almost totally neglected by the critics recovering this sub-genre. My thesis also addresses modernism in working-class fiction, a subject which has all too often been ignored by the almost automatic foregrounding of realism, and is a strong feature of Hunger and Love. Following this, my thesis broadens out to cover political minorities represented as outsiders in literature, and deals with the unmarried woman, the homosexual and the non-white, comparing them with the working-class protagonist in Hunger and Love. The concluding chapter involves the utopias and dystopias of minority groups, with special reference to Britton's Brain (1930) and Spacetime Inn (1932), which as plays are very unusual to the science fiction genre. Read it here: [PDF] The Work of Lionel Britton | Semantic Scholar
(1887-1971) UK playwright and author, a conscientious objector during World War One who gained some prominence in the interwar period for his Scientific Romance Hunger and Love, Etc (1931), a speculative proletarian/modernist Dystopia, written before (and influential upon) but published after Brain: A Play of the Whole Earth (performed 1930; 1930), a drama in which a giant Computer is set up in the Sahara to run human affairs according to ambiguously Utopian tenets. This it does until nearly the End of the World, when a wandering star collides with the planet.
Spacetime Inn (performed 1931; 1932), also a play, expounds a vision of things derived in part from the theories of J W Dunne, though the main dramatic interest lies in the interactions of various Icon figures – Eve (see Adam and Eve), Doctor Samuel Johnson, Napoleon, the Queen of Sheba, Queen Victoria, Karl Marx, William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw – as they deal with two uncomprehending Cockney intruders into the "Eternal Inn" that has become their world. Ultimately it is indicated that, echoing Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (13 July 1890 San Francisco Examiner), the entire action has taken place during suspended Time in the last moments before a road-crash Disaster. A UK theatre licence having been refused because of the inclusion of Queen Victoria, Spacetime Inn has the unusual distinction of being the only play ever performed – or rather read, with Britton himself playing all the parts – in the House of Commons, on 10 June 1931, to a steadily dwindling audience.
Animal Ideas: A Dramatic Symphony of the Human in the Universe (1935), though less cogent as a drama and never performed, engages in similarly ambitious metaphysics. [JC/DRL]
https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/britton_lionel
