Dear Readers,
2026 is just around the corner. This week we’re sharing highlights from a classic sci-fi story at 100.
Most people only know Metropolis as a quirky silent film. The 1925 book is far richer, and darker, than the film. It’s set in a fictional 2026. Have we have arrived?
In this edition of Ink & Time, we’ll take stock of its predictions, unpack some eerie parallels and give you a sneak peak into scenes which were cut from the movie by overly-anxious producers at the dawn of the genre.
But first, because we welcomed 106 new subscribers this week, we’re sharing a few favorites from the archives, to give our new friends some added color, flavor and texture.
From the Ink & Time Archives:
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Metropolis Takes No Prisoners: “Shocking & Prescient”
High above the Machine, a glittery Techno-Paradise for the Elite
A seminal dystopian vision.
A world divided by class, driven by machines, and animated by the specter of artificial intelligence. A century has passed since Thea von Harbou wrote Metropolis in 1925.
The story was set in a futuristic 2026.
When von Harbou and her husband Fritz Lang took the script to producers much of its material was too dark and incendiary for the big screen. If you’ve seen the film you were likely either fascinated by the peculiar archival cinematography, or repelled by the disjointed narrative and lack of character development.
The problem with most English translations is they’re a total slog to read.
Archaic terminology, German transliterations and complex grammatical constructions would confound even the best literary scholars. Painful for the casual reader. Yet the original novel is a gripping story, with character depth, dramatic tension and world extensive building.
It is a darker exploration of ancient occult mysteries colliding with futuristic technology.
It’s a world where workers serve robotic deities in underground factories while elites orchestrate a strange techno-paradise-singularity above. Workers ground up in an industrial machine is metaphor for gig workers tethered to algorithms, optimized for productivity and pushed to cold, calculated limits.
A ruling elite is insulated from working class suffering. Sound familiar?
Mass tech-enabled manipulation is exemplified by the False Maria, the machine-made simulacrum stirring an uprising. Deepfakes anyone?
Then there is the religiously charged love story between the son of the city’s all powerful master and a compassionate revolutionary working to liberate the workers.
For workers toiling underground The Machine has become a devouring god
When the worker uprising and a biblical flood unleash the mechanical gods, both rulers and revolutionaries learn too late their true enemy is neither flesh nor steel but something more spiritual, and sinister.
At the heart of Metropolis is the dehumanization of workers, a full spectrum subjugation to machines.
The Pater-noster Machine, translated as "Our Father," is a relentless engine that devours human energy. Today limitless compute serves the titans of capital, approaching a god-like machine prioritizing economic output over any sense of human dignity. And we watch, anxiously.
Metropolis 2026 is only a few months away.
Metropolis is a city of stark contrasts: the elite bask in luxury, epitomized by the futuristic pleasure-dome known as the Eternal Garden within the Club of the Sons, while the workers toil in suffocating darkness. This physical divide mirrors today’s digital divide, where access to cutting-edge technology and its applications from medicine to education and even intellectual compute, remains the privilege of a minority class.
The novel’s ruling class remain oblivious to the laborers’ suffering.
Today’s billionaires cloister away in utopian enclaves while smart machines erode the job security of millions. But the machine rumbles on, consuming more of our earth, energy and soul. To what end?
Only the most opulent surroundings will suffice for the offspring of the city masters
Perhaps the most chillingly raw element of Metropolis is the character of the False Maria—a machine-made imposter designed to manipulate the masses.
In 1925, it was science fiction; A hundred years on, it’s an everyday reality we no longer challenge. The Superior Influencer is a Bot.
Meanwhile, AI-generated deepfakes fabricate speeches, while social media algorithms incite mass hysteria, and disinformation campaigns destabilize entire societies. We are reminded, from 100 years ago, that technological advancements in the wrong hands can be tools of deception and control.
Thus, the character of Rotman represents a degraded, fallen mediator between head and hand, heaven and hell.
As we navigate the rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence, robotic automation, and unchecked manipulation of nature, genetics, and everything sacred, we must ask ourselves:
Who is left behind? Can we be redeemed? Can technology serve rather than enslave us?
The fictional 2026 of Metropolis has arrived, and it is more real than ever. The book's warnings are unfolding all around us. No mere historical artifact, the story is a call to action.
We have the opportunity to shape the future of technology, labor, and society in ways that align with human dignity, rather than exploitation.
Whether we heed that call, or whether we succumb to the dystopian trajectory von Harbou foresaw, remains to be seen.
The simulacra seductress evolves a century on, her power to enchant and disrupt growing
Facing Future without a Face
Here’s a scene from Chapter 4 in the modernised version of Metropolis 2026 where we first meet the False Maria:
Suddenly he sensed cold approaching from behind. He held his breath.
A hand reached past his head—an elegant, luminescent, skeleton hand. Transparent synthetic skin stretched over slender joints that gleamed like dulled silver. Snow-white, fleshless fingers grasped the schematic and took it away.
Joe Forsyth spun around. He stared at the being, eyes glazing.
The being was female, undeniably. Under flowing garments stood a body like a young birch, lithe, balanced on perfectly aligned feet.
Though female, she wasn't human. Her form seemed crystalline, bones shimmering silver beneath eerie flesh. Cold radiated from glass-like skin, devoid of blood.
Her sensual hands pressed against her motionless chest, defiant yet determined.
She had no face. An elegant neck supported only a roughly shaped mass, horrific yet strangely captivating.
The skull was bare, features merely suggested. Eyes, like painted on closed lids, stared blankly with calculated madness at the breathless man.
The Trembling Ecstasy of the Damned
Here’s a scene from Chapter 6 from the legendary district of Yoshiwara…
The illumination increased gradually, reluctantly.
Slim stood in one of the room's curves, between height and depth, separated by a low barrier from the haunting void where the snow-like radiance originated, and those terrible voices.
He leaned over the rail.
A milk-white disc glowed from beneath, self-luminous. Around its edge, like dark calligraphy on a pristine surface, women crouched and knelt in elaborate soiled garments. Stunningly intoxicated.
Some pressed their foreheads to the ground, fingers tangled in jet-black hair. Others huddled together desperate, heads touching, embodying fear.
A few swayed rhythmically as if in prayer, or an endless trance. Some just wept.
There were some who appeared completely lifeless, discharged of life force. They all appeared as supplicants, neurologically connected, to the man on the luminous disc.
The man wore white bio-silk, the kind woven for the privileged few in Metropolis.
He wore the soft shoes in which wealthy sons caressed the earth. Now the silk hung in tatters, soiled to the core, and the shoes looked as if they were blood-soaked from within.
"Is that who you're looking for?" asked a Levantine ancestor through September's lips, leaning confidentially toward Slim's ear.
Slim didn't answer. He just watched the man.
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Ink & Time helps you discover powerful authors and ideas from a century or more ago and just might make you nostalgic for an analog era, for living and reading before the algorithms took over.