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Writers have long been fascinated by machinery – what it gives and what it takes away. Tom McCarthy, whose experimental work has been hailed as the future of fiction, charts literature's complicated relationship with technology, at once beautiful and menacing.

For centuries, literature has been haunted by technology. When Blake shudders in fearful awe before the tiger, don't be fooled into thinking that he's contemplating nature. What the animal, a product of "hammer", "chain", "furnace" and "anvil", really represents is the industrial revolution. Blake, like Quixote, grappled with dark satanic mills. His contemporary Mary Shelley also created monsters from machines: her Frankenstein, our culture's most enduring parable of technology gone haywire, was written largely in response to the replacement of human textile workers with automated looms, and the subsequent torching of cotton mills by Luddite armies of the newly unemployed. Mills again: perhaps it's no coincidence that they crop