Science Is Bad: Difference between revisions

* [[Jonathan Swift]] rams this Trope down the reader's throat in the Laputa chapter of ''[[Gulliver's Travels]]''. The rulers are tyrants [[Politically Incorrect Villain| (and chauvinists)]] who respect only science, but it has made them [[The Caligula| incompetent rulers]]; while they are fond of mathematics, astronomy, music and technology, they fail to make practical use of their knowledge. For instance, buildings in Laputa are poorly built and the clothing doesn't fit because they take measurements with instruments such as quadrants and a compass rather than with tape measures. Their physical conditions [[Evil Makes You Ugly| have degenerated too]], depicted as becoming so lost in thought that they do not move unless struckan byattendant strikes them with a "bladder",; many of their heads have become stuck reclined to one side, and they often suffer from strabismus: one eye turns inward and the other looks up "to the zenith". They don't even know that their wives [[Your Cheating Heart| are adulterers]] who are using their husbands' lack of attention to carry on affairs with the more loving servants. Even worse, they've had a negative effect on their subjects. Not only are Lagado and Balnibarbi poverty-stricken, the governor of the former visited Laputa once, and was inspired to build the Academy of Projectors, where completely worthless projects are endlessly worked onpursued. Ironically, the governor of Balnibarbi is likely the most lucid man in the chapter, and one of the few characters Gulliver meets in the entire novel with any common sense. Of course, Swift was using this chapter to mock - [[Satire| among other things]] - the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Society absurd inventions of the Royal Society.]

* Many works of [[H.P. Lovecraft]] express this Trope, showing Lovecraft's own distrust and fear of technology and lack of graspingunderstanding of technological concepts. For example, "Cool Air" is about a doctor who has kept himself alive (as a walking corpse) using air conditioning (which was new at the time of writing) while in "The Color of Space" (written around the time infrared and ultraviolet light had recently been discovered), weird and unearthly colors are a sign of a slumbering [[Eldritch Abomination]].

* In [[Anne McCaffrey]]'s ''[[Dragonriders of Pern|Pern]]'' novels, some of the natives regard the newly rediscovered supercomputer as evil and try to destroy or discredit it, either through superstition or fear of change. The planet was originally settled by people who only wanted to leave their ''dependancedependence'' on technology behind, not to form a Luddite civilization. In time this meant they lost all but the most basic stuff needed for survival, and because of this they suffered. It was eventually ''returning'' to the technological state which saved them, when they found AI which gave them access to all the tech the colonists planned on having, but lost.