Wikipedia page about this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon

Release date is 1999-09-01

Produced by David Price

"Erewhon; Or, Over the Range" by Samuel Butler is a satirical novel published in 1872. A traveler discovers a strange fictional country where society operates by inverted rules: illness is treated as crime, while criminals receive medical treatment. The book satirizes Victorian England while pioneering speculations about machine consciousness and artificial intelligence in its famous "Book of the Machines" section. Drawing on Butler's experiences as a sheep farmer in New Zealand, this darkly comic work imagines a world where compassion and punishment are bizarrely reversed, and where machines may evolve beyond human control. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Original publication data not identified