1. Alienation
2. Art motifs
3. Book design
4. Employment
5. Family
6. Historical fiction
7. History
8. Imagery
9. Kindness
10. Narrative techniques
11. Perspectives (Art)
12. Robots
13. Visual literacy

Based on a true story, ‘Automaton’ tells of Thomas Edison’s failed attempt to create a talking doll. The story is told in a diary like form through the eyes of Dillon, a young boy, newly employed to work on the assembly lines building the dolls. As he moves through each factory section, we learn about the grotesqueness of the dolls and experience the lack of humanity in the process. We meet various workers including Lucy who creates the doll’s voice.

Edison ultimately tells the workers that ‘the experiment has failed’ as nobody likes the doll. A nearby bowler-hatted supervisor quips, ‘He wants it to be human’. This draws the response, ‘Does he think that he is God? That he can create life…?’

Both the text and the illustrations examine the human obsession to create things in their own image. The use of Intertextuality throughout from the quote, ‘It’s alive!’, from Frankenstein on the title page to the altered image of man’s evolution serve to illuminate Edison’s attempt to be a Godlike creator.

The illustrations employ the inlaying and overlapping of letters, notes and drawings. These add to the background story that includes the illness of the young boy’s sister. The illustrations capture the eerie hell-like atmosphere of the factory floor with the workers looking yellow and green. Edison was an early user of production lines, and the images capture the dehumanising robot-like nature of the work. However, it is the ongoing images of keys and keyholes asking the reader to ‘turn’ throughout that provide the most powerful and telling motif in the book. The dolls require winding to work, and this appears to flow over to the workers. They also are machines needing keys.

One cannot help feeling that Edison would approve of the current movement towards the use of artificial intelligence (AI).

1. Postmodern Picture Books blogspot. 26 April 2007 review by James Tracey of ‘Automaton by Gary Crew’ http://pmpicturebooks.blogspot.com/2007/04/automaton-by-gary-crew.html
2. Perilous Adventures N.A. Bourke interviews ‘Gary Crew’ https://www.perilousadventures.net/0903/garycrew.html
3. Aaron Hill Art website https://aaronhillart.com/
4. Smithsonian Magazine. 18 December 2020. ‘The Epic Failure of Thomas Edison’s Talking Doll’ by Victoria Dawson https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/epic-failure-thomas-edisons-talking-doll-180955442/
5. Open Culture 8 May 2015. ‘Hear Thomas Edison’s Creepy Talking Dolls: An Invention That Scared Kids & Flopped on the Market’ https://www.openculture.com/2015/05/hear-thomas-edisons-creepy-talking-dolls.html
6. History Channel 9 August 2022. ‘Thomas Edison’ https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/thomas-edison