The tension between instrumentality and liberation in science fiction literature: The machine/human

19th century, which is characterized with the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, imperialism and colonialism, witnessed the birth of a new reason, a new science, a new technique, a new human and a new genre of fiction—that is science fiction, which emerged precisely as a result of this transformation. Science fiction which has problematized technology and its effects on humans and society since the beginning of its emergence, has had an indecisive attitude towards human-technology relation. Some authors viewed science and technology as tools that will move humanity forward, assigning them the role of a savior, some emphasized the objectifying and alienating aspect of this technique that is nested in industrial capitalism, and still others had a more ambivalent approach. In this thesis the aforementioned tension will be traced via the figures of robots, androids and cyborgs in the texts of Čapek, Asimov, Dick, Shelley, Villiers and Moore, which we consider as representatives of differing views on human-technology relation. The reason why we focus on these figures is that they are suitable to trace this tension as hybrid and ambiguous figures in which the human and machine is intertwined in different ways and that they enable varied ways to read the human-technology relation.