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"I suspect that religion is a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species. And that's one of the interesting things about contact with other intelligences: we could see what role, if any, religion plays in their development."
- Arthur C. Clarke

Novel-Writing Machines  
  A device that automatically produces fiction.  

Julia was twenty-six years old... and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor... She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the final product. She "didn't much care for reading," she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.
Technovelgy from 1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four), by George Orwell.
Published by Secker & Warburg in 1948
Additional resources -

I should also point out this classic cartoon from 1923, introducing the Cartoon Dynamo:


(The Cartoon Dynamo)

Compare to the knowledge engine from Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, the rthetorizer from The Penultimate Truth (1964) by Philip K. Dick, the electronic bard from The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age (1965) and the verse transcriber from Studio 5, The Stars (1971) by J.G. Ballard.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from 1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four)
  More Ideas and Technology by George Orwell
  Tech news articles related to 1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four)
  Tech news articles related to works by George Orwell

Novel-Writing Machines-related news articles:
  - What-If Machine Concocts Creative Premises
  - SciFiQ Science Fiction Writing Aid

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