Tin Men

The Tin Men (1965) is Michael Frayn's brilliantly funny debut novel, set at the William Morris Institute for Automation Research — an institution whose name alone is a joke given its founder's historical opposition to machines.

The story follows several eccentric researchers in the mid-1960s as they build systems that will quietly upend how people read news, make decisions, and perceive reality: Goldwasser invents UHL (Unit Headline Language), which generates coherent newspaper headlines from a code of short words; Nunn, the institute's paranoid security officer, becomes convinced his own coded logs reveal something dangerous; and Hugh Rowe spends his days writing glowing reviews for a novel he hasn't actually written.

Frayn uses this cast to satirize intellectual vanity, technological optimism, and the gap between what people say they are doing and what is actually happening — all with a wit that reads as prescient about how automation reshapes truth long before it became commonplace.