In an alternate Great Depressions NYC, a Jewish foreman investigates the true outputs of his factory as his eccentric German employer seeks to use an emerging idea called "industrivism," or the improvement of the human body through technology, created by a bored pulp writer, to recruit workers to fulfill his machinations. Without realizing, a pulp writer in an alternative 1920s New York City invents the idea of "industrivism" that earns her an audience with an eccentric German businessman. Meanwhile, a Jewish foreman investigate the true purpose of the factory and unearths his employer's dark past and future machinations.

In seventeenth-century Delft, a fanatically curious fabric merchant invents the microscope. Even as he neglects and abuses his family, he discovers a new world of life.

Days after announcing an invention that will change the fabric of his futuristic world, an inventor goes missing and two detectives must find out where he is and what his supposedly groundbreaking invention was.

From factory workers to the king, members of all social classes in an industrialized society are distraught with their way of life and desire socioeconomic change. In scheming to join the revolution they deem inevitable, everyone struggles to be the first to initiate the highly desired change.

When a serial writer decides that he can’t take more of his monotonous life, he destroys his copywriter and leaves his domestic prison to protest the rise of the machines.

All his life, a man creates machines to compensate for his idiocy, but, over time, the machines he creates lose respect for him and treat him poorly, causing him to lose all hope. A single machine opens his eyes to the idiocy of others, changing his perspective and giving him back hope and joy.

Through three tales of impossible machines with abilities to manipulate the physical world, travel through time and space, and bestow telepathy onto an entire community, candidates of an engineering exam in the far future are asked to ponder fantastical implications of technology.

Facing liquidation due to public mistrust of robotic life-forms, a historic robotics company introduces a new eco-friendly form of robot in hopes of improving robot-human coexistence only to accidentally pave the way for robot domination of life on Earth.

An elderly Chinese engineer reflects the time he spends working on obsolete space craft in relative isolation.

Excited for their new threshing machine, a group of farmers eagerly begins using it. However, one farmer pushes the machine too far and breaks it, leading to the others plotting to prevent him from using it.