One of the ways in which humans understand their relation to machines is by analogy to biological processes. We think of machines as resembling us in somehow being alive and somehow evolving over time. The American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick observed in his 1972 speech, “The Android and the Human,” that in the last decade, “our environment, and I mean our man-made world of machines, artificial constructs, computers, electronic systems, interlinking homeostatic components—all this is in fact beginning more and more to possess … animation.” Already in the late nineteenth century, the English authors Samuel Butler and George Eliot were thinking of machines as living and evolving organisms. This paper examines how writers like Dick, Butler and Eliot rethink what it means to be human by attributing life to their technological environment. It discusses various speculative rhetorical techniques that writers use to look at the human from the perspective not just of another living organism but also of the surroundings of the human themselves. It shows how writers biologize machines by figuring them as cryptic nonhuman organisms that can merge with and act on behalf of their physical environments. It argues that underlying the techno-anthropologies of writers like Dick, Butler and Eliot is an environmental understanding of life as the dyadic relation between the organism and its surroundings.