there are so many lessons that we need to understand and leverage in our modern tooling, languages, and systems that Smalltalk and Lisp got right decades ago.
The early 1900s mystical fiction is a rabbit hole for sure. Voyage to Arcturus is a very good recommendation! Others in this vein include, but are not limited to:
The system in UBAInc is pretty well fleshed out in the book and at one time in the rings-era WWW there were people creating their own versions of the game -- some very good.