Utopias, Dystopias

Note that Brooks Landon, in "Science Fiction After 1900" says: "The positivism and optimism of science fiction writing in the 1920s and 1930s has been tempered, if not supplanted, by questioning and frequently apocalyptic pessimism in the years following World War II." (xiii-xiv) Huh?

Amis writes that stories of the future which take as their theme changes in the political and economic realm, with science and technology reduced to background detail, are typically rh most interesting -- but they can barely be called science fiction.

Kingsley Amis is dismissive of "nearly all early-modern science fiction, that written btween, say, 1910 and 1940." He doesn't think it's written well, too lugubrious. How much does Amis despise the 1910-40 period? As of 1940, he writes, "Sensationalism began to diminish, some degree of literacy made its appearance, and the admonitory utopia, virtually the leading form of contemporary science fiction, came into being again after something like twenty years." Since 1920, that is, no admonitory utopias?

Amis notes that no positive utopias are to be found in his day; "modern visionaries in general seem to have lost interest in any kind of social change..." (95) He is in favor of utopian literature as diagnositic and admonitory, but seems sad that no one now offers other possible worlds.

Amis writes about the "comic inferno" -- a mode of writing clearly older than SF.

Satirical dystopias ridicule dominant notions -- pride in a mounting material standard of living, belief that such progress can be continued indefinitely, feeling that the accumulation of possessions is both the preorgative and evidence of merit.



The first known use of the term dystopia appeared in a speech before the British Parliament by Greg Webber and John Stuart Mill[2] in 1868. In that speech, Mill said, "It is, perhaps, too complimentary to call them Utopians, they ought rather to be called dys-topians, or caco-topians. What is commonly called Utopian is something too good to be practicable; but what they appear to favor is too bad to be practicable".[3] His knowledge of Greek suggests that he was referring to a bad place, rather than simply the opposite of Utopia. The Greek prefix "dys" ("δυσ-") signifies "ill", "bad" or "abnormal"; Greek "topos" ("τόπος") meaning "place"; and Greek "ou-" ("ου") meaning "not". Thus, dystopia refers to an imagined place where almost everything is bad, perhaps a play on the term utopia that was coined by Thomas More.


* James Harrington - The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656)
* Samuel Hartlib - A Description of the Famous Kingdom of Macaria (1641)
* Sir Thomas More - Utopia (1516)
* Francesco Patrizi - La Città felice (1553)
* Thomas Spence - A Description of Spensonia (1794)


* Tommaso Campanella, City of the Sun (1602)

* Johannes Valentinus Andreae, Christianopolis (1619)

* Sir Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis (1626)


PRE-RADIUM-AGE


* Anonymous, Equality: or, a History of Lithconia (Liberal Union, Phialdelphia, 1837). Originally: "The Temple of Reason," Deist [weekly newspaper], May 15, 1802. Considered to be the first American Utopia. The author is not known, but could be Dr. James Reynolds, who was a zealous liberal crusader (per Bleiler).

* Étienne Cabet, Voyages en Icarie (1840). Étienne Cabet's work caused a group of followers to leave France in 1848 and come to the United States to found a series of utopian settlements in Texas, Illinois, Iowa, California, and elsewhere. These groups lived in communal settings and lasted until 1898.

* Samuel Butler, Erewhon, or Over the Range was published anonymously in 1872. See Butler entry.

* Louisa May Alcott, "Transcendental Wild Oats" (1873) — DYSTOPIA

* Anonymous, The Great Romance (1881)

* Anna Bowman Dodd, The Republic of the Future (1887) — DYSTOPIA

* Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888)

* James De Mille, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888) — DYSTOPIA

* Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett, New Amazonia (1889)

* Ignatius Donnelly, Caesar's Column (1890) — DYSTOPIA

* Byron A. Brooks, Earth Revisited (1893)

* Walter Browne, 2894 (1894)

* Alexander Craig, Ionia (1898)

* Anna Adolph, Arqtiq (1899)

* Samuel Butler, Erewhon Revisited Twenty Years Later (Richards, 1901). See Butler entry.



* Castello Holford - Aristopia (1895)
* Albert Waldo Howard - The Milltillionaire (c. 1895)
* William Dean Howells - the Altrurian trilogy
o A Traveler from Altruria (1894)
o Letters of an Altrurian Traveler (1904)
o Through the Eye of the Needle (1907)
* Marie Howland - Papa's Own Girl (1874)
* W. H. Hudson - A Crystal Age (1887)

* Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Merchant - Unveiling a Parallel (1893)
* Mary Lane - Mizora (1880–81)

* John McCoy - A Prophetic Romance (1896)
* John Macnie - The Diothas (1883)


* William Morris – News from Nowhere (1890)
* Henry Olerich - A Cityless and Countryless World

# Plato's Republic (400 BC) was, at least on one level, a description of a political utopia ruled by an elite of philosopher kings, conceived by Plato. (Compare to his Laws, discussing laws for a real city.)
# The City of God (written 413–426) by Augustine of Hippo, describes an ideal city, the "eternal" Jerusalem, the archetype of all Christian utopias.
# Utopia (1516) by Thomas More a Gutenberg text of the book
# Reipublicae Christianopolitanae descriptio (Beschreibung des Staates Christenstadt) (1619) by Johann Valentin Andreæ, describes a Christian utopia inhabited by a community of scholar-artisans and run as a democracy.
# The City of the Sun (1623) by Tommaso Campanella depicts a theocratic and communist society.
# The New Atlantis (1627) by Francis Bacon.
# Zwaanendael Colony (1631) by Pieter Corneliszoon Plockhoy in Delaware.
# News from Nowhere by William Morris (1892), Shows "Nowhere", a place without politics, a future society based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of production.[4]
# Gloriana, or the Revolution of 1900 (1890) by Lady Florence Dixie. The female protagonist poses as a man, Hector l'Estrange, is elected to the House of Commons, and wins women the vote. The book ends in the year 1999, with a description of a prosperous and peaceful Britain governed by women.[5]
# H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia (1905) is half fiction and half philosophical debate.


* Bradford C. Peck - The World a Department Store
* Bolesław Prus – Pharaoh (1895)

* Addison Peale Russell - Sub-Coelum (1893)
* Solomon Schindler - Young West (1894)


H.G. Wells, First Men in the Moon (1901) -- last good Wells, except Food?

The novel can be read as a dystopia -- insect-like Selenites in their hive-like society. Very much a eugencist caste society.

Has been called the first alien dystopia. Said to have launched the SF subgenre depicting intelligent social insects.

The Martians of The War of the Worlds and the Selenites of The First Men in the Moon live in dystopian societies?

The last of Wells's dystopian novels? His dystopian writings (Time Machine, and A Story of the Days to Come, e.g.) influenced Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell. Zamyatin would claim that it was in the writings of Wells that the history of the utopian/dystopian literary tradition merged or fused with that of science fiction.



1904-13

Hastings, George Gordon. THE FIRST AMERICAN KING. 1904
London, New York: The Smart Set Publishing Company, 1904. Octavo, pp. [1-4] 1-354 [355-356: ads], original pictorial tan cloth, front panel stamped in gray, black, red, gold and blind, spine panel stamped in gray, black, red and gold. First edition. Bleiler, Science-Fiction: The Early Years 1059. Clareson, Science Fiction in America, 1870s-1930s 404. Clarke, Tale of the Future (1978), p. 30. Negley, Utopian Literature: A Bibliography 535. Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature, 1516-1985, pp. 131-32. Bleiler (1978), p. 95. Reginald 06899. Smith, American Fiction, 1901-1925 H-355. Binding slightly leaned, front hinge a bit tender, a very good copy. (#114891)


1905 Rudyard Kipling's "With the Night Mail" -- story
in "McClure's Magazine."
The sequel, "As Easy as A.B.C." (1912) has a future world dominated by an
international airship service, and a neatly-constructed world, down to
convincing details of engineering, clothing, and slang in 2000 A.D.

With the Night Mail is a glimpse of the year 2000, in which flying has become so important that the A.B.C. (Aerial Board of Control) rules the world. A sequel, As Easy as A.B.C. (1912), shows the A.B.C. ruthlessly trying tomaintain law and order.

HG Wells, A Modern Utopia (1905) -- first lame Wells
-- socialist world-state? His book A Modern Utopia expressed a desire for a society that was run and organised by humanistic and well-educated people. Wells, who was extremely critical of the role that privilege and hereditary factors in capitalist society and in his utopia, people gain power as a result of their intelligence and training. Called the first of Wells's utopian novels -- his previous were dystopian.

Aldiss: "The last of the great utopias and the first to realize that from now on, with improved communications, no island or continent was big enough to hold a perfect state -- it must be the whole world or nothing."

Amis: It is both satire and warning (unlike his previous works). This and his later works "give a soporific whiff of left-wing crankiness."

The Utopian Samurai of this book -- and Men Like Gods -- live in a society not all that different from the Selenites. This book makes Wells the target of later anti-utopians attacks.

But note that this book is not unambiguously utopian -- it contains a strong anti-utopian element. It is a meta-utopia, an account of a dialogue bwteen utopian and dystopian imaginations. An inconclusive consideration of utopian and anti-utopian philosophies -- like Le Guin's The Dispossesed. Wells criticizes the rationalist in ethics and politics, the utopian who sees everything in black and white. He criticizes Utopian rationalists for demanding a language without ambiguity, as precise as mathematical formulae -- precursor to Zamyatin. Zamyatin inherits the anti-utopian ideas from A Modern Utopia -- emphasis on the Heraclitean principle of change as law of life; emphasis on the irrational character o fthe world generally.

Even if tempted by utopianism, Wells -- here, as elsewhere -- remains skeptical about utopianism in politics and wary of its pitfalls.

HG Wells, In the Days of the Comet (1906)
resorted to changing human nature by means of personality-improving gases shed by a comet's tail, as the most plausible way to usher in his Utopia of universal free love. A fantastic tale of the world's beauty and unity after the Great Change occurs.
A comet rushes toward the earth, a deadly, glowing orb that soon fills the sky and promises doom. But mankind is too busy hating, stealing, scheming, and killing to care. As luminous green trails of cosmic dust and vapor stream across the heavens, blood flows beneath: nations wage all-out war, bitter strikes erupt, and jealous lovers plot revenge and murder. The earth slips past the comet by the narrowest of margins, but all succumb to the gases in its tail. When mankind wakes up, everyone is completely and profoundly different. In the Days of the Comet is H. G. Wells's classic tale of the last days of the old earth and the extraterrestrial Change that becomes the salvation of the human race. An ill-fated romance between Willie Leadford and Nettie Stuart unfolds in a world buried in misery and bent on its own destruction. After the earth passes through the comet's tail, suffering, pettiness, and injustice melt away. Willie, Nettie, and everyone around them are reborn. They now see themselves and their world in a dramatically new and wonderful way.

H.G. Wells, The War in the Air, 1908
Notable for its prophetic ideas, images, and concepts -- the use of the airplane for warfare and the coming of WWI.


Jack London, The Iron Heel (1908)
Influenced Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Aldiss -- London's place in the history of SF is secured by this dystopian takle of future dictatorship. Alas, he says, The Iron Heel is hard to take today. "Its honest sympathies with the poor and the oppressed are never in doubt, but they come clothed in cliches, with alternate spates of denunciation and sentimentality."

A dystopian novel of the (then) near future, covers the years 1912-32, during which the Oligarchy (or Iron Heel) arose in the US. The Oligarchy -- the largest monopoly trusts (or robber barons) -- reduce farmers to serfdom and bankrupt the middle class. (The Progressive Era led to a breakup of trusts, notably the Sherman Antitrust Act applied to Standard Oil in 1911). A First Revolt is described, the narrator is a member of the resistance -- and a forthcoming Second Revolt hinted at. Caste society -- in which the Oligarchs are the inner circle, the Mercenaries (a military caste) the second circle, well-paid labor in essential industries a third, and a serf-like labor caste in the outer ring.

In 1984, the Oligarchy complete a wonder-city -- to be lived in, but also admired and appreciated -- called Asgard. Slave-like proles live there and build public works. But London less interested in technological changes than sociopolitical -- belief in the historical materialism of Marxism.

Although the narrator predicts that the Second Revolt will succeed, the Oligarchy maintain power for three centuries -- we learn, from the future scholar who annotates the text -- until a revolution ushers in the Brotherhood of Man.

MADE INTO A 1998 MOVIE "Zheleznaya pyata oligarkhii" (d. Aleksandr Bashirov), starring himself as Nikolai Petrovich.
Also known as: Oligarkian rautainen korko Finland
Tallone di ferro dell'oligarchia, Il Italy
The Iron Heel of Oligarchy International (English title)

E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops (1909).
Novella? Really a long story.

In a 1947 preface, Forster wrote that the novella was a reaction to "one of the earlier heavens of H.G. Wells" -- i.e, to a socialist world-state. No doubt reference to Wells's When the Sleeper Wakes, a magazine serial from 1899. He changed it again in 1910 and 1921 editions.

Forster is credited with the concepts of the fully automated apartment, machines that supply every need, and television (cinematophote).

Most of the human population lives below ground -- each one isolated omto a cell with all bodily needs met by the omnipotent global Machine. Travel is permitted but unpopular. The population communcates through a kind of instant messaging/video conferencing machine, with which they conduct theior only activity -- sharing ideas and knowledge.

The two main characters, Vashtin and her son Kuno. Vashti is content to produce and endlessly discuss secondhand ideas. Kuno, a sensualist and revel tells Vashti of his disenchantment with the sanitized, mechanized world. He tells her that he's visited the surface of the planet -- despite the life support apparatus supposedly required to endure the toxic surface air. He saw other humans living outside the Machine. But he was recaptured by the Machine, and threatened with expulsion.

Then the life support apparatus required to visit the wouter world is abolished. Second, a kind of religion is established in which the Machine is the object of worship -- those who do not accept the deity of the Machine are viewed as "unmechanical" and threatened with expulsion.''

Then defects begin to appear in the Machine. Knowledge of how to repair the Machine has been lost. Finally, the Machine collapses, bringing civilization as it's known to an end. Before they perish, Vashti realizes that man and his connection to the natural world are what matter, not the comforts of life within the Machine. Hopefully the few surface-dwellers (precursors of Logan's Run) will carry on.

Clarke, Francis H. MORGAN ROCKEFELLER'S WILL: A ROMANCE OF 1991-2. (1909)
Portland, Oregon: Clarke-Cree Publishing Co., 1909.By 1990 Morgan Rockefeller owned everything in the United States. Upon his death he bequeathed his fortune - except a million dollars for his missing niece - to the United States Government to be held in trust for the American people. The book describes the "establishment of a new government controlled by a new fraternal order, Reapers of the World, in part organized by the niece. A kind of cooperative socialism is developed, and the utopian millennium is reached by the year 2000." - Lewis, Utopian Literature, p. 44. Bleiler, Science-Fiction: The Early Years 427. Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature, 1516-1985,


HG Wells, The Sleeper Awakes (1910), rewritten version of When The Sleeper Wakes (1899)

Dystopian novel in which a man sleeps for 2 centuries, waking up in a transformed London -- in which, thanks to compound interest on his bank accounts, he has become the richest man in the world. He was a socialist and futurist (like Wells), but he awakes to see his dreams realized in a dystopian manner.

The capitalists who run this world hope he'll play along with them, continue to let them run the world using his money. But Sleeper Graham has other ideas and becomes a Socialist messiah to the oppressed.

In 1897 a Victorian gentleman falls into a sleep from which he cannot be waked. During his two centuries of slumber he becomes the Sleeper, the most well known and powerful person in the world. All property is bequeathed to the Sleeper to be administered by a Council on his behalf. The common people, increasingly oppressed, view the Sleeper as a mythical liberator whose awakening will free them from misery.

He discovers that he is legal owner and master of the world. But a rebellious figure seeks to overthrow this established order. Agents of the rebel liberate Graham.

The Sleeper awakes in 2100 to a futuristic London adorned with wondrous technological trappings yet staggering under social injustice and escalating unrest. His awakening sends shock waves throughout London, from the highest meetings of the Council to the workers laboring in factories in the bowels of the city. Daring rescues and villainous treachery abound as workers and capitalists fight desperately for control of the Sleeper.

Robert Heinlein was impressed by this book.

The revolt takes place. Graham is hailed as the savior of the people. He is nominally restored to his rightful place as master of the world -- but then he learns that the people are suffering as badly under the new revolutionary regime as they did before. Graham travels through London in disguise. London is portrayed as a dehumanized, industrialized quagmire caught in perpetual darkness. The lower classes slave away in factories and go to cheap amusements.

Graham oversees a worker's revolution, which -- as the book closes, seems about to triumph.



* Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Moving the Mountain (1911) — 1st of trilogy?



Brinsmade, Herman Hine. UTOPIA ACHIEVED: A NOVEL OF THE FUTURE. 1912
New York: Broadway Publishing Co., [1912].
First edition. Reform novel. Single tax brings eutopia. Bleiler, Science-Fiction: The Early Years 268. Clareson, Science Fiction in America, 1870s-1930s 095. Lewis, Utopian Literature, p. 25. Negley, Utopian Literature: A Bibliography 145. Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature, 1516-1985, p. 151. Bleiler (1978), p.

When William Came NOVEL 1913 H. H. Munro (SAKI)
TK -- alternate history
What we find frightening about this novel is the very premise: England has been subjugated and annexed! by Germany . . . When William Came, written before World War I, is a grim tale of a then-fictional war between Britain and Germany. Saki's biting wit is aimed squarely at British politics in this thinly veiled story -- he, like many others, could see war approaching, and who would want to see a conflict of such proportion?
this one is set in 1913 and the ‘William’ of the title is that old bogeyman ‘Kaiser Bill’. For some reason, at the height of Britain’s power, the fear of invasion was common at that time. (See ‘The Riddle of the Sands’, ‘The Battle of Dorking’, ‘Spies of the Kaiser’ or even ‘The War of the Worlds’)


Paul Scheerbart, Lesabéndio: Ein Asteroïden-Roman. (1913)
Benjamin's 1933(?) essay "Experience and Poverty" calls for owning up tot the impoverishment of experience -- and even professing it -- in order to begin from the beginning, make do with little. He says approvingly that Brecht, Loos, Le Corbusier, Scheerbart, and Klee had taken leave of "the traditional image of humanity -- ceremonious, noble, decked out with all the sacrificial offerings of the past." Forget the great traditions of huimanism and idealism, forget renewing experience (cf Adorno's Jargon of Authenticity). The appropriate response to the poverty of experience is collaborating in the worl of destruction -- be as barbaric as the fascists, but for a good cause. [Like his friend Bataille?] This is Benjamin as a radical antihumanist. The "destructive character" he hails in this essay turns everything into rubble. McCole says that Benjamin here attempts to steal the idea of the decline of experience from cultural conservatives, the energies of barbarism from fascists. (Dialectic of Enlightenment -- this is the era when certain radicals do borrow from reactionaries; Bloch.)

Writing during WWI Bennjamin seems to welcome war -- like HG Wells -- as chance to clear the decks. (In "Experience and Poverty.") Cluttered and smothered interiors had ruined the middle class; and the propertyless ahd suffered in those days. Like Brecht, Benjamin wanted to "erase the traces." He valued those who were recording this newly devalued, technologized, impoverished experience Klee, Loos, and the utopians Scheerbart and Micky Mouse. By all of these the brutality and dynamism of contemporary techmology was used, abused, mocked, and harnessed."

In July 1919, Benjamin was translating Baudelaire -- wrote a review of Lesabéndio, by a utopian writer newly introduced to him by Scholem. He was introduced to Bloch by Hugo Ball. He read, worked on a review of Bloch's Geist der Utopie. He planned a book on "true politics" -- it was to include a philosophical critique of Lesabéndio. Part of the book became his essay "Critique of Violence." This is Benjamin at his most interesting.

John McCole's book Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition suggests that Benjamin liked the architecture of Loos not because he saw in it a model of rationalization and efficiency but because it was the constructive anticipaton of a form of social practice that breaks with bourgeois society. (Loos's refusal of ornament seemed to resonate with Benajmain's belief that the collective -- because it was injured by the poverty of experience -- demanded parsimony in architecture.) Anyway, he was interested in visionary -- not practical -- architecture. "Through all his engagements with technology, his most lasting yet elusive affinity may have been with the works of the utopian visionary Paul Scheerbart. Benjamin was devoted to Scheerbart's novels since WWI years. Lesabéndio portrays the asteroid utopia of the planet Palls, an anarchic society without property or institutions. Its inhabitants live in a throughly transformed relationshp to nature: their natural needs are met through adaptation to their environment, yet they continue to pursue technological projects meant to embellish rather than exploit the planet. Scheerbart's purpose, as Benjamin saw it, was to disabuse people of the "base and vulgar opinion that they are called on to 'exploit' the forces of nature" and to portray a world in which technology woulf liberate both humanity and, "fraternally," the rest of creation along with it. In Scheerbart's "utopia of the body .. the earth and huanity together form a single body [Leib]." Benjamin also prized the resolute refusal of interiority and psychological complication in Scheerbart's characters. As he explained in "Eperience and Poverty," this was what had led Scheerbart to champion the new glass aarchitecture -- the transparency of glass made it the enemt o secrecy and privacy and this the antidote to the suffocating complaications of the bourgeois interior. Verne simply transported ordinary bourgeous characters into outer space; Scherrbart was interested in the deeper question of hwo technology would transform the vwry basis of human nature.

Note that Benjamin wrote a critique of Lesabendio under the title "The True Politician"; it has been lost.

1917: Benjamin maries Dora Pollak (Scholem gives Benjamin a copy of the utopian novel Lesabendio for a wedding present). [Scheerbart, Lesabéndio: Ein Asteroidroman]
Benjamin thinks he must become a professor, but doesn’t really want to write a second dissertation; also knows that -- as the editors of Volume 1 of Benjamin’s selected writings put it -- “From his first encounter with the academic world, Benjamin had foreseen that the individualist tendencies of his own thought would work against his establishment within the realm of institutionalized philosophy.” [cf. what Howe says about the PhD program.] He feels that Heidegger is just a kiss-ass to Husserl. They return to March and, for the first time, seek work. They finally move into Benjamin’s parents’ house. Benjamin had read Sorel’s Reflections on Violence while in Switzerland; now he began working on the political issues [anarchistic] raised by that book: wrote “Critique of Violence.” Supposedly also writing a philosophical critique of the utopian novel Lesabendio that will provide a developed position on [contemporary] politics! He’s also reading Bloch. So: anarchist, nihilist, utopian. Also writing a preface to the Baudelaire translation on the theoretical problems confronted by the translator. [Note that Benjamin’s encounter with Lesabéndio: Ein Asteroidroman helps inoculate him against the Marxist aesthetic notion, derived from Engels’ comments on Balzac, that only great Realist art has an ecstatic cognitive power, that Realist art is the only cognitive activity outside of Marxist philosophy able to escape the alienated vision of reality that is inseparable from any class society. Benjamin does subscribe to what Schaeffer calls the speculative theory of Art, in this Marxist form, but he will insist that modernist art, not Realist art, has this power -- hence his interest in Baudelaire, the Symbolists, the Surrealists.]
1919:Benjamin in Switzerland, reading Nietzsche and working on his doctoral thesis, The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism, “a pointer to the true nature of romanticism,” as he described it in a letter. It was, in fact, an attempt to work out a theory of criticism -- he was opposed to what he called “the current corrupt and directionless practice of art criticism…” -- it aimed at “authentic criticism.” Received his doctoral degree in 1919. [Note that he must be studying what Schaeffer calls the speculative theory of Art: he’s studying the German romantic notion of Art as a medium of communication with the Infinite, which infected romanticism, Baudelaire, Symbolism, avant-garde, etc.]
Benjamin comes to know Hugo Ball and his wife, Emmy Hennings, who live in Bern. Benjamin becomes influenced by Dadaism -- note that it’s Ball’s anarchistic, political Dadaism, not the kind that influenced Breton. Ball introduced Benjamin to Bloch, who had also studied with Simmel. Benjamin awarded his doctorate from university in Bern, thinks about moving to Palestine. Instead of looking for work as a professor, gets back to work on Baudelaire translations. Reading Lesabendio and Sorel.
This is the making of Benjamin as a philosopher -- this combination of analyzing romanticist art criticism, studying under Simmel, getting to know Ball and Bloch, translating Baudelaire, studying anarchism and science fiction utopianism and Nietzsche on his own time. Adorno would suggest that Benjamin’s remarkable clarity and power of thought came from the dialectical tension within everything he wrote, between extremely personal experiences and gestures toward the ineffable absolute. Pensky writes, “Thus, one might say that the characteristic infusion of fragments of concrete experience into the articulation of metaphysical conception was itself an essential methodological component of a consistent line of attack in Benjamin’s critical thinking. The tension produced by such juxtapositions could explore the real with a messianic interest, without betraying its commitment to the things themselves, and produce images whose transcendent force would be contained within their absolute historical concreteness and graphicness.” [undoubtedly picked this method up, not just from his melancholy, but from Nietzsche and Baudelaire.] In the liberated fragment of everyday life, Benjamin finds clues as to the meaning of everything. Pensky writes that “The maintained tension between historical object and messianic futurity, between subjective concentration and objective revelation, is in essence a tension arising from the possibility of meaning; better, it is a productive tension maintained at the moment of dialectical suspension in which the necessity and impossibility of meaning are held frozen for the contemplating subject.” Pensky connects this to Benjamin’s melancholia. He reads melancholia as “a way of seeing,” one operating in “the space that separates Benjamin’s ‘messianic’ and ‘materialistic’ gaze” -- i.e., melancholy is a middle way of seeing [a hangover vision, a dialectical optic] that sees in both modes simultaneously, holographically. The person who sees in this fashion is drawn more and more into the world of the everyday, precisely to the degree that the normal and ordinary come to seem more and more puzzling and symbolic. Adorno saw what Pensky calls the “productive contradiction” in Benjamin’s critical mode: Benjamin’s dialectics at a standstill, his way of seeing in everyday items both their natural form and their historically constructed form, was painful. Pensky: “Misery, the absence of meaning, of a stable identity, of the image of harmony and completion, is the force that drives the contemplative mind onward, but also is the price paid by the human being.” Benjamin had a talent for contradictory thinking, this cannot be separated from his melancholia. [note that this is the problem of the engaged ironist.]
Note that Benjamin believed in an originary dimension of lost, destroyed, or withheld meaning -- this is the source of his fertile critical mode, seeking clues to this dimension in fragments -- but also the source of his mournfulness, misery, and despair.




1914-23


H.G. Wells, The World Set Free (1914).

An invention accelerates the process of radioactive decay. Producing bombs that continue to explode for days, weeks, months. Prefigure the development of atomic bomb. (Scientists at the time were aware that the natural decay of radium releases energy at a slow rate over thousands of years.)

Leó Szilárd (Hungarian: Szilárd Leó, February 11, 1898 – May 30, 1964) was a Hungarian-German-American physicist who conceived the nuclear chain reaction and worked on the Manhattan Project. He acknowledged that Wells's book inspired his theory. Wells's bombs weren't prophetic at an engineering level — once a bomb explodes, it can't keep exploding. But!

After the war, mankind begins to lapse into barbarism -- but an inspired group of world leaders meet and create a one-world government.



* Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (1915) - 2d of trilogy?


Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (1915)

Utopian novel written by noted feminist. An isolated society of women who reproduce via parthenogenesis. Idwal social order, free of war, conflict, or domination. (Appeared in serialized form; not published as a book until 1979.) Gilman's book suggests that gender is a social construct. The women are stronger than the men, wiser.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "Herland" is a lost-world fantasy in the Haggardian tradition with a decided twist: It functions primarily as a discourse on the supposed but not necessarily actual differences between the two sexes, and as a feminist screed in the utopian genre. Written in 1915, the novel was initially serialized in the pages of Gilman's own monthly magazine, "The Forerunner," a publication whose main agenda was to further Gilman's ideas of feminism and socialism. We are introduced to three very different types of men at the beginning of this story: Terry, a chauvinist kind of man's man with decidedly old-fashioned ideas concerning "women's place"; Jeff, a Galahad type of dreamy idealist, who's fond of putting women on top of proverbial pedestals; and our narrator, Vandyck, a level-headed sociologist. The three discover a land of some 12,000 square miles on a plateau in some unnamed part of the world...a plateau that is inhabited by nothing but--you guessed it--females. The 3 million females in what Vandyck refers to as Herland have, for the last 2,000 years, been cut off from civilization and have been reproducing parthenogenetically; virgin births that come when the women turn 25 or so, and that always result in baby girls. These miracle births are perhaps the most fantasy-oriented aspect of Gilman's tale; an aspect that might have helped secure its pride of place in Cawthorn and Moorcock's excellent overview volume "Fantasy: The 100 Best Books." Our three men, after spending many months of learning the language of Herland (an education not easily accomplished, unlike in many other lost-world adventures where explorers, less realistically, seem to pick up a new tongue in a matter of days) and getting acclimatized, are given a tour of the land, and Gilman shows us how well the women work together, how they have raised childbearing and motherhood to a religion of sorts, and how far advanced their methods of agriculture and education have become. It is a true utopia, with all its inhabitants happy and healthy and well cared for. The men perceive this land in conformity with their various temperaments; not too surprisingly, Terry has the roughest time here. But even he is forced to admit that Herland's accomplishments have outstripped ours in many regards, after initially thinking that no "civilization" could possibly exist without men.

Simply written by its author, with many touches of humor and (at a mere 146 pages) short enough to never wear out its welcome, despite the occasional didactic tone, "Herland" is a winning read indeed. Even in these more enlightened and more PC times, when American women have the right to vote, can hold any job a man can (even president, perhaps?), and earn almost 75% of what a man earns (OK, guess we still have a way to go!), this book serves as a good reminder that sexism is such an easy trap to fall into. I would like to especially recommend this particular Pantheon edition of "Herland" because of the wonderful 20-page introduction to the book written by Ann J. Lane, who discusses not only Gilman's life, but the history of the utopian novel in general, and "Herland"'s position therein. Modern-day readers might find this intro very helpful. And speaking of the modern-day reader, if there was one problem this reader had with Gilman's novel, it was one dealing with the question of sex. Is it reasonable to expect 3 million women trapped on a plateau NOT to resort to lesbianism after so many centuries? The gals seem completely chaste in Herland, and even after Terry, Jeff and Van take three of the Herland women as wives, their brides still insist that sex is only for procreation purposes (which brings to mind the old saying "There goes paradise!"). But here's what I had a real problem with: Van, amazingly enough, is just fine with this, claiming that he'd rather have a virtually sexless marriage with his wonderful Herland bride than be married to a fully active partner back home! Forget about those virgin births...THIS is the biggest fantasy aspect of "Herland"!


* Charlotte Perkins Gilman, With Her in Ourland (1916) — 3d of trilogy?



1917 Victor Rousseau's novel "The Messiah of the Cylinder" is an
end-of-the Earth dystopia through the viewpoint an awakening man from the
present in a Socialist future. Widely viewed as a dark parody of H. G. Wells'
"When the Sleeper Wakes."
Victor Rousseau, "The Messiah of the Cylinder" (1917) 

1918 Gregory Owen's novel "Meccania"
Meccania is a reference to Gregory Owen's Meccania, the Super-State (1918). Meccania is the ultimate in totalitarian dystopias, a state completely regimented and controlled by the government. For a Big Brother-ruled England, Meccania would be a natural enemy.

Brussof, Valery [Yakovlevich]. THE REPUBLIC OF THE SOUTHERN CROSS AND OTHER STORIES 1918
... With an Introductory Essay by Stephen Graham. London: Constable and Company Ltd., 1918. Octavo, pp. [i-iv] v-xiii [xiv-xvi] [1] 2-162 [163: printer's imprint] [164: blank], original green cloth, front and rear panels ruled in blind, spine panel stamped in gold, fore and bottom edges untrimmed. First edition in English. Mixed issue; full cloth (as per Locke's second issue), fore-edge untrimmed (as per Locke's first issue). The title novella, a fine anti-utopian fiction, is generally acknowledged to be the author's best fictional work. "A very unusual impressionistic story, with an atmosphere like that in the work of Luis Borges." - Bleiler, Science-Fiction: The Early Years 287. Clarke, Tale of the Future (1978), p. 46. Locke, A Spectrum of Fantasy, p. 42. Negley, Utopian Literature: A Bibliography 146. Survey of Science Fiction




* Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (1921) — DYSTOPIA. See Zamyatin entry.



Ray Cummings, The Girl in the Golden Atom (1922)
Ray Cummings (Raymond King Cummings) was an author of science fiction, rated one of the "founding fathers of the science fiction pulp genre"[1]. He was born August 30, 1887 in New York and died January 23, 1957 in Mount Vernon.
 Cummings worked with Thomas Edison as a personal assistant and technical writer from 1914 to 1919. His most highly regarded work was the novel The Girl in the Golden Atom published in 1922. His career resulted in some 750 novels and short stories, using also the pen names Ray King, Gabrielle Cummings, and Gabriel Wilson.
 A classic work of science fiction, this novel was one of the first to explore the world of the atom. The Girl in the Golden Atom is the story of a young chemist who finds a hidden atomic world within his mother’s wedding ring. Under a microscope, he sees within the ring a beautiful young woman sitting before a cave. Enchanted by her, he shrinks himself so that he can join her world.
 Having worked for Thomas Alva Edison, Ray Cummings (1887–1957) was inspired by science’s possibilities and began to write science fiction. The Girl in the Golden Atom was enormously successful at its publication in 1923, and Cummings went on to write an equally successful sequel, The People of the Golden Atom. Both volumes are featured in this Bison Books edition, along with a new introduction by Jack Williamson.


HG Wells, Men Like Gods (1923).
Aldiss -- a Mr. Barnstaple drives his car into the 4th dimension, and there finds a utopia of beautiful and powerful (and frequently nude) people. With him is a diverse group of his contemporaries who do their best to wreck the utopia. Barnstaple defeats them with utopian aid. Wells's fantasy device the 4th dimension, iserves merely to lead us to his utopia. Burroughs's Pellucidar, on the other hanf, is the whole story -- it's all about how to get there and what happens there.

Wells's is a seriois tale, whose main aim is to discuss entertainingly the ways in which man might improve himself and his lot. Aldiss says Burroughs's Pellucidar is better. Burroughs is fun to read; Wells gives off that whiff of what Amis called left-wing crankiness. Burroughs teaches us to wonder -- a religious state, blanketing out criticism. Wells is teaching us to think.
Aldiss uses this book as an example of the poles of modern fantasy -- thinking pole at one end (Swift to Wells) and dreaming pole at the other (no great figures).

Socialist world-state? Not a SF novel? Zamyatin says it's the one and only literary utopia written by Wells -- but Z does not consider it a SF novel. Its topical journalism, propaganda for the world state.
The hero of the novel, Mr. Barnstaple, is a depressive journalist in the newspaper "The Liberal." At the beginning of the story, Mr. Barnstaple, as well as a few other Englishmen, are accidentally transported to the parallel world of Utopia. Utopia is like an advanced Earth, although it had been quite similar to Earth in the past in a period known to Utopians as the "Days of Confusion." Utopia is a utopian world: it has a utopian socialist world government, advanced science, and even pathogens have been eliminated and predators are almost tamed. Barnstaple is confounded and confused by the utopian attitudes: "where is your government ?" he asks. "our government is in our education" is the answer (see Plato). Barnstaple gradually loses his Victorian English narcissism. For instance, Wells makes comments on personal responsibility when Barnstaple sees a person slaving over a rose garden at high altitude and asks "why don't you hire a gardner?" the answer is "the working class has vanished from utopia years ago! He who loves the rose must then serve that rose." Barnstaple is changed by those experiences and he loses his Eurocentric view of the world and starts to really get the idea of the place. As this conversion starts to take place utopians start to get sick.
This, however, means that the newly arrived Earthlings pose a grave threat to Utopians, as the latter's immune system has become weak; and the Earthlings have to be quarantined until a solution is found. They resent this isolation and some of them plot to take over Utopia; they are actively opposed by Mr. Barnstaple, who has to escape from the quarantine castle, just as superior Utopian technology finally destroys the Earthling revolt. Finally, the Utopians find a way to send back Mr. Barnstaple, and the story ends as he goes back to Earth.
The novel was considered by several contemporaries to be a weakly plotted story in which Wells's utopian enthusiasm overtook his skills as a writer of scientific romances (his own term for what is nowadays commonly called science fiction). The novel was yet another vehicle for Wells to propagate the so-called 'wellsian utopia', his ideas of a possible better future society, which he has described in several other works, notably in his A Modern Utopia (1905). In literary history, the novel's notable role was to provoke Aldous Huxley into writing Brave New World (1932), his parody and criticism of wellsian utopian ideas.

Muriel Jaeger, The Question Mark (1923)
– a dystopian novel.
Utopian-religious novel of a future England.




1924-33




Yevgeny Zamyatin, We.  (1924)
Written 1920-21. Published in English in 1924?? Possibly influenced by Jerome K Jerome. Not published in Russian, except in samizdat, until 1988. Written in response to the author's personal experiences with the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, his life in the Newcastle suburb of Jesmond and work in the Tyne shipyards at nearby Wallsend during the First World War. It was on Tyneside that he observed the rationalization of labour on a large scale. The story is told by the protagonist, "D-503", in his diary, which details both his work as a mathematician and his misadventures with a resistance group called the Mephi. D-503 lives in the One State,[3] an urban nation constructed almost entirely of glass, where everything is organized according to primitive mathematics. Sleep times are measured out for each day and each individual is given a certain number of other people to have intercourse with based on a system of pink coupons and scheduling.
Full text: http://crispytomato.net/zamyatin_we.txt
We is a futuristic dystopian satire, generally considered to be the grandfather of the genre (but see The Iron Heel). It takes the totalitarian and conformative aspects of modern industrial society to an extreme conclusion, depicting a state that believes that free will is the cause of unhappiness, and that citizens' lives should be controlled with mathematical precision based on the system of industrial efficiency created by Frederick Winslow Taylor. Among many other literary innovations, Zamyatin's futuristic vision includes houses, and indeed everything else, made of glass or other transparent materials, so that everyone is constantly visible.
George Orwell believed that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) "must be partly derived from" We.[11] However, in a 1962 letter, Huxley says that he wrote Brave New World long before he had heard of We.[12] Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) some eight months after he read We in a French translation and wrote a review of it.[14] Orwell is reported as "saying that he was taking it as the model for his next novel."


Hugo Gernsback, Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 (1925).
Note the importance of Gernsback. (Book published in 1925 – first serialized in 1911.) Ralph 124C 41+, by Hugo Gernsback, is an early science fiction novel, written as a twelve-part serial in Modern Electrics magazine beginning in April 1911. It was later compiled into a novel/book form in 1925. It was hugely influential at the time, and filled with new ideas. The plot, characters, and writing strike most modern readers as shallow and old-fashioned. The title itself is a play on words meaning "one to foresee for one."
 Gernsback first popularized the term “science fiction” – his magazines noted for imaginative fertility and adventurousness, but not sober and realistic approach. No intellectual sophistication.
Gernsback’s book gives us the sub-Atlantic tube, hypnobioscope, personalized news, and machine translation
Widely acclaimed upon its initial appearance in 1911 as a serial in Gernsback's magazine, MODERN ELECTRICS, this interplanetary novel by "the father of modern science fiction" is virtually unreadable today. However, historically, its impact and the prominence of its author in the SF field, elevates it to cornerstone status in the SF genre. "The literary treatment is on a very low level, but Ralph 124C41+ is renowned for its many highly imaginative technological projections. These include clear descriptions of radar, book and newspaper microfilms and microfiches, television, plant hormones, wireless transmission of power.etc."
 By the year 2660, science has transformed and conquered the world, rescuing humanity from itself. Spectacular inventions from the farthest reaches of space and deep beneath the earth are available to meet every need, providing antidotes to individual troubles and social ills. Inventors are highly prized and respected, and they are jealously protected and lavishly cared for by world governments. That support and acclaim, however—as the most brilliant of scientists, Ralph 124C 41+, discovers—is not without its price.
 This visionary novel of the twenty-seventh century was written by Hugo Gernsback (1887–1964), founder of the influential magazine Amazing Stories. Marvelously prophetic and creative, Ralph 124C 41+ celebrates technological advances and entrances readers with an exuberant, unforgettable vision of what our world might become. This commemorative edition makes this landmark tale widely available for the first time in decades and features the prized Frank R. Paul illustrations from the rare first edition, a list of inventions and technological devices, and Hugo Gernsback's prefaces to the first and second editions.
he titular protagonist saves the life of the heroine by directing energy remotely at an approaching avalanche. As the novel goes on, he describes the technological wonders of the modern world, frequently using the infamous phrase "As you know..." The hero finally rescues the heroine by travelling into space on his own rocketship to rescue her from the villain's clutches.
Some successful predictions from this novel include television, remote-control power transmission, televised phone calls, transcontinental air service, solar energy in practical use, sound movies, synthetic milk and foods, artificial cloth, voiceprinting, tape recorders, and spaceflight. It also contains "...the first accurate description of radar, complete with diagram...", according to Arthur C. Clarke i
The main character in the book is named Ralph, and his love interest is Alice. They don't go to the moon, but they do fly towards Venus and Mars. This story was written over 40 years before The Honeymooners ever aired on television. It is not known if the creators of The Honeymooners took any inspiration from this story.
            Nearly every science fiction fan knows the name Hugo Gernsback, even if only because the annual science fiction achievement awards, the Hugos, are named in his honor.   The traditional view of Gernsback, as the "Father of Science Fiction" was promulgated by the late SF historian Sam Moskowitz.  While it is true that Gernsback founded Amazing in 1926 and coined the term "science fiction" (as well as the earlier scientifiction), his actual long term editorial effect on the genre is open to question.  Gernsback viewed science fiction as a means of inspiring future generations of scientists (which it eventually did do), but at the expense of plot and character.  Gernsback's best known work of science fiction, Ralph 124C 41+, illustrates the drawbacks of Gernsback's view of science fiction perfectly.
            The novel's tone is set in the opening pages.  Each time Gernsback mentions a new device, he stops to explain what it does and the theory behind how it works. It is quite possible that Ralph 124C 41+ introduces more gadgets faster than any other science fiction novel written before or since.  However, one of the things which sets Gernsback's books apart from the voyages extraordinaires of Jules Verne is that Verne would have incorporated a couple of Gernsback's ideas into the plot of his story and examined their effect on the society which the changes were introduced into.   Gernsback seems to fling his ideas out just to see if any of his predictions will occur.
            While Verne's characters frequently were stiff, Gernsback's characters have less dimension than the pages the novel is printed on.  What characterization does occur is laughable, as is Gernsback's take on society.  His world of the twenty-seventh century seems particularly naive, with a nebulous world government (which seems to have done away with actual surnames).  Scientists are held in the awe reserved today for athletes or film stars, with the entire world knowing when Ralph 124C 41+ is going to perform important experiments as well as giving him a standing ovation (via Telephot) when he saves a young woman in Switzerland who nobody had ever heard of before (but who, of course, will become Ralph's romantic interest).
            The best thing that can be said for Gernsback's writing style is that he was in desperate need of an editor and an English grammar.  His prose is repetitive and basic.  Although straightfoward, it is not easy to read because of the number of digressions which Gernsback throws in.  Among other things, Gernsback's writing in Ralph 124C 41+ seems to adhere to all of the negative stereotypes which have been associated with science fiction since Gernsback coined the term.
            Ralph 124C 41+ has frequently been called a classic.  What it really is, however, is an oddity.  The worst science fiction published in the 1990s is centuries beyond Gernsback as far as plot, writing style and characterization is concerned.   While the novel is a goldmine for technological speculation, Gernsback could simply have written up a list of gadgets with a brief description of each and come away with something as readable with as much plot and character as he weaves into Ralph 124C 41+.    While Gernsback may have been instrumental in some aspects of the establishment of science fiction (the first magazine devoted to it, the name, and supporting early fandom), the field has moved far beyond Gernsback's vision and talents in the 73 years since this book was originally published.




Burroughs, The Moon Maid., 1926
It was written in three parts, Part 1 was begun in June 1922 under the title The Moon Maid, Part 2 was begun in 1919 under the title Under the Red Flag, later retitled The Moon Men, Part 3 was titled the The Red Hawk. The book version was first published by A. C. McClurg on 1926. [NOTE SIMILARITY TO L RON HUBBARD]
The Moon Maid has a remarkable history. It consists of three consecutive novellas. The second was actually written first, in the spring of 1919, shortly after the Bolshevik revolution.
Burroughs titled this story “Under the Red Flag.” Set a century or two in America ’s future, it told the tale of Julian James, born in a Bolshevik dystopia and living in the 31st Commune of the Chicago Soviet. Lantski Petrov is president of the United States , and Otto Bergst is the new commander of the Red Guard at Chicago .
As a piece of anti-Communist fiction, “Under the Red Flag” predated Rand ’s We the Living by 17 years and Orwell’s Animal Farm by almost three decades. But in 1919, no one would publish it. The story was rejected 11 times by periodicals as varied as the Saturday Evening Post and the Argosy All-Story line of pulp magazines, which had already published Burroughs’ enormously popular A Princess of Mars (1912), Tarzan of the Apes (1912), and At the Earth’s Core (1913), among others.
The unpublished story was filed away, but not for long. Burroughs was a businessman, and he decided he had to salvage something from his time spent writing “Under the Red Flag.” During a single day in 1922, he rewrote the yarn. It was still set in the 22nd Century, but the Bolsheviks were turned into Kalkars, a brutish, mongrel breed of lunar invaders. President Petrov became Jarth, Jemadar of the United Teivos of America. Commander Bergst of Chicago ’s Red Guard was transformed into Brother-General Or-tis, the new Commandant of Chicago. And James Julian, the story’s tragic lead character, morphed into Julian the Ninth, one in a long line of Julian family heroes. Burroughs re-titled the story “The Moon Men” and cleverly made it a sequel to an as-yet-unwritten story.
Within months, Burroughs penned “The Moon Maid,” the first third of what was becoming a multi-generational narrative. This segment takes place 100 years before “The Moon Men.” It’s the story of Julian the Fifth, whose unfortunate spaceship crashes on the Moon. His subsequent adventures in a world beneath the lunar surface launch a chain of events leading to the Kalkar invasion of Earth.
“The Moon Maid” quickly sold to Argosy All-Story Weekly, which serialized it in spring of 1923. All-Story had no choice now but to publish its “sequel,” the rewritten “Under the Red Flag,” in February and March 1925.
Finally, there remained for Burroughs the task of satisfactorily concluding the Julian family saga. Six months after publishing “The Moon Men,” All-Story Weekly serialized his “The Red Hawk,” the final piece of the chronicle. Jumping 300 years beyond “The Moon Men,” it describes Julian the Twentieth’s role in the revolt that ends Kalkar tyranny on Earth. All three stories were collected in book form as the novel The Moon Maid in 1926.

Belloc, Hilaire. BUT SOFT- WE ARE OBSERVED!. 1928
London: Arrowsmith, [1928]. Octavo, pp. [1-6] 7-312, illustrations by G. K. Chesterton [?] Published later in the U.S. as SHADOWED! (1929). "A satire on parliamentary government: the communists and anarchists of 1979 prove to be no different from the old parties.

Buck Rogers strip debuts -- 1929
– it’s based on the central character of Philip Francis Nowlan's novella Armageddon 2419 A.D., in the August 1928 issue of the pulp magazine Amazing Stories.

Bradford, Columbus. TERRANIA OR THE FEMINIZATION OF THE WORLD. 1930
Boston: The Christopher Publishing House, [1930]. "Women lead the way to utopia. First female president of Terrania, the 'Federation of the World.'" - Lewis, Utopian Literature, p. 24. "Eutopia ruled by women." - Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature, 1516-1985, p. 188. Bleiler, Science-Fiction: The Early Years 254. Clareson, Science Fiction in America, 1870s-1930s 090.

Insatiability (Polish: Nienasycenie), Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. 1930
is the only major novel by the Polish writer, dramatist, philosopher, painter and photographer, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. It was written in 1927 and first published in 1930.
AN EXPERIMENTAL EPIC IN EVERY SENSE OF THE WORD, BUT ALSO ONE OF THE MOST INSPIRING AND DEVASTATINGLY CREATIVE NOVELS EVER WRITTEN. REGULARLY MENTIONED IN ALL-TIME GREATEST 20TH CENTURY NOVELS LISTS, THE BOOK HAS AN EPIC SCOPE ALLIED WITH A KEEN SENSE OF DETAIL.
It combines chaotic action with deep philosophical and political discussion and predicts many of the events and political outcomes of the subsequent years, specifically, the invasion of Poland and the subsequent foreign domination and mind control exerted, first by the Germans, and then by the Soviet Union on Polish life and art.
Czesław Miłosz frames the first chapter of his book, The Captive Mind, around a discussion of Insatiability, specifically the "Murti-Bing" pill, which allows artists to contentedly conform to the demands of the equivalent of Socialist Realism.
The novel was translated into English in 1977 by Louis Iribarne.
Also author of "Nikotina" (1932). Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz aka Witkacy (1885-1939) experimented with a number of drugs and hallucinogens, in his artworks where he meticulously noted what he had ingested in the process of execution, in his "soirees" which included theatrics, psychodramas and scurrilous comedy, and on his own. A brilliant polymath who was also neurotic and depressed, he was a highly gifted artist, dramatist and novelist who also wrote philosophical treatises. His works have become more relevant in a postmodern world than they ever were in his life and his complexities and insights appreciated by a larger public. This work was written at the same time of his masterpiece novel Insatiability (Nienasycenie), which he interweaves as a point of principle, baring his own addictions to alcohol and cigarettes, and espousing the use of "whiter" drugs, but later declaring their insidiousness as well. Since mankind is already hopelessly removed from metaphysical sensations which are the source of true being, we are in a futile conflict of seeking transcendence. Art as a meaningful discourse and act of revelation is over. Therefore "there is in man a certain insatiability caused by existence itself, a primordial insatiability, associated with the very fact of the unavoidable existence of individuality, an insatiability that I call metaphysical and that, if it is not eradicated by excessive satiation of real-life feelings, by work, by the exercise of power, by creativity, etc., can be appeased solely with the aid of narcotics." (from "Nikotina"). Rare and significant document of this pioneer of the broken heart and the human condition. Bookseller Inventory # 1221



Wells, The Shape of Things to Come, 1933
The Shape of Things to Come is a work of science fiction by H. G. Wells, published in 1933, which speculates on future events from 1933 until the year 2106. It is not a novel, but rather a fictional history book or chronicle, similar in style to Star Maker and Last and First Men, both by Olaf Stapledon.
Wells' book also shared with Stapledon's an understanding of the change wrought in the nature of war by the development of air power; both writers included harrowing depictions of cities destroyed in aerial bombardments, which proved an all too accurate prediction of what was to happen in the actual second World War.
Wells creates a framing device by claiming that the book is his edited version of notes written by an eminent diplomat, Dr Philip Raven, who had been having dream visions of a history textbook published in 2106, and wrote down what he could remember of it.
The book is dominated by Wells's belief in a world state as the solution to mankind's problems. Wells successfully predicted the Second World War, although he envisaged it dragging on into the 1960s, being finally ended only by a devastating plague that almost destroys civilization. Wells then envisages a benevolent dictatorship - 'The Dictatorship of the Air' (a term obviously modeled on 'The Dictatorship of the proletariat') - arising from the controllers of the world's surviving transportation systems (the only people with global power). This dictatorship promotes science, enforces Basic English as a global lingua franca, and eradicates all religion, setting the world on the route to a peaceful utopia. When the dictatorship finds it necessary to kill political opponents, the condemned persons are given a chance to emulate the ancient philosophers Socrates and Seneca and take a poison tablet in a congenial environment of their choice.
Eventually, after a century of re-shaping humanity, the dictatorship is overthrown in a completely bloodless coup, the former rulers are sent into a very honourable retirement, and the world state "withers away" as was predicted by Friedrich Engels in his 1877 work Anti-Duhring. The last part of the book is a detailed description of the Utopian world which emerges, in some ways reminiscent of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward.
While written as a future history, seen in retrospect it can be considered as an alternate history diverging from ours in late 1933 or early 1934, the Point of divergence being FDR's failure to implement the New Deal and revive the US economy (and also Hitler's failure to revive the German economy by re-armament). Instead, the worldwide economic crisis continues for three decades, concurrently with the war. The war is prosecuted by countries already on the verge of collapse and ends, not with any side's victory, but with everybody's total collapse and disintegration (also of countries which were not involved in the fighting). There follows the complete collapse of Capitalism and the emergence of the above-mentioned new order.
Wells's book can be credited with an accurate prediction of the submarine launched ballistic missile, which was to assume a crucial role in the Cold War period. Though the warheads of what he termed "air torpedoes" were envisaged as chemical rather than nuclear, Wells fully grasped - two decades ahead of the military planners - the strategic implications of combining submarines with weapons of mass destruction.
Wells's "Air and Sea Control", the association of pilots and technicians which controls the world's communications and eventually develops into a world government, seems a clear literary descendant of an institution called the Aerial Board of Control (A.B.C.) in the short stories "With the Night Mail" and "Easy as A.B.C.", by Rudyard Kipling, with which Wells was certainly familiar. The Kipling stories are set in a post-apocalyptic world where airships are commonly used both for freight and passenger service, as well as for preventing civil unrest using powerful sonic weapons:

MOVIE:
Things to Come (1936) (novel "The Shape of Things to Come")
The Shape of Things to Come (1979)


Aldous Huxley, Brave New World. (1932)
Aldiss: not just one major change in Huxley's future civilization, but several tht interact -- the extra-uterin production of babies, the cloning methods of obtaining identical people, the disappearane of Christianity, and so on.

Aldous was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, the zoologist, agnostic and controversialist ("Darwin's Bulldog"). His brother Julian Huxley and half-brother Andrew Huxley also became outstanding biologists. In Brave New World Huxley portrays a society operating on the principles of mass production and Pavlovian conditioning.
Reacting in part against a popular series of pamphlets – starting with Daedalus: or, Science and the Future, in which the author (Brian Stableford Haldane) Argued that by the end of the century social life would be altered beyond recognition, entirely for the better due to the advancement of biological science. There was a flow of ideas from futurologial speculations into speculative fiction, which helped keep Brititsh science fiction intellectually serious.
Significantly, Huxley also worked for a time in the 1920s at the technologically-advanced Brunner and Mond chemical plant in Billingham, Teesside, and the most recent introduction to his famous science fiction novel Brave New World (1932) states that this experience of "an ordered universe in a world of planless incoherence" was one source for the novel.
Set in the London of AD 2540 (632 A.F. in the book), the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology, biological engineering [sorta], and sleep-learning that combine to change society.
 Contrary to what modern readers would expect, the biological techniques used to control the populace in Brave New World do not include genetic engineering. Huxley wrote the book in the 1920s, thirty years before Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA. However, Mendel's work with inheritance patterns in peas had been re-discovered in 1900 and the eugenics movement, based on Darwinian selection, was well established. Huxley's family included a number of prominent biologists including Thomas Huxley, half-brother and Nobel Laureate Andrew Huxley, and brother Julian Huxley who was a biologist and involved in the eugenics movement. In light of this, the fact that Huxley emphasizes conditioning over breeding is notable (see nature versus nurture). As the science writer Matt Ridley put it, Brave New World describes an "environmental not a genetic hell." Human embryos and fetuses are conditioned via a carefully designed regimen of chemical (such as exposure to hormones and toxins), thermal (exposure to intense heat or cold, as one's future career would dictate) and other environmental stimuli, although there is an element of selective breeding as well.
 Brave New World was inspired by the H. G. Wells' Utopian novel Men Like Gods. Wells' optimistic vision of the future gave Huxley the idea to begin writing a parody of the novel, which became Brave New World. Contrary to the most popular optimist utopian novels of the time, Huxley sought to provide a frightening vision of the future. Huxley referred to Brave New World as a "negative utopia" (see dystopia), somewhat influenced by Wells' own The Sleeper Awakes and the works of D. H. Lawrence. Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel We, completed ten years before in 1921, has been suggested as an influence, but Huxley stated that he had not known of the book at the time.[1]
 Huxley visited the newly-opened and technologically-advanced Brunner and Mond plant, part of Imperial Chemical Industries, or ICI, Billingham and gives a fine and detailed account of the processes he saw. The introduction to the most recent print of Brave New World states that Huxley was inspired to write the classic novel by this Billingham visit.
 An early trip to the United States gave Brave New World much of its character. Not only was Huxley outraged by the culture of youth, commercial cheeriness, sexual promiscuity, and inward-looking nature of many Americans,[2] he also found a book by Henry Ford on the boat to America. There was a fear of Americanization in Europe, so to see America firsthand, as well as read the ideas and plans of one of its foremost citizens, spurred Huxley to write Brave New World with America in mind. The "feelies" are his response to the "talkie" motion pictures, and the sex-hormone chewing gum is parody of the ubiquitous chewing gum, which was something of a symbol of America at that time. In an article in the May 4, 1935 issue of Illustrated London News, G. K. Chesterton explained that Huxley was revolting against the "Age of Utopias" - a time, mostly before World War I, inspired by what H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw were writing about socialism and a World State.
Huxley gives us feelies, scent-organ, artifical womb, Centrifgual Bumle-Puppy, and hypnopaedia (sleep-learning)



Wells, The Shape of Things to Come (1933)
The Shape of Things to Come is a work of science fiction by H. G. Wells, published in 1933, which speculates on future events from 1933 until the year 2106. It is not a novel, but rather a fictional history book or chronicle, similar in style to Star Maker and Last and First Men, both by Olaf Stapledon.
Wells' book also shared with Stapledon's an understanding of the change wrought in the nature of war by the development of air power; both writers included harrowing depictions of cities destroyed in aerial bombardments, which proved an all too accurate prediction of what was to happen in the actual second World War.
Wells creates a framing device by claiming that the book is his edited version of notes written by an eminent diplomat, Dr Philip Raven, who had been having dream visions of a history textbook published in 2106, and wrote down what he could remember of it.
The book is dominated by Wells's belief in a world state as the solution to mankind's problems. Wells successfully predicted the Second World War, although he envisaged it dragging on into the 1960s, being finally ended only by a devastating plague that almost destroys civilization. Wells then envisages a benevolent dictatorship - 'The Dictatorship of the Air' (a term obviously modeled on 'The Dictatorship of the proletariat') - arising from the controllers of the world's surviving transportation systems (the only people with global power). This dictatorship promotes science, enforces Basic English as a global lingua franca, and eradicates all religion, setting the world on the route to a peaceful utopia. When the dictatorship finds it necessary to kill political opponents, the condemned persons are given a chance to emulate the ancient philosophers Socrates and Seneca and take a poison tablet in a congenial environment of their choice.
Eventually, after a century of re-shaping humanity, the dictatorship is overthrown in a completely bloodless coup, the former rulers are sent into a very honourable retirement, and the world state "withers away" as was predicted by Friedrich Engels in his 1877 work Anti-Duhring. The last part of the book is a detailed description of the Utopian world which emerges, in some ways reminiscent of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward.
While written as a future history, seen in retrospect it can be considered as an alternate history diverging from ours in late 1933 or early 1934, the Point of divergence being FDR's failure to implement the New Deal and revive the US economy (and also Hitler's failure to revive the German economy by re-armament). Instead, the worldwide economic crisis continues for three decades, concurrently with the war. The war is prosecuted by countries already on the verge of collapse and ends, not with any side's victory, but with everybody's total collapse and disintegration (also of countries which were not involved in the fighting). There follows the complete collapse of Capitalism and the emergence of the above-mentioned new order.
Wells's book can be credited with an accurate prediction of the submarine launched ballistic missile, which was to assume a crucial role in the Cold War period. Though the warheads of what he termed "air torpedoes" were envisaged as chemical rather than nuclear, Wells fully grasped - two decades ahead of the military planners - the strategic implications of combining submarines with weapons of mass destruction.
Wells's "Air and Sea Control", the association of pilots and technicians which controls the world's communications and eventually develops into a world government, seems a clear literary descendant of an institution called the Aerial Board of Control (A.B.C.) in the short stories "With the Night Mail" and "Easy as A.B.C.", by Rudyard Kipling, with which Wells was certainly familiar. The Kipling stories are set in a post-apocalyptic world where airships are commonly used both for freight and passenger service, as well as for preventing civil unrest using powerful sonic weapons.







* James Hilton - Lost Horizon (1933)