The future always changes. From heroic space adventures in the 1960s to paranoid cyberpunk in the 1980s, you can learn a lot about the zeitgeist of an era by looking at how people imagined the future. This is also true of most early science fiction from the 18th and 19th centuries. Like today, writers back then projected their fears, ambitions, and prejudices onto a future society that we, as residents of a far-off epoch, can now appreciate with gimlet-eyed hindsight.
10 Memoirs Of The Twentieth Century
One of the first English-language texts to deal with the future was Memoirs of the Twentieth Century, written by Irish Anglican clergyman Samuel Madden and published in 1733. He claimed to have had the “honour and misfortune” to “have dar’d to enter by the help of an infallible Guide, into the dark Caverns of Futurity, and discover the Secrets of Ages yet to come.”
Memoirs Of The Twentie...
Best Price: $30.01
Buy New $74.99
(as of 01:50 UTC - Details)
The book was touted as its subtitle, “Original Letters of State, Under George the Sixth, Related to the most important Events in Great Britain and Europe . . . from the Middle of the Eighteenth to the End of the Twentieth Century. Received and Revealed in the year 1728; and now published . . . in Six Volumes.” The reference to five nonexistent sequels to the first volume was a satirical jab at long-winded memoirs of the time.
The book’s format was a series of letters to the British monarch from ambassadors in foreign capitals in the years 1997 and 1998. There was little in the way of technological development in Madden’s vision, but there were great political changes: The Ottoman Empire was replaced by a Tatar dynasty, while the papacy ruled supreme with rich holdings in Africa, China, and Paraguay. It also featured interesting elements like a Mexican cheese that never rots, extant native states in North America, a messianic movement arising in Persia, and an army of Central African Jews marching on Egypt. However, much of the material was actually concerned with satirizing 18th-century political and religious concerns rather than serious speculation.
Memoirs of the Twentieth Century was published anonymously in 1733 but then immediately suppressed by both the author himself as well as British prime minister Sir Robert Walpole. This may have been because the content wasn’t actually speculations on the future but rather a thinly veiled satire of the Walpole government. Alternatively, it may have been because the identity of the author had become known, and Madden feared the effect of the work on his reputation. Of the 1,000 copies printed, around 900 were returned to Madden, who destroyed them.
9 The Reign Of George VI: 1900 To 1925
In 1763, another futurism-themed book was published in the United Kingdom. It’s often confused with Samuel Madden’s work but was actually an unrelated anonymously written text. The Reign of George VI: 1900 to 1925 was a sort of British wish fulfillment fantasy, describing the rule of a wise and brave monarch during the early 20th century.
The reign of George VI...
Buy New $13.95
(as of 02:15 UTC - Details)
The text portrays Britain as under threat from a Russia ruled by Czar Peter IV, who controls a northern empire which includes Scandinavia and a powerful and threatening navy. The czar was allied with France, which was very much the junior partner in the alliance to dominate Europe. George IV defeats Franco-Russian attempts to invade England in 1900 and forces a peace in 1902 after invading France himself while the Turks attack Russia from the south.
The next decade and a half are peaceful and prosperous for victorious England, with George IV investing heavily in the arts and sciences. He builds a new English capital at Stanley, in Rutland. The city is surrounded by artificial mountains and filled with neoclassical architecture and planned streets, complete with a palace filled with artwork from throughout Europe and Asia.
A second great war with the Franco-Russians occurs from 1917 to 1920. The English again score victories in Europe with the help of allied German and Italian states, though the Spanish joined the enemy side. It would end with the British conquest of France, Mexico, and the Philippines.
The postwar years would feature the development of a great canal transport system and the rise of manufacturing in both the British Isles and the American colonies (which apparently never declared independence). The book ends in 1925 with a great golden age. Perhaps the most unrealistic element is the happiness of the French population under the benevolent rule of an English monarch.
Some have admitted that despite the excessively pro-British sentiment of the text, there are some interesting parallels between Madden’s work and real history—20th-century Russian power, the rise of manufacturing in North America, and the strength of a British monarch named George VI during a world war.
8 L’An 2440
L’An 2440 (Poche...
Buy New $14.99
(as of 11:23 UTC - Details)
Louis-Sebastien Mercier’s novel L’An 2440 commences with an 18th-century Frenchman having a heated argument with an Englishman before going off to take a nap and waking up in the year 2440. (The English translation, Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred, changed the year to 2500 “for the sake of a round number.”) After some brief confusion in which the future inhabitants assume that the Frenchman is dressing up in historical clothing for the sake of making some philosophical point, he sets off on a tour of the far future.
Mercier was a great believer in Enlightenment thought, and thus, his future Paris is advanced in terms of social order, though not so much in technology. Compared to the 18th century, fashions are much freer and more comfortable. The 25th-century streets are much more orderly than the chaos of 18th-century transportation, with carriages are reserved for infirm judges and men of good character, rather than the nobility (who thus enjoy “more money and less of gout“).
The future society has adopted rationality as the basis of their government and way of life, and the world is at peace. The narrator even encounters a statue of a black man with the inscription: “To the avenger of the New World.” In Mercier’s future, the European powers were eventually beaten back by slaves and the original inhabitants of the New World, and colonialism was finally abandoned for the good of all. However, Mercier also assumed that the values of Enlightenment Europe would spread worldwide, with the Chinese abandoning their writing system and adopting the French language as well as the Turks drinking wine and watching Voltaire’s play Mahomet.
The novel concludes with a visit to the palace of Versailles, which is reduced to “nothing but ruins, gaping walls, and mutilated statues; some porticos, half demolished, afforded a confused idea of its ancient magnificence.” There, the Frenchman meets Louis XIV, who has apparently been condemned to remain forever in the remnants of his empire’s former glory. Just before asking the monarch a question, the narrator is bitten by an adder and reawakens in the 18th century, bring the story to an abrupt conclusion.
