Customer Reviews

The World as It Shall Be (Early Classics of Science Fiction)

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I read this book a while ago so I don't really remember the details. But it's really good!

The story has the stereotypical structure of "traveller from the author's time visits the future". However, as the Amazon text says, it's definitely a dys- rather than an utopia, a dehumanised future where people are empty, bored, and consumerist, where babies are raised in factory-like creches.

Souvestre predicted several technologies with surprising accuracy, although as I said, I don't remember which specifically. Anyway so did Jules Verne. What sunk in more was his predictions of the spirit of the age, and his insight that material progress would not necessarily lead to greater happiness or quality of life.

As someone who has lived in several different countries already at the age of 26, I found this line striking: "Their vacant faces were like coins worn away by use, which had lost their imprint and only differed because they were made of different metals. Because they had come to regard the world as a great highway, they had lost all their sense of nationality: they no longer had a town, or a hearth; and, in consequence, they had no motherland."

It could apply to a lot of people - the professional expatriate down through the low-wage migrant worker to the refugee. It echoes the English saying "You can't go home again" and The Economist's recent essay on migration, adaptation, and nostalgia. We now find that there are things more important than the idea of home. I think this is what Souvestre predicted best about the future - that loss of identity linked to place, the rootlessness of the modern human (for better or for worse).

On the other hand, it's also somewhat humourous so it's not totally depressing.