“I called for a hero – one who should be typical of the England of 1925…”
It’s always interesting when authors try and predict the future. A lot of the time they miss the mark entirely – anything from before the nineties seems to be unaware the Internet is going to be a thing – but sometimes there’s some terrifying prescience. 1984 got the idea about fake news; Cold Comfort Farm suggested videophones; and even Flashforward got the name of the next Pope right. But then there are people like Muriel Jaeger who, while not spot on, certainly seem to get the gist of the future more than others.
Guy Martin is an ordinary man from 1925 who finds himself catapulted two centuries into the future into a much-changed world. Taking residence in the Wayland family home, he begins to learn about this new society. Here, all citizens are given free education and a “power-box”, a device that grants access to communication, transportation and entertainment. The most popular sport is racing up mountains, actors no longer perform in theatres, religion is more of a hobby than a lifestyle, and most people get around by aerocycles. It seems that humans have finally reached a utopia.
But the more Guy explores this new world, the more he realises that perhaps not is all as it seems. Society is divided between the educated and the uneducated, with intellectualism regarded as the most important thing. And elsewhere, a man has announced he’s the new Messiah…
The book doesn’t waste much time in worrying about how Guy gets to the future, and I think it’s better that way or else we get too bogged down in it. What we really want to know is how the future turned out. Worldbuilding of this kind is always one of my favourite things, as no two authors ever hit on exactly the same idea. Where Jaeger seems to really win here is with the invention of the “power-box”, which is about as close to a smartphone I’ve seen any author manage it. Everyone has one of these devices that plugs into any other technology in the world, be it a screen, building or vehicle, and allows the user to control it. While not predicting the Internet completely, the idea that we’re all reliant on a small device in our pocket is a very prescient one.
Jaeger should probably be more remembered for this book, but it was eclipsed just five years later by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which stands far above others at the time for showing a possible future, and I’m sure that at least some of the reason we remember his and not hers is because she was a woman. Her future is far from perfect, as becomes clearer as the book goes on, but she does so some really interesting things with it, such as making education free (at one point, we learn, university education was compulsory, but not everyone cared enough for this to stick) and marriage being reduced to merely a formality. People seem to age differently too. I think it’s especially interesting to read it now, too, as it was written about a century ago about a time that is still a century ahead of us. Intriguing to be in the middle.
A forgotten utopia that’s well worth another look.