[from THE FUTURIST, September-October 2001]
British Future Fiction 1700-1914 edited by I.F. Clarke. Pickering & Chatto Publishers Ltd. 2001. Eight volumes, approx. 2,100 pages. £495 ($880). Order now.
Future Dreams and Nightmares
Reviewed by Lane JenningsFuturists may now gain insights from popular futures writing long out of print.
British literary scholar and professor Ian F. Clarke has had a long career championing futures fiction, a wide-ranging genre that includes not only those works of science fiction set in the future, but also satires, utopias, accounts of anticipated wars and invasions, tales predicting the impacts of political change, scientific romances, and reports of voyages of discovery set in "an imaginary future period."
Clarke's book The Pattern of Expectation 1644-2001 (Jonathan Cape, 1979) traced the impact of utopian writing (including futures fiction) on society--particularly noting its role in popularizing such concepts as "progress" and, more recently, giving concrete form to contemporary fears of relentless growth and change. And his definitive bibliography of futures fiction The Tale of the Future, which has appeared in multiple revised and expanded editions since its first publication in 1961, lists and briefly describes hundreds of novels and stories focusing on many different aspects of future life.
But many of the works Clarke has researched and described so enticingly have long been out of print, available only in the rare book market or on the shelves of a few specialized libraries--until now.
British Future Fiction, a massive, eight-volume collection, now makes more easily available some two dozen intriguing, historically relevant, and entertaining examples of writing about imagined events and social innovations from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Examples include The Reign of George VI, 1900-1925 (published in 1763), a conservative "forecast" of the British monarchy triumphantly ruling all of Europe, and "The Battle of Dorking" (1871), a pamphlet describing a successful invasion of England by the Prussians, which provoked a furor of controversy and promoted military reorganization and rearmament in Britain before the First World War.
The long neglect of the writings included in this collection is due in large part to the fact that they do not fit conveniently into any existing market niche. They are neither "classic" mainstream fiction nor popular entertainment, but were mostly written to raise questions in readers' minds, to provoke argument, or to offer warnings of danger and proposals for action. Not everyone cares to read such thought-provoking works. But now, thanks to Clarke, those who do will once again have that opportunity.
In his General Introduction to the collection, Clarke notes that one of the key factors contributing to popular success in futures fiction is likely to limit its accuracy as a forecast: "[T]he tale of the future can always obtain maximum effect whenever it taps into contemporary expectations: the desire for social justice manifest in the extraordinary success of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, for example, and the fear of state power so evident in the last warning to the world in [George Orwell's] Nineteen Eighty-Four."
Thus, rather than presenting a fully plausible future, futures fictions tend to mirror the times in which they were created--and thus reveal the popular fears and biases likely to shape planning efforts and limit goal-setting in a given society.
Each volume in the collection features works on a common theme. The complete contents:
Volume 1, The Beginnings: The Reign of George VI, 1900-1925 (Anonymous); The Coming Race (Edward Bulwer-Lytton).
Volume 2, New Worlds: Three Hundred Years Hence (W.D. Hay); A Crystal Age (W.H. Hudson).
Volume 3, The Marvels of Mechanism: The Wreck of a World (W. Grove); An American Emperor (Louis Tracy).
Volume 4, Women's Rights: Yea and Nay: The Revolt of Man (Sir Walter Besant); Lesbia Newman (Henry Robert Samuel Dalton).
Volume 5, Woman Triumphant: Star of the Morning (Anonymous); The Sex Triumphant (A.C. Fox-Davies).
Volume 6, The Next Great War: The Battle of Dorking (Sir George Tomkyns Chesney); The Invasion of England (Sir William Butler); The Second Armada (Abraham Hayward); "The Siege of London" ("Posteritas"); The New Centurion: A Tale of Automatic Warfare (James Eastwick); The Next Naval War (Captain S. Earley-Wilmot).
Volume 7, Disasters to Come: The Death Trap (Robert William Cole); The Great Raid (Lloyd Williams); Under the Red Ensign (Anonymous).
Volume 8, The End of the World: The Doom of the Great City (Delaval North and William Delisle Hay); The Salvation of Nature (John Davidson); Lord of the World (Robert Hugh Benson).
Clarke's selections emphasize texts that are not available in separate editions or collections. This explains the absence of better-known works like Mary Shelley's The Last Man, William Morris's News From Nowhere, or anything at all by H.G. Wells.
Clarke also ends the collection with works written before the twentieth century was well under way, as Europe was preparing for World War I. As he notes in his Epilogue, visions of the future were radically altered then, and "the familiar geography of tomorrow's world was transformed into a shadow-land of conjectures and surmises. . . . No more happy global societies in the style of Bellamy's Looking Backward or in the jolly neighbourhood associations of Morris's News from Nowhere. In the desolate after-time of the new fiction, survival is the one sure happiness."
While the high price of this collection and its narrow scope (only British authors writing before World War I) may limit its sales appeal to public libraries and private citizens outside Britain, Clarke's extraordinary effort deserves the praise of futurists everywhere. By selecting, editing, annotating, and bringing back into print these significant writings, Clarke has taken another step to help make futures fiction available as a useful resource for contemporary futures studies.
About the Reviewer
Lane Jennings is research director of THE FUTURIST, production editor of Future Survey, and author of Virtual Futures.
