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Fantasy Commentator, v. 1, issue 7, Summer 1945
Page 138
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138 FANTASY COMMENTATOR II We come now to a particularly fascinating series of tales. Asleep---and then awake! And to a world that has changed, for centuries may have passed by while the sleeper lay unconscious of them all! And when one thinks of this theme the book which has achieved the most fame, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, 2000-1887, is usually the first to come to mind. Bellamy pictures a utopia in which his hero awakens, and his effort was interesting enough to elicit critical response (even in fictional form) from many other writers, all of which was perhaps responsible for his sequel Equality (1897). These were very well written, but I feel that many later attempts make more pleasant reading nowadays. Perhaps the very greatest of these is The Messiah of the Cylinder, a book that appeared in 1917. Victor Rousseau, its author, has here created a tale that can be read and reread with undiminished pleasure. Locked in a cylinder that cannot open for a hundred years, the hero of the tale recovers consciousness to find a world greatly altered. Man's deities have been stolen from him, and a mechanistic science offered as substitute. To the awakened man London is terrible, yet somehow fascinating. Human sympathy is at a low ebb; man is for the most part ruthless in this day, and much regimented, too. Later, our hero finds suspended in a great temple a cylinder similar to that in which he himself had slept---and in it his sweetheart of that day he left behind; the cap of her prison is slowly unscrewing, which indicates that her day of awakening is near. The Messiah of the Cylinder is packed with thrills, and tells, amid much action and excitement, of the final revolutionary triumph of the olden ways of living and of the reestablishment of the Christian faith. This book is indeed one that no one who follows fantasy fiction should fail to read. Deservedly famous, too, is George Allan England's magnificent trilogy, which appeared in book form as the single volume Darkness and Dawn (1914). This bulky novel---it is almost three inches thick!---tells the story of the awakening of an engineer and his secretary in the ruined tower of New York City's Metropolitan Building to find that civilization has crumbled about them as a result of some unknown catastrophe. It seems scarcely possible that an author would be able to cram into one story as much adventure, as many thrills, as has England in his account of how these two survivors reestablish civilization from the ruins. And he has done this well; the novel reads smoothly, and is unquestionably a magnificent achievement in the field of fantasy. Owen Johnson's Coming of the Amazons (1931) is satire, but interesting nevertheless. Here the refrigerated hero is roused to a woman-ruled world, to revolt after a time against this feminine domination. Kenneth S. Guthrie's Romance of Two Centuries (1920) has its hero awaken a hundred years in the future; this book becomes somewhat dull in spots because the author dwells too long upon the perfections of the society he himself wishes to see some day come about. It is fascinating in many respects, however, and provides much good reading. An even more interesting conception of the future is given in the excellent People of the Ruins (1920) of Edward Shanks; here the hero finds his future England sadly retrogressed in civilization---the inhabitants can no longer make machines and use the ancient crumbling buildings rather than bothering to make new ones. He manages to construct a gun, with consequent interesting developments. Granville Hicks and Richard Bennett co-authored in 1940 The First to Awaken: a Novel of the Year 2040. This is merely a fictional vehicle for idea of the authors about a perfect society, and tells of a clerk who is awakened after a century-long sleep and sees this scientific utopia. Edwin Lester Arnold's Phra the Phoenician (1890); though not strictly speaking a novel of the future gains mention here because its hero, after a number of adventures in past eras
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138 FANTASY COMMENTATOR II We come now to a particularly fascinating series of tales. Asleep---and then awake! And to a world that has changed, for centuries may have passed by while the sleeper lay unconscious of them all! And when one thinks of this theme the book which has achieved the most fame, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, 2000-1887, is usually the first to come to mind. Bellamy pictures a utopia in which his hero awakens, and his effort was interesting enough to elicit critical response (even in fictional form) from many other writers, all of which was perhaps responsible for his sequel Equality (1897). These were very well written, but I feel that many later attempts make more pleasant reading nowadays. Perhaps the very greatest of these is The Messiah of the Cylinder, a book that appeared in 1917. Victor Rousseau, its author, has here created a tale that can be read and reread with undiminished pleasure. Locked in a cylinder that cannot open for a hundred years, the hero of the tale recovers consciousness to find a world greatly altered. Man's deities have been stolen from him, and a mechanistic science offered as substitute. To the awakened man London is terrible, yet somehow fascinating. Human sympathy is at a low ebb; man is for the most part ruthless in this day, and much regimented, too. Later, our hero finds suspended in a great temple a cylinder similar to that in which he himself had slept---and in it his sweetheart of that day he left behind; the cap of her prison is slowly unscrewing, which indicates that her day of awakening is near. The Messiah of the Cylinder is packed with thrills, and tells, amid much action and excitement, of the final revolutionary triumph of the olden ways of living and of the reestablishment of the Christian faith. This book is indeed one that no one who follows fantasy fiction should fail to read. Deservedly famous, too, is George Allan England's magnificent trilogy, which appeared in book form as the single volume Darkness and Dawn (1914). This bulky novel---it is almost three inches thick!---tells the story of the awakening of an engineer and his secretary in the ruined tower of New York City's Metropolitan Building to find that civilization has crumbled about them as a result of some unknown catastrophe. It seems scarcely possible that an author would be able to cram into one story as much adventure, as many thrills, as has England in his account of how these two survivors reestablish civilization from the ruins. And he has done this well; the novel reads smoothly, and is unquestionably a magnificent achievement in the field of fantasy. Owen Johnson's Coming of the Amazons (1931) is satire, but interesting nevertheless. Here the refrigerated hero is roused to a woman-ruled world, to revolt after a time against this feminine domination. Kenneth S. Guthrie's Romance of Two Centuries (1920) has its hero awaken a hundred years in the future; this book becomes somewhat dull in spots because the author dwells too long upon the perfections of the society he himself wishes to see some day come about. It is fascinating in many respects, however, and provides much good reading. An even more interesting conception of the future is given in the excellent People of the Ruins (1920) of Edward Shanks; here the hero finds his future England sadly retrogressed in civilization---the inhabitants can no longer make machines and use the ancient crumbling buildings rather than bothering to make new ones. He manages to construct a gun, with consequent interesting developments. Granville Hicks and Richard Bennett co-authored in 1940 The First to Awaken: a Novel of the Year 2040. This is merely a fictional vehicle for idea of the authors about a perfect society, and tells of a clerk who is awakened after a century-long sleep and sees this scientific utopia. Edwin Lester Arnold's Phra the Phoenician (1890); though not strictly speaking a novel of the future gains mention here because its hero, after a number of adventures in past eras
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