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A prescient look at humankind's future

When a diplomat dies in the 1930s, he leaves behind a book of "dream visions" he has been experiencing, detailing events that will occur on Earth for the next 200 years. This fictional account of the future (similar to Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon) proved prescient in many ways, as Wells predicts events such as World War II, the rise of chemical warfare, and climate change.

Three Hundred Years Hence is a utopian science fiction novel by author Mary Griffith. It is the first known utopian novel written by an American woman.

In Three Hundred Years Hence envisiones a feminist future in the year 2135.

The book is set in Philadelphia.

The main character, Edgar Hastings, leaves on a business trip but is frozen in a snow storm.

Thee hundred years later, he is discovered, thawed out and wakes up. He finds the improvements taken place since his accident amazing. The improved conditions are due entirely to the changes that took place when all females were given an education.

About the Book (written by David Hartwell): The utopia Chauncey Thomas describes in The Crystal Button may seem a remarkable vision for a late nineteenth-century Boston carriage-manufacturer writing in his spare time.

His hero, Paul Prognosis, goes into a coma for ten years after an accident and dreams that he is in the city of Tone (new Boston) in 4872, three thousand years in the future. It is a highly sanitized, perfectly organized world with sumptuous architecture - colonnades, triumphal arches, facades alive with sculptured decorations. Paul is filled with wonder by the way things work, and much of the novel is devoted to the operations of pure science - Tone's subway system for example, in which electricity and compressed air are the energy sources for rapid transit.

Unlike most utopian novelists Thomas does not moralize, though he faces an awkward paradox in the combination of stability and technology: everything must be changed but also remain permanent. All through the novel there are hints of unresolved anxieties which culminates when the comet Veda appears off schedule and destroys the ordered world of Tone, returning Paul to consciousness in the present.

The Land of the Changing Sun (1894), is a Lost-World tale featuring an Underground society named Alpha, which the author seems to have conceived of as a Utopia; founded 200 years earlier under the Arctic - in caverns, however, not inside a Hollow Earth - by a group of inventive Englishmen, it is lit and heated by an artificial sun, which moves on tracks and changes colour pleasingly. A cruel Eugenic regime causes the exiling of any person deemed defective. Intruding magma threatens this world, and its inhabitants decide to evacuate Alpha in advanced submarines.

Charlie Johns has been snatched from his home on 61 North 34th Street and delivered to the strange future world of Ledom. Here, violence is a vague and improbable notion. Technology has triumphed over hunger, overpopulation, pollution, even time and space. But there is a change Charlie finds even more shocking: gender is a thing of the past. Venus Plus X is Theodore Sturgeon's brilliant evocation of a civilization for whom tensions between male and female and the human preoccupation with sex no longer exist.

As Charlie Johns explores Ledom and its people, he finds that the human precepts he holds dear are profane in this new world. But has Charlie learned all there is to know about this advanced society? And why are the Ledom so intent on gaining Charlie's approval? Unsettling, compelling, and no less than visionary, here is science fiction at its boldest: a novel whose wisdom and lyricism make it one of the most original and insightful speculations on gender ever produced.

Originally appeared in Ace Double D-103 (1955).

The operating principle was random selection: positions of public power were decided by a sophisticated lottery. Everyone had a chance, everyone could live in hope that they would be chosen to be the boss, the Quizmaster. But with the power came the game - the assassination game - which everyone could watch on TV. Would the new man be good enough to avoid his chosen killer? Which made for fascinating and exciting viewing, compelling enough to distract the public's attention while the Big Five industrial complexes run the world, the solar system and the people, unnoticed and completely unopposed. Then, in 2203, with the choice of a member of a maverick cult as Quizmaster, the system developed a little hitch...

Human crisis in a computer world.

Rear cover synopsis:

"Bohn, the omnipotent computer whose flashing circuits and messianic pronouncements dictate what tomorrow will--or will not--be.

But Matthew Oliver is flesh and blood and full of questions--not nearly as certain as the machine he's appointed to serve.

And the right hand of science seldom knows what the left hand is doing..."

It's influenced William Gibson and been listed as one of the ten essential works of science fiction. Most importantly, Joanna Russ's THE FEMALE MAN is a suspenseful, surprising and darkly witty chronicle of what happens when Jeannine, Janet, Joanna, and Jael--four alternate selves from drastically different realities--meet.