10 Intriguing Visions of the Future
The future always changes. From heroic space adventures in the 1960s to paranoid cyberpunk in the 1980s, you can learn a lot about the zeitgeist of an era by looking at how people imagined the future. This is also true of most early science fiction from the 18th and 19th centuries. Like today, writers back then projected their fears, ambitions, and prejudices onto a future society that we, as residents of a far-off epoch, can now appreciate with gimlet-eyed hindsight.
10 Memoirs Of The Twentieth Century
One of the first English-language texts to deal with the future was Memoirs of the Twentieth Century, written by Irish Anglican clergyman Samuel Madden and published in 1733. He claimed to have had the “honour and misfortune” to “have dar’d to enter by the help of an infallible Guide, into the dark Caverns of Futurity, and discover the Secrets of Ages yet to come.”Louis-Sebastien Mercier’s novel L’An 2440 commences with an 18th-century Frenchman having a heated argument with an Englishman before going off to take a nap and waking up in the year 2440. (The English translation, Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred, changed the year to 2500 “for the sake of a round number.”) After some brief confusion in which the future inhabitants assume that the Frenchman is dressing up in historical clothing for the sake of making some philosophical point, he sets off on a tour of the far future.
Mercier was a great believer in Enlightenment thought, and thus, his future Paris is advanced in terms of social order, though not so much in technology. Compared to the 18th century, fashions are much freer and more comfortable. The 25th-century streets are much more orderly than the chaos of 18th-century transportation, with carriages are reserved for infirm judges and men of good character, rather than the nobility (who thus enjoy “more money and less of gout“).
The future society has adopted rationality as the basis of their government and way of life, and the world is at peace. The narrator even encounters a statue of a black man with the inscription: “To the avenger of the New World.” In Mercier’s future, the European powers were eventually beaten back by slaves and the original inhabitants of the New World, and colonialism was finally abandoned for the good of all. However, Mercier also assumed that the values of Enlightenment Europe would spread worldwide, with the Chinese abandoning their writing system and adopting the French language as well as the Turks drinking wine and watching Voltaire’s play Mahomet.
The novel concludes with a visit to the palace of Versailles, which is reduced to “nothing but ruins, gaping walls, and mutilated statues; some porticos, half demolished, afforded a confused idea of its ancient magnificence.” There, the Frenchman meets Louis XIV, who has apparently been condemned to remain forever in the remnants of his empire’s former glory. Just before asking the monarch a question, the narrator is bitten by an adder and reawakens in the 18th century, bring the story to an abrupt conclusion.
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