To anyone who has considered at all attentively the enormous material advances of the nineteenth century, a much more remarkable thing than any invention or improvement which that century brought forth must be the speed of human progression during the hundred years between 1800 and 1900, and the extraordinary acceleration of that speed which began […]
Category: Speculative Fiction
Robert Grimshaw – Fifty Years Hence, or What May Be in 1943
TO MY CHILDREN, Who may perchance, fifty years hence, compare these prophecies with what has then come about. “Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.” Locksley Hall. That portion of the public which honors me by perusing what […]
Pieter Harting – Anno Domini 2071
When comparing the present condition of society with that of past centuries the question naturally arises, what will the future be ? Will the same progress which, in our own times especially, has been of such vast dimensions, and manifested itself in so many directions, continue to he ‘progressive ? And if so— for who […]
Mary Griffith – Three Hundred Years Hence
E. Nesbit – The Ebony Frame
To be rich is a luxurious sensation, the more so when you have plumbed the depths of hard-up-ness as a Fleet Street hack, a picker-up of unconsidered pars, a reporter, an unappreciated journalist; all callings utterly inconsistent with one’s family feeling and one’s direct descent from the Dukes of Picardy. When my Aunt Dorcas died […]