• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 283 0

appearance. It was one conglomerate mass of grey-toned, semi-opaque glass, giving some indication of the intense heat that had been evolved in its destruction. The outlines of its principal thoroughfares were still faintly indicated, although the melting buildings had flowed into the streets like lava, partly obliterating them. Here and there a dome of glass showed where an abnormally high structure once stood, and thus the contour of the city bore a weird resemblance to its former self — about such as the grim outlines of a corpse over which a sheet has been thrown bear to a living man. All along the shore lay the gaunt skeletons of half-fused steamships. The young men passed this dismal calcined graveyard in deep silence, keeping straight up the broad Hudson. No sign of life greeted them until they neared Poughkeepsie, when they saw, flying above a house situated on the top of a hill, that brilliant fluttering flag, the Stars and Stripes. Somehow its very motion in the wind gave promise that the vital spark had not been altogether extinguished in America. The great sadness that had oppressed the voyagers was lifted, and they burst forth into cheer after cheer. One of the young men rushed into the chart-room, and brought out the Union Jack, which was quickly hauled up to the mast-head, and the reverend captain pulled the cord that, for the first time during the voyage, let loose the roar of the steam whistle, rousing the echoes of the hills on either side of the noble stream. Instantly, on the verandah of the flag covered house, was seen the glimmer of a white summer dress, then of another and another and another, until eight were counted.

AND FINALLY

THE events That followed belong rather to the region of romance than to a staid, sober narrative of fact like the present; indeed, the theme has been a favorite one with poets and novelists, whose pens would have been more able than mine to do justice to this international idyll. America and England were indeed joined, as the American Ambassador had predicted at the Guildhall, though at the time his words were spoken he had little idea of the nature and complete accord of that union. While it cannot be denied that the unprecedented disaster that obliterated human life in 1904 seemed to be a calamity, yet it is possible to trace the design of a beneficent Providence in this wholesale destruction. The race that now inhabits the earth is one that includes no savages and no warlords. Armies are unknown and unthought of. There is no battleship on the face of the waters. It is doubtful if universal peace could have been brought to the world short of the annihilation of the jealous, cantankerous, quarrelsome peoples who inhabited it previous to 1904. Humanity was destroyed once, by flood, and again by fire; but whether the race, as it enlarges, will deteriorate after its second extinguishment, as it appears to have done after its first, must remain for the future to determine.

AN INTERPLANETARY RUPTURE

Frank L. Packard

So far, most of the stories have either been set in the contemporary Victorian/Edwardian period or in the near future, but now it’s time to move far ahead in time, by over a thousand years to the fourth millennium. Although H. G. Wells took us into the far distant future in The Time Machine, he only took us a little over two centuries ahead in When the Sleeper Wakes, and it was rare for writers to go too far. Technological innovation was gathering pace but it was still all relatively new and it was difficult to see beyond the next horizon.

There were the occasional exceptions. Simon Newcomb, for instance, explored the last days of a future Earth in “The End of the World” (McClure’s Magazine, May 1903), set at least 6000 years in the future. Camille Flammarion likewise saw the last days in Omega (1897) which follows events up to 200,000 years in the future. Both Newcomb and Flammarion were astronomers and thus used to thinking on a cosmic scale. It was unusual for stories to actually consider society and events in detail in the far future.

Of special