Victor Rousseau, The Messiah of the Cylinder (1917)

Following on from my last post, and out of mere curiosity, I read Victor Rousseau's The Messiah of the Cylinder (1917). Our narrator Arnold Tennell works with elderly Sir Spofforth Moore and a geezer called Lazaroff at ‘The Biological Institute’ near London. Also on the scene is Sir Spofforth’s toothsome daughter Esther. Lazaroff ('a Prussian Pole … keen and fanatical, daring, inflexible, the sort of man who would welcome the chance to proclaim a Holy War for Science and die in the front rank') is as full-on an eugenicist as I can recall encountering in any novel of the period:

"Today civilization is being choked to death by the effete, the defective, whom a too benign humanitarianism suffers to live beneath the shelter of a worn-out faith. The fearful menace of a race of defectives has laid hold of the popular imagination. Soon we shall follow the lead of progressive America, and forbid them to propagate their kind. Here any statesman who dared suggest sterilization would be hounded from office. But England is awakening." [11]

Way to go, America! ‘Man will be free. The logical State, finely conceived by Wells, without its rudimentary appendixes and fish-gills, will be the nation of the future.’ [11-12] Boo to fish gills! And what will the main business of this future-utopia be?

"It will be a world of physical and mental perfection, too," [Lazaroff] cried. "Of free men and women, freely mating, separating when the mating impulse is dead — "

"Yes, he is right, Father," Esther interposed eagerly. "Whatever else may come, the hour of woman's liberation is striking."

Mating! Mating FTW! Esther, for one, certainly seems keen. Anyway it so happens that Lazaroff has invented a suspended animation chamber. He also has his eye on Esther, and knows Arnold is a rival; so he tricks our narrator into climbing inside the chamber and sends him away into the far future. Hiss!

Arnold wakes alone in a ruined cellar, and wanders around for a bit. The description of future-London anticipates Fritz Lang’s Metropolis by a decade:

The county of Surrey appeared to be an extensive forest, ending about a waste of dismantled brick, the suburbs of old London, which extended on each side as far as I could see. Then the modern town began: an outer ring of what I took to be enormous factories and storage warehouses; an inner ring, no doubt, of residences; and then the nucleus, the most splendid city that the imagination could have devised … the city presenting the aspect of a succession of gigantic steps, until the summit, the square mile comprising the heart, was reached. This consisted of an array of enormous edifices, with fronts perfectly plain, and evidently constructed of brick-faced steel-work, but all glistening a dazzling white, which, even at that height, made my eyes water, and rising uniformly some forty-five or fifty stories. The flat roofs were occupied by gardens or what I took to be gymnasia, sheltered beneath tarpaulins. I saw innumerable airplanes at rest, suspended high above the streets, while others flitted here and there above the roofs. [45-6]

Interestingly, the future is supplied with two new colours: mull and glow. Not, you understand, new shades of already existing colours—but actually new colours. You’re wondering how that works? Permit me to enlighten you:

"Can it be that in — where you came from they have only the old seven colors in the spectrum?"

"From red to violet."

"We have had nine for at least twenty years," he said. "Mull, below red, and glow, above violet; what our ancestors called ultra-violet and believed to be invisible, though it was staring them in the face everywhere all the time. There used to be a theory that the color sense has developed with civilization."

Sounds persuasive.

I was astonished to discover that no history prior to 1945 was taught, and no geography. The greater part of the curriculum was devoted to scientific and economic subjects. I learned that Oxford and Cambridge had disappeared, with the old public schools, in 1945, after a revolution, the anger of the people having been kindled against them on account of their moral influence and the distinctive stamp of character that they produced.

Quite right! Also, Rousseau anticipates News 24:

On the way home we stopped at one of the open-air moving picture shows, and saw two or three dramatized versions of public affairs. Ingenious mechanism synchronized the movements of the figures upon the screen, which were in stereoscopic relief, with speeches made through the telephone funnels. These, David said, took the place of newspapers when the socialized State destroyed the printed news-sheet by the simple process of killing the advertising.

People still smoke, too. 'Doctor Sanson wants to forbid the use of nicotine as impairing the productive efficiency of the race,’ says one character. ‘But the Council thinks the narcotic has a restraining influence — ‘ So who is this Sanson? ‘He is a man of superhuman powers,’ we’re told, ‘more feared than any man has ever been feared. There is a popular belief that he was born a thousand years ago, and has wandered from land to land, waiting for the new age to dawn. Nothing has ever been learned as to his origin. He appeared like a conqueror, about the year 1980, to lead the hosts of the revolution to victory.’ Ah, 1980!

Well, after a fair amount of Cook’s Touring round this future land, we come to the crunch: Sanson, of course, is Lazaroff. He sealed Esther and himself into suspended-animation tubes too, planning on awaking in the future and taking Esther as his bride. But he foolishly forgot about leap-years when setting the dials for Esther and Arnold, and this somehow resulted in him awaking in 1980, 35 years before them. The tubes being designed as absolutely indestructible and impenetrable he has no option but to grow into an old man whilst the woman he loves remains in stasis as a beautiful 25-year-old. So he seized global power, instituted a eugenicist dys-, or u-, topia (depending on your view) and now plans to make humanity immortal. ‘You shall work with me as you used to do, when I and Esther rule the world together, immortal as gods,’ he tells Arnold; only to be rebuffed ('you can never hold me to obedience, nor Esther either. I love her, and we shall both die before we yield!'). As the novel takes it as axiomatic that immortality would be a great evil, Arnold raises a rebellion to overthrow Lazaroff/Sanson. This involves a big climactic bust-up at the end of the book, with ray-guns and armies and teeth-gnashingly-described aerial battles.

Sansom calls on the Mormon-led dictatorship of America to send its air-force and aid him, but ‘the Mormon airplanes never arrived, because, practically at the same hour, America rose in revolt against her masters. And the Sanson regime has been swept away forever’. Arnie gets the girl; Sansom crashes his airplane into the moon. Hurrah!

Oh, the universal joy at the release of all the inmates of the defectives and moron shops! ... It was as if a dark cloud had rolled away and disclosed the sun.

Thank HEAVENS they closed down the moron shops! Also Christianity is restored, and the narrator notes 'the astonishment and enthusiasm as the people listened to the teachings of Christianity. After three months there are still crowds at all the street corners, hearing the doctrines and the story of Christ from priests and missionaries.' So all's well that ends well.