The World As It Shall Be

WORKING

'''Souvestre, Émile. Le monde tel qu'il sera. Paris: W. Coquebert, 1846. The World As It Shall Be.''' Translated from the French by Margaret Clarke. Wesleyan University Press, 2004.

Cited by John J. Pierce, "Imagination and Evolution, a Conceptual History of Science Fiction," manuscript, 2018, who calls it "a nightmare of Satanic technology," where "Babies are placed in steam-powered crèches resembling henhouses, and fed a formula called supra-lacto-gune; older children are raised under glass like vegetables, and taught a materialist catechism." This world is "is ultra-mechanized but far from safe: deaths and injuries are common in the subways and submarines are attacked by whales. Industry is compartmentalized; each state of the Republic of United Interests produces only one product; people work at only one trade and hardly speak or think of anything else." Workers are "bred for their tasks" (as in the considerably later Brave New World) and "lead a hellish existence much like that in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927)" (Pierce chapter 2, ms p. 14).

Pierce, RDE, 27Mar18