WeRead
Powered by ReaderPub
A narrator drifts into a visionary account of life in the year 2071, guided by the apparition of an earlier scientific thinker and a young companion, and proceeds through a series of speculative essays and vignettes imagining technological, social, and institutional changes. Topics range from advanced communications, air and rail travel, materials and energy innovations, scientific instruments and observatories, to reorganized education, libraries, political reforms, suffrage, gender rights, and global commerce. The tone alternates between satirical observation and earnest extrapolation, presenting descriptive scenes and concise treatises that project how inventions and reforms might reshape everyday life and public institutions.
As we came nearer I began to suspect that this wire might be a tubular bridge of some kind, and this surmise grew into certainty when Bacon assured me that a company had already been formed for the purpose of constructing a second one; “for,” added my informant, “this one has become utterly inadequate to the extensive communication between England and the continent.”