Genre:

Abstract

Publications abstracted:

[Macnie] 1890

Subjects:

Futurism, Electricity, Humanism, Imagination, Metallurgy, Manufactories, Transport, Technology, Progress, Socialism, Agriculture, Education, Photography, Gender

People mentioned:

Edward Bellamy

    Summary of John Macnie's utopian vision of the future, in which electricity has transformed almost every aspect of human life. This novel, as well as other utopian fictions, reveal how 'We are standing at the day-dawn of the Electric Age. The thunderbolt of Jove has become the most puissant of all the servants of man. It has annihilated time, abolished space, and it will yet unify the world' (230). In the ninety sixth century, photography and the phonograph are 'women's inventions' that are 'characteristically feminine in their purpose and application' allowing a woman to 'behold those distant scenes to which she had less free access than man—before marriage, at least' (238).