Green man Review: The Pleasures of a Futuroscope By Lord Dunsany
By Matthew Scott Winslow
Perhaps it's just a sign of my total book geekiness, but it's always a pleasure for me to learn that an otherwise unknown work by an author I enjoy is being published. When C.S. Lewis's Boxen was published back in the '80s, I snagged an early copy of it. Sure, it was disappointing, but it was Lewis that I hadn't yet read. So it is with much pleasure that I learned that a new, final novel by Lord Dunsany was being published by Hippocampus Press, the same company that has been releasing H.P. Lovecraft books and material for some time now.
The Pleasures of a Futuroscope is believed to be Dunsany's final novel. Up until now, it has always been held that His Fellow Men was Dunsany's final novel, and that from the publication of His Fellow Men in 1952 until his death in 1957, Dunsany slowly wound down, progressively writing less and less. The discovery of Futuroscope; however, means the leading biographies and studies will have to be re-written. From the introduction by Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi, we learn that Futuroscope was most likely written in 1955, meaning Dunsany was writing almost to the end of his life.
Lord Dunsany is known most for his fantasy, especially The Gods of Pegana, The Charwoman's Shadow, and The King of Elfland's Daughter. He did, however, write science fiction, but even that work would be better categorized as 'science fantasy.' The Pleasures of a Futuroscope easily fits within this latter category. The premise is that an inventor (Methery from "The Two-Way War" in Jorkens Borrows a Large Whiskey) has created a machine that works like a television, but allows you to see into the future. Methery, being your typical 'absent-minded professor', does not see the value in his invention, and so he lends it to the narrator, who immediately sees its value, and writes up his experiences with the machine in order to help promote Methery's great invention.
What the narrator sees when he looks into the future, however, is anything but the pleasure that the book's title ironically suggests. Moving first into the near future, the narrator sees the urban sprawl of mid-twentieth century expanding and expanding and expanding. Then, moving further into the future, he witnesses a blinding flash that is so strong even his eyes, which are only viewing the flash, are rendered radioactive for a short span of time. At first, the future immediately beyond the flash is grim as would be expected. The narrator cranks the futuroscope out to the furthest future it can find, 500 years in the distance, where he discovers a family living in neolithic conditions. Mankind has reverted to stone-age lifestyles, with some distant memory of metal being the source of evil causing everyone to avoid metal. Whenever a metallic object is dug up, it is quickly discarded with religious rituals.
The narrator follows his 'futurolithic' family through their daily life, quickly becoming enthralled and entranced by them. Most of this novel is a series of vignettes as the narrator voyeuristically accompanies the family though many trials and triumphs. (This makes for quite an interesting contrast: we have here a novel from half a century past, foretelling the future half a millennium hence via a medium that is today, half a century from the time of writing, quite in vogue: 'reality TV.')
There is no real plot to this novel; rather, the strength of the book comes from the haunting vision of the future that a near octogenarian of half a century ago saw. In the footsteps of Tolkien and Lewis, Lord Dunsany was suspicious of the direction technology and 'progress' were taking mankind. In the introduction, editor S.T. Joshi quotes from Dunsany's book of essays A Glimpse from a Watch Tower:
Strange, strange news came to us to-day. We have just heard of the atomic bomb. . . . I think that a new era started yesterday. . . . The picture I long have seen in the dark of the future, growing rapidly less dim as our strange age goes by, is the picture of Man grown cleverer than he was intended to be, but yet not clever enough, and destroying himself by his own skill. Now we are like Phaeton, mounting his father's chariot for the first time. Where will the wild horses take us?
Were this not one of the early twentieth century's leading fantasists, such thinking could easily be dismissed as the thoughts of an old man afraid by the march of time. But Dunsany was concerned about these issues long before the first atomic bomb. Instead, even though the mechanism for this dystopian future is one that is less and less relevant for us today, the story is still chilling and frightening, for we are becoming more and more dependent upon our technology. Were the food supply to fail, how long could most of us survive? If the Internet were to collapse and GMR were to not be updated, could we make it in the world? These are the sorts of questions that dystopias ask and the fact that we can still ask them makes books like The Pleasures of a Futuroscope vitally necessary for us today, half a century of 'progress' later.
