Review: The Pleasures of a Futuroscope By Lord Dunsany

By William P. Simmons

An Irish master of fantasy and the outre no less influential to the development and restoration of Irish literature and culture than the much more critically beloved figure of William Butler Yeats, Lord Dunsany (1878-1957) was crucial to the development of the literature of the fantasique. Author of more than twelve novels, hundreds of short fictions & poems, and dozens of plays (not counting his essays), Dunsany's elegant style and self assured voice were the perfect if unusual tools with which to create shadow worlds and twilight scenarios that most often emphasized the purity of nature and impulse over the cold mechanical reason of modern civilization and the industrial mish-mash to which it had enslaved itself.

While fantasy as impulse, imaginative outlet, and literary device must have accompanied the first men setting by firelight staring up at the sky, and elements of myth, magic, and the supernatural comprise the major themes and substance of the earliest myths, legends, folktales, and cave paintings, Fantasy as a specialized literary genre is widely believed to have came into being within the past hundred years or so. Along with William Morris and George MacDonald, Lord Dunsany was one of the genre's parents. And yet, despite the shining quality of his work, and the influence which he cast over such authors as H. P. Lovecraft (in idea if not in style) and Ambrose Bierce, his work has suffered an inexplicable lessening in critical interest. So much the better, then, that a novel like The Pleasures Of A Futurescope is released by Hippocampus Press alongside several resurrected new collections of reprint and original material from Wildside press and Nightshade Books.

His last major work, The Pleasures of a Futuroscope, is a powerful if stylistically uneven novel far more significant in symbolism and meaning than in actual construction or narration. Evidence that even at his weaker moments Dunsany was capable of weaving profound moods of enchantment and fear, this novel, printed here for the first time, nevertheless lacks something of the grace and penetrable emotion that made his early collections so very powerful. While this early example of post apocalyptic fiction has much in the way of meditative beauty and insight to recommend it, and the narrative itself is for the most part strong enough to retain our interest - if for no other reason, than as a result of Dunsany's poetic gift of description and understanding of symbolism to convey messages far more profound to our instincts than found immediately within the surface story - its subject of survival in a far off world lacks the intimacy, sheer cosmic splendor, and mystical, rhythmic word play which make such pure fantasies as The Gods Of Pegana, The King Of Elfland's Daughter, and several of his plays both thrilling and philosophically provoking, charging timeless myths of nature and instinct with an infectious romantic longing not as apparent or intended in what Joshi correctly refers to in his introduction as what might be considered the first "reality show" as its narrator witnesses the daily struggles and living conditions of a primitive family in the future.

One of Dunsany's rare attempts at science fiction, The Pleasures Of A Futurescope is decidedly light on the science and large on generalities and literary coincidence. The author's use of a bored, entertainment-seeking idler as a narrator who continually reminds us of his free time and limited knowledge is particularly irritating, as this ploy is easily seen for the mechanical ploy that it is, saving Dunsany from spending the time or effort to support the major incidents of his whimsical drama with convincing information, backdrop, or supporting technical details. While this minor flaw can be overlooked by the presumption that Dunsany's fiction was often more concerned with mythic generalities and symbols than with concrete action, and his interest pointed more often into the airy shadows of fantasy rather than the mechanical logic of science, not so easy to dismiss is the narrator's continual reminder to the reader that his purpose of looking through the 'futurecope' is for simple entertainment - as though we are ever allowed to forget! A small complaint, this repetitive device on Dunsany's part nevertheless interrupts more than one moment of suspense, tension, and wonder.

Thankfully, what the novel lacks in background information, belief, and stylistic unity, it makes up for in imagination, raw storytelling ability, and the author's ever present ability penchant for lending more life and pertinence to grand symbols than to characters, which, even if believably crafted, exist and achieve emotional effect as larger personified ideas and emotions. In this and moving novel, written in 1955, a retired gentleman of mean burrows a futuroscope - a device that allows a viewer to see into the near or distant future - from its impractical, eccentric inventor. The futurescope reveals an awful fate for humanity: a nuclear holocaust has destroyed nearly all human life on the planet. The city of London, now merely a huge crater, is filled in with water from the Thames. The pitiful remnants of humanity have been reduced to a Stone Age existence. The narrator, peering increasingly more and more through the futuroscope, focuses on the life, times, and struggles of a single family and the wolves, natural dangers, gypsies, and outcasts among them.

As is known by any serious student of the fantastic and supernatural, Dunsany possessed a distinct understanding of fantasy as a tool for investing archetypes with new life and meaning for those in modern times considering them. His fiction suggests again and again his understanding of the importance of symbols in fantasy. While several of his mini-myths, vignettes, and tales almost always treat fantastic figures and themes with beauty, grace, and no small degree of seriousness in both substance and purpose (albeit through a voice and writing style that often poked good meaning fun at miracles even while lamenting their disappearance), his fictions simultaneously employed horror, fantasy, and very rarely science-fiction as metaphors and allegory for beliefs and deeply felt instincts that he himself harbored on facets of life, culture, and the world at large. One of these themes and metaphors is evoked strongly in this work of quasi-dystopian fiction - that of the importance and wonder of men returning to their native relationship with the natural world, and likewise the very real, ever-present dangers of a society whose technological "progress" and machines have been allowed to grow stronger than its creators. Similar to the Pan-like themes found in many of his short stories, which, along with the novel The Blessing Of Pan (1927), suggest the physical, emotional, and spiritual wonder and freedom to be found in the animal impulse and nature, The Pleasures Of A Futurescope features its narrator evolving from initial repulsion to admiration to the primitive return man and the world has taken since a hinted-at atomic blast and winter destroyed civilization.

As said by H.P. Lovecraft: "To the truly imaginative he (Dunsany) is a talisman and a key unlocking rich storehouses of dream." Rich storehouses of dream are indeed opened up as Dunsany's narrator watches the struggles of a neolithic stone-age family in the distant future experiencing a life equal parts tragedy and beauty, excitement and strife, as he lives and dines in his own time - a modern age where thrills had by television and the wireless are a poor substitute to a life where one encounters the ravages of passion, violence, and the satisfaction of survival daily. As the daughter of this stone age family is kidnaped by the "Wild Man", a man even more joined to nature than they, and as a wandering pack of surviving gypsies toil in arts that hint of a progress that threatens to throw the world again into a race of technological superiority, Dunsany's romanticist sensibilities, mystical appreciation of nature, and storytelling ability triumphs over occasional faults of logic and style. The result is a novel that serves as both an exciting, philosophically profound read as well as evidence that the late Lord Dunsany had lost little of his ability as he neared the end of a monumental career.