cover image The Great Romance: A Rediscovered Utopian Adventure

The Great Romance: A Rediscovered Utopian Adventure

The Inhabitant, , edited by Dominic Alessio. . Univ. of Nebraska/Bison, $17.95 (102pp) ISBN 978-0-8032-5996-6

In this anonymous work, first published in New Zealand in 1881 and lost until the 1990s, John Hope puts himself to sleep in 1950 and wakes up in 2143 to find that everyone is telepathic, and evil is almost unknown. He heads off to colonize Venus and soon encounters aliens, with whom he develops a daringly intimate relationship. Despite paltry characterization and amateurish prose by the standards of any century, Hope’s story includes surprisingly advanced ideas. This may have been the first time that anyone described space suits, air locks or the difficulties of landing on an asteroid or entering a planetary atmosphere. Alessio argues in his almost obsessively analytical introduction that the story may have had considerable, indirect influence on one of the most widely read books of the 19th century, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward . This reprint will be of considerable interest to specialist scholars of science fiction, if not the casual reader. (May)