As a vision of an idealized world, a sort of utopia, Astor’s book owed a debt to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, the American bestseller of 1887, likewise set in the year 2000. (Time travel by sleep again: our hero enters a trance of 113 years.) Bellamy expressed the frustration of not being able to know the future. In his story “The Blindman’s World” he imagined that we earthlings are alone among the universe’s intelligent creatures in lacking “the faculty of foresight,” as if we had eyes only at the backs of our heads. “Your ignorance of the time of your death impresses us as one of the saddest features of your condition,” says a mysterious visitor. Looking Backward inspired a wave of utopias, to be followed by dystopias, and these are so invariably futuristic that we sometimes forget that the original Utopia, by Thomas More, was not set in the future at all. Utopia was just a faraway island.
No one bothered with the future in 1516. It was indistinguishable from the present. However, sailors were discovering remote places and strange peoples, so remote places served well for speculative authors spinning fantasies. Lemuel Gulliver does not voyage in time. It is enough for him to visit “Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan.” William Shakespeare, whose imagination seemed limitless, who traveled freely to magical isles and enchanted forests, did not—could not—imagine different times. The past and present are all the same to Shakespeare: mechanical clocks strike the hour in Caesar’s Rome, and Cleopatra plays billiards. He would have been amazed by the theatrical time travel that Tom Stoppard creates in Arcadia and Indian Ink: placing together on stage stories that unfold in different eras, decades apart.
“Something needs to be said about this,” Stoppard writes in a stage direction in Arcadia. “The action of the play shuttles back and forth between the early nineteenth century and the present day, always in this same room.” Props move about—books, flowers, a tea mug, an oil lamp—as if crossing the centuries through an invisible portal. By the end of the play they have gathered on a table: the geometrical solids, the computer, decanter, glasses, tea mug, Hannah’s research books, Septimus’s books, the two portfolios, Thomasina’s candlestick, the oil lamp, the dahlia, the Sunday papers … On Stoppard’s stage these objects are the time travelers.
We have achieved a temporal sentience that our ancestors lacked. It was long in coming. The year 1900 brought a blaze of self-consciousness about times and dates. The twentieth century was rising like a new sun. “No century has ever issued from the womb of time whose advent has aroused the high expectation, the universal hope, as that which the midnight litanies and the secular festivals but eight days hence will usher in,” wrote the editorialist of the Philadelphia Press. The Hearst-owned New York Morning Journal declared itself “The Twentieth Century Newspaper” and organized an electrical publicity stunt: “The Journal Asks All Citizens of New York to Illuminate Their Homes Monday Midnight as a Welcome to the Twentieth Century.” New York festooned City Hall with two thousand lightbulbs in red, white, and blue, and the president of the city council addressed a throng: “Tonight when the clock strikes twelve the present century will have come to an end. We look back upon it as a cycle of time within which the achievements in science and in civilization are not less than marvelous.” In London the Fortnightly Review invited its now famous futurist, the thirty-three-year-old H. G. Wells, to write a series of prophetic essays: “Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought.” In Paris they were already calling it fin de siècle, emphasis on fin: decadence and ennui were all the rage. But when the time came, the French, too, looked forward.
An English writer could not hope to have an international literary reputation until he had been published in France, and Wells did not have to wait long. The Time Machine was translated by Henry Davray, who recognized an heir to the visionary Jules Verne, and the venerable Mercure de France printed it in 1898 with a title that lost something in translation: La machine à explorer le temps.fn3 Naturally the avant-garde loved the idea of time travel: Avant! Alfred Jarry, a symbolist playwright and prankster—also an enthusiastic bicyclist—using the pseudonym “Dr. Faustroll,” immediately produced a mock-serious construction manual, “Commentaire pour servir à la construction pratique de la machine à explorer le temps.” Jarry’s time machine is a bicycle with an ebony frame and three “gyrostats” with rapidly rotating flywheels, chain drives, and ratchet boxes. A lever with an ivory handle controls the speed. Mumbo-jumbo ensues. “It is worth noting that the Machine has two Pasts: the past anterior to our own present, what we might call the real past; and the past created by the Machine when it returns to our Present and which is in effect the reversibility of the Future.” Time is the fourth dimension, of course.fn4 Jarry later said he admired Wells’s “admirable sang-froid” in managing to make his mumbo-jumbo so scientific.
The fin de siècle was at hand. Preparing for Year 1900 festivities in Lyon, Armand Gervais, a toy manufacturer who liked novelties and automata, commissioned a set of fifty color engravings from a freelance artist named Jean-Marc Côté. These images conjure a world of marvels that might exist en l’an 2000: people sporting in their tiny personal aircraft, warring in dirigibles, playing underwater croquet at the bottom of the sea. Perhaps the best is the schoolroom, where children in knee breeches sit with hands clasped at wooden desks while their teacher feeds books into a grinding machine, powered by a hand crank. Evidently the books are pulverized into a residue of pure information, which is then conveyed by wires up the wall and across the ceiling and down into headsets that cover the pupils’ ears.
These prescient images have a story of their own. They never saw the light of their own time. A few sets were run off on the press in the basement of the Gervais factory in 1899, when Gervais died. The factory was shuttered, and the contents of that basement remained hidden for the next twenty-five years. A Parisian antiques dealer stumbled upon the Gervais inventory in the twenties and bought the lot, including a single proof set of Côté’s cards in pristine condition. He had them for fifty years, finally selling them in 1978 to Christopher Hyde, a Canadian writer who came across his shop on rue de l’Ancienne-Comédie. Hyde, in turn, showed them to Isaac Asimov, a Russian-born scientist and science-fiction writer, the author or editor of, by then, 343 books. Asimov made the En l’an 2000 cards into his 344th: Futuredays. He saw something remarkable in them—something genuinely new in the annals of prophecy.
Prophecy is old. The business of “telling” the future has existed through all recorded history. Foretelling and soothsaying, augury and divination, are among the most venerable of professions, if not always the most trusted. Ancient China had 易經, I Ching, the Book of Changes; sibyls and oracles plied their trade in Greece; aeromancers and palmists and scryers saw the future in clouds, hands, and crystals, respectively. “That grim old Roman Cato the Censor said it well: ‘I wonder how one augur can keep from laughing when he passes another,’” wrote Asimov.
But the future, as divined by the diviners, remained a personal matter. Fortune-tellers cast their hexagrams and turned their tarot cards to see the futures of individuals: sickness and health, happiness and misery, tall dark strangers. As for the world at large—that did not change. Through most of history, the world people imagined their children living in was the world they inherited from their parents. One generation was like the next. No one asked the oracle to forecast the character of daily life in years to come.
“Suppose we dismiss fortune-telling,” says Asimov. “Suppose we also dismiss divinely inspired apocalyptic forecasts. What, then, is left?”
Futurism. As redefined by Asimov himself. H. G. Wells talked about “futurity” at the turn of the century, and then the word futurism was hijacked by a group of Italian artists and protofascists. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti