Verne, Jules - In the Year 2889

VIP免费

2024-11-23 0 0 64.99KB 15 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

others first published in English. In contrast to his conservative, plodding

SF novels, "In the Year 2889" dashes wildly from one fanciful extrapolation

to another. Experts believe Jules' son Michel may have authored part of the

story.

Many of the predictions for the year 2889 have already come true. Verne's

dystopian concept of one man brought to vast power and wealth through

widely distributed intellectual property brings to mind names like Samuel

Newhouse and Bill Gates. There are also glimmerings of later science

fiction themes, including suspended animation and turning the moon

around a la Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End (1953).

Of course Verne also made mistakes, and some of his predictions simply

have not come to pass. But give them time: there are nearly nine centuries

left before the year 2889.

Little though they seem to think of it, the people of this 29th century live

continually in fairyland. Surrounded with marvels, they are indifferent to

marvels. To them all seems natural. Could they but appreciate the

refinements of civilization in our day; could they but compare the present

with the past, and recognize the advances we have made! How much fairer

they would find our modern towns, with populations exceeding 10,000,000

souls; streets 300 feet wide, houses 100 feet high; with a constant

temperature in all seasons; and lines of aerial locomotion crossing the sky

in all directions! If they could but imagine the state of things that once

existed, when through muddy streets rumbling boxes on wheels, drawn by

horses--yes, horses!--were the only means of conveyance. Think of the

railroads of old, and you will appreciate the pneumatic tubes through which

today we travel at 100 miles an hour. Would not our contemporaries prize

the telephone and telephote more, had they not forgotten the telegraph?

Surprisingly, all these transformations rest on principles perfectly familiar to

our remote ancestors, which they disregarded. Heat, for instance, is as

ancient as man himself; electricity was known 3000 years ago, and steam

1100. Nay, so early as 10 centuries ago it was known that the differences

between the several chemical and physical forces depend on the mode of

brightest star our great Joseph Jackson. To Jackson we are indebted those

wonderful instruments--the new accumulators. Some of these absorb and

condense the living force contained in the sun's rays; others, the electricity

stored in our globe; others again, energy from whatever source: waterfalls,

streams, wind, etc. He, too, invented the transformer, a more wonderful

contrivance still, which takes the living force from the accumulator, and, at

the touch of a button, returns it to space in any form desired, whether as

heat, light, electricity, or mechanical force, after having first obtained from it

the work required. From the day these two instruments were contrived

should be dated the era of true progress. They have put into the hands of

man almost infinite power. As for their applications, they are numberless.

Mitigating the rigors of winter, by giving back to the atmosphere the surplus

heat stored up during the summer, they have revolutionized agriculture.

Supplying motive power for aerial navigation, they have given to commerce

a mighty impetus. To them we are indebted for the continuous production

of electricity without batteries or dynamos, of light without combustion or

incandescence, and for an unfailing supply of mechanical energy for the

needs of industry.

Yes, the accumulator and the transformer have wrought all these wonders.

And can we not to them also trace, indirectly, this latest wonder of all, the

great "Earth Chronicle" building on 253rd Avenue, which was dedicated the

other day? If George Washington Smith, founder of the Manhattan

"Chronicle", should come back to life today, what would he think when told

that this place of marble and gold belongs to his remote descendant, Fritz

Napoleon Smith, who, after 30 generations, is owner of the same newpaper

that his ancestor established! For George Washington Smith's newspaper

has lived generation after generation, now passing out of the family, anon

coming back to it. When, 200 years ago, the political center of the United

States was transferred from Washington to Centropolis, the newspaper

followed the government and assumed the name of Earth Chronicle.

Unfortunately, it was unable to maintain itself at the high level of its name.

Pressed on all sides by more modern rival journals, it was continually in

danger of collapse. 20 years ago its subscription list contained but a few

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Verne, Jules - In the Year 2889.pdf

共15页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Verne, Jules - In the Year 2889

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: