Caesar’s Column

This 1890 book has been variously categorized as science fiction, speculative fiction, dystopian fiction, and/or apocalyptic fiction; one critic has termed it an “Apocalyptic Utopia.” As some other speculative writers did (Anna Bowman Dodd’s 1887 book The Republic of the Future is a contemporaneous example), Donnelly cast his fiction in the form of an epistolary novel. His first-person narrator Gabriel Weltstein writes a series of letters to his brother, recounting his experiences during a 1988 visit to New York. Weltstein is a wool merchant from Uganda (early Zionist thinkers considered the possibility of founding a Jewish state in Uganda). Weltstein wants to avoid dealing with an international cartel and sell wool directly to American manufacturers. Like many utopian/dystopian writers, Donnelly dwells on the technological changes of the future. Weltstein travels to New York City by airship; he is dazzled by the city’s brilliant illumination, powered by tapping into the Aurora Borealis. In the city, subways operate below transparent sidewalks. At the Hotel Darwin, Weltstein finds a televised menu to guide him among exotic choices, from edible spiders to bird’s nests from China. Televised newspapers are readily available.