Gutenberg Archives: City of Endless Night

[Broomstick]

Because I have little money but I do have an e-book, and I like old stories as well as new, I started cruising Project Guteberg's science fiction archives. If you aren't familiar with Project Gutenberg it's an on-line archive of books whose copyright has expired and have therefore passed into public domain.

One of the first science fiction stories I downloaded from there was City of Endless Night by Milo Hastings. It depicts a dystopian future where the entire world is one state speaking English (that's not the dystopian part) except for Germany, whose capital city of Berlin is an arcology holding something like 300 million people surrounded by a no-man's-land. It's a "city of endless night" because there are no windows to the outside in Berlin, it's a self-contained environment with no natural sunlight.

The book was written in 1920, so internally it has the history of The War to End All Wars but not WWII or the Nazis. It does have eugenics, propaganda, rigid roles for various castes, predominance of synthetic clothing, and so forth. It's a future history missing a century of real history. In a sense, it's an alternate-world future history.

It's fairly fast-paced and the characterizations aren't too outrageous/pulp. In particular, the few women characters depicted aren't entirely cardboard which was a bit unusual for the SF of the time. Women get a pretty crappy deal in this society, but the strategies used by some of them to get by are quite shrewd. Some of the science is a bit sketchy by today's standards but this really is a story about people and ideas, not so much about a particular form of technology. Some aspects of this society remind me of Brave New World, which was written 12 years later than this story, but don't overwork the analogy. Topics like eugenics and orderly societies were much on the mind during that time period. As reflection of the times, women are not professionals, they're basically breeding stock and concubines. The notion of women being self-supporting with careers or at least jobs didn't really take root until after WWII. Men, meanwhile, are slotted into a career role at an early age and that's what they do for the rest of their lives. To some extent this is predestined - there have been sufficient generations of controlled breeding that there are physical and mental differences between manual laborers and mental laborers. The lower classes are kept pacified by entertainments, food, and the occasional bit of sex and depicted as contented simpletons. Those in the "professional" classes (like Our Hero) are kept in line by surveillance but it seems the majority are contented with their lot, in part because they know nothing different. Information is highly controlled but some clandestine sources of information still remain in the form of old books handed down from the past.

The basic plot: Our Hero by a particular quirk is one of the few non-Germans in the world who actually speaks fluent German and is convinced to infiltrate Berlin. Our Hero replaces a German chemist and proceeds to experience life in Berlin first-hand, treating the reader to a tour of what is essentially an alien/foreign culture, before finding a means to escape and incidentally bringing down the current regime, reuniting Germans with the rest of the world (we hope).

I enjoyed the novel and if you want to check it out you can download it here in any of several formats.

[Broomstick]

BTW - I'd be interested in knowing if anyone downloads this.

Also, any interest in hearing about anything else on Gutenberg? Either more SF or other things.

[madd0ct0r]

that was a great read, just needs korean names

[PainRack]

Oooh.pls do share more

[BabelHuber]

I've downloaded it yesterday. It really is good!

If you can recommend more, I'm all ears!

[Broomstick]

Well, they have quite a few books by Jules Verne translated into several languages... I can always recommend that guy...

There's the very pulp SF The Copper-Clad World although it's not as good as City of Endless Night. Still, it's a pretty fast read with lots of action.

Currently, I am reading the autobiography of David Crockett, US frontiersman, Congressman, and one of the guys on the losing side at the Alamo. Interesting from a historical viewpoint, but Mr. Crockett was not a terribly literate man and it sort of shows. I'll have more to say on that one when I'm done with it.