Amazing vision of the future from 1930. Although its a bit dated and plenty of his “next 100 years” is wrong there are hints of almost prophetic vision. His portrayal of various countries national flavour and reactions is almost spot on. His evaluation of the USA holds true today, and is especially poignant in light of the Iraq crisis right now. Not quite right with the timing, but he predicted the US winning over the Russian communists with guerrilla free-market activity. The actions of his Russian communists almost parallel the Chinese capitalist devolution today. (At his point in history the Chinese wasn’t communist, they were a republic.)
Other scientific and evolutionary predictions are wonderful. The first men depleting the oil reserves, tidal and geothermal power becoming important and also his own version of nuclear power (not right in modern scientific terms but staggeringly close to the physical reality of it). Along with nuclear power he also predicts all kinds of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction. In fact more often than not the races of man are wiped out by biological weapons… it’s either that or devolve into racial lethargy.
The one problem I feel his that his time scales are all too long. His tech levels plateau constantly. Maybe he didn’t feel the acceleration of tech in the 30s. His main influences seem to be Spengler, Hegel and Darwin (maybe some others similar). He is completely into evolution and the oscillatory nature of civilisation, with an eventual growth towards some ideal state. He needs his timescales to be significant enough to allow for evolution, he also wants to show that the history of man will be at least as long as the time since the earth was created. Making the 20th Cent a nice centre point and his time scales logarithmically increasing out from now.
Considering he never considered his work to be science fiction and had never read any (bar HG Wells) he has created/re-created a large number of scifi memes by himself. The victorian language and the occasional rambling and pointless digression can be forgiven for the pure and constant inventiveness that he had.
