Self published in Glasgow in 1891. Republished by ForgottenBooks in July 2018.
How I got this book:
Downloaded the ebook from ForgottenBooks
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Meda: a Tale of the Future, was written during the year 1888. Some friends having seen the MS expressed a desire to have printed copies. To gratify the wishes of these indulgent readers this little book has been printed. If a copy should by chance fall into the hands of any "outside friendship's pale", the author would crave mercy at their hands.
Meda is a quaintly strange tale apparently narrated by a man who, as the result of losing consciousness due to overwork, finds himself suddenly thrown forward in time to the distant future. Observing a great city crumbled to ruins, its stonework in heaps and all its ironwork vanished, he fails to recognise the Glasgow of the year 5575. Fortunately encountering future people with whom he can communicate in Latin, not understanding their futuristic English of course, he is taken to meet one of their leaders, a scholar of ancient civilisation, who is delighted to encounter a Specimen of old Britain. In true Victorian literary style, this scholar then spends most of the book explaining future life, culture, art, music, philosophy and science to our hapless traveller, before a brief ill-fated romance curtails his visit.
In its style, Meda reminded me of works such as The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish, albeit with a humorous lightness that I particularly enjoyed. Its uncanny prescience contrasts with other ideas that are glaringly dated. Folingsby describes solar lighting and has his characters discuss the folly of runaway fossil fuel consumption, the unsustainability of consumer-driven society, and the inherent disaster of giving power to self-interested populist politicians. In fact there's several paragraphs that could easily have been written last week about Brexit Britain instead being science fiction from a hundred and thirty years ago. Alongside this however is an assumption that social class (and therefore intelligence) is determined almost solely by birth and, in common with Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, that only perfectly healthy people should be allowed to marry (having children outside of marriage being, of course, completely impossible!). I had fun trying to get my head around some of the more outrageous science, especially the idea that human physiology could evolve so drastically in just three thousand years. Meda is very much a book of its time and I would have preferred three-quarters storyline with one-quarter description instead of the other way around, but I'm still glad to have had the chance to read this antique adventure.
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