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mcgrew writes:

I ran across this book a month or so ago when I was reading about Illinois' upcoming bicentennial. It's a speculative fiction look at the year 2018 from a 1918 standpoint. Its author, Vachel Lindsay, was a very popular poet at the turn of his century, and this is his only novel. He started writing it in 1904, hoping to publish by Illinois' centennial, but it was finally published in 1920.

The Golden Book of Springfield is speculative fiction, but rather than science fiction, this is future fantasy fiction. The Golden Book flies into a room, but it isn't a drone as someone in our time would presume, but magic. His war is fought on horseback with swords. He has a character shouting from a platform, Lindsay being unaware that in a hundred years a thing called a "bullhorn" would be commonplace.

He does introduce a very few innovations, such as a "lens gun," "a new kind of" movie projector, and the "corn-dragon engine," which isn't an internal combustion engine running on ethanol or methanol, but a new kind of steam locomotive. A "corn-dragon" was a steam train driving past a cornfield, the "dragon" being what was called then "smokestack lightning".

It's surrealism, and going by what Wikipedia has to say, some of the first, although a college history class told me it started in Germany. It's about his and friends of his (whether the friends are real or fictional) dreams of his city a hundred years in his future, two years in my future as I write this.

It's also a ghost story, written by a ghost. It's about the 1918 Vachel Lindsay haunting our present. It reads "And my bones crumble through the century, like last year's autumn leaves. Then there is, alternating with drouth, bitter frost. And roots wrap my heart and brain. And there is sleep.

"Then a galloping and gay shrieking, away on the road, to the East of Oak Ridge! And though I am six feet beneath the ground the eyes of the soul are given me. I see wonderful young horsewomen..."

Lindsay committed suicide in 1931. If that's not a ghost story, what is?

JNCF asked "I find myself wondering how reasonable you think your depiction of 23rd century Mars is." The answer is a definite, loud, "HELL NO." Reading this book (or any old SF) will tell you why.

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