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City of Endless Night door M. M. (Milo…
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City of Endless Night (editie 2009)

door M. M. (Milo Milton) Hastings (Auteur)

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A fascinating and disturbing dystopian vision from a neglected sci-fi master, imagining an all too terrifying alternate ending to World War Inbsp;and its implications for the human race The year is 2041. Since the end of WWI, Berlin has been an enormous subterranean city, home to 300 million citizens who have never seen the sun, and presided over by the autocratic Hohenzollern dynasty. Every aspect of life is regimented; from controlled rations that are issued on the basis of work-for-food, to a press that works exclusively under the auspices of the Information Service. Christianity has been abolished and all breeding is carried out on the basis of strict eugenic principles. Lyman De Forrest, an American chemist, discovers a way of neutralizing Berlin's defenses and, assuming the identity of a dead German man, enters the city to discover its hidden truths. The first outsider for decades to enter the forbidden metropolis, he is horrified to find a society where women are kept in isolation for breeding or the pleasuring of high status men. Can De Forrest escape this living tomb? Published shortly after the end of WWI,nbsp;this tremendous example of early dystopian science fiction is thoughtnbsp;to have been the inspiration behind Fritz Lang's Metropolis.… (meer)
Lid:Carl_Alves
Titel:City of Endless Night
Auteurs:M. M. (Milo Milton) Hastings (Auteur)
Info:Public Domain Books (2006), 314 pages
Verzamelingen:Jouw bibliotheek
Waardering:****
Trefwoorden:Geen

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City of Endless Night door Milo Hastings

  1. 00
    Heerlijke nieuwe wereld door Aldous Huxley (fannyprice)
    fannyprice: Both books play with the concept of eugenics and social classes.
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p 183. "The obstructionist policy of this party was inherent in its origin, for it was inspired and held together by the ideas of a dead man, whose followers could only repeat as their test of faith a phrase that has come down to us as an idiom - 'What would He do?' 'He' being dead could do nothing, neither could he change his mind, but having left an indelible record of his ideas... this made for solidarity and power and quite prevented any adaptation of the form of government to the needs of the world that had arisen since his demise."

p187 on voting: "But suppose they should sometime fail to re-elect him?" / "No danger.. there is only one name on the ballot and the ballots are dumped into the paper mill without inspection... Voting everywhere is a very useful device in organised government. In the cruder form used in democracies there were two or more candidates. It usually made little difference which was elected; but the system was imperfect because the voters who voted for the candidate which lost were not pleased. Then there was the trouble of counting the ballots. We avoid all this."

I had to keep in mind at all times the year the book purported to take place (2151) and the year in which the book was written (1920). A dystopia of what an overly-ordered eugenic society in a tightly confined space could become. Of interest:
* use of the terms "First World War" and "Second World War"
* eventual failure of the League of Nations (although it lasted from 1919-1983)
* p184 "the emasculation of the League of Nations by the American obstructionists caused, or at least permitted the rise, and dominance of the Bolshevists..."
* prediction of a Second World War that pits Germany against the rest of the world (1983-2041)
* prediction of a global conflict between communism/socialism and capitalism
* prediction of eugenics forming an integral part of German identity as it puts itself at odds with the world (although given the high level of eugenics throughout the Western World between the World Wars, perhaps this isn't surprising at all)
* thoughts of how rapidly effective eugenics could be (within 6 generations, have enduring and strongly distinct differences in physical appearance, mental ability, and gender ratio of babies per generation)
* views of women (both as expressed by the author, and purportedly expressed by this strongly male-dominated eugenic Teutonic society)
* a Berlin Wall (although in the book it is entirely encircling and covering an underground city)
* expulsion of Jews from Berlin (all that remains of Germany)
* that expulsion accomplished by making pork a required element of daily diet (potentially less effective than as expressed in the book)
* use of the catchphrase "What Would *** Do"? (in this book "What Would He Do", referring to a now-deceased but still influential-to-his-followers American political leader who strongly opposed the League of Nations) ( )
  zizabeph | May 7, 2023 |
->Read after WW2 readings.
  Harris023 | Apr 23, 2023 |
Written a hundred years ago, City of Endless Night is a dystopian novel set in future Berlin. In this future, Berlin has isolated itself from the rest of the world through a protective dome. They feed their people through a synthetic food. Every aspect of their lives are controlled to obscene levels including what job they are allowed to have, how much food they are allowed to eat, and how much money they can spend on a gift for their girlfriends. Meanwhile, they have rigged elections where members of the royal family are elected without opposition, and their grand plan is to conquer their enemies and rape the woman in order to populate the world with more Germans. This is really horrible stuff, and given that this novel predates the Nazi rise in Germany and the author wrote about many things that would become Nazi doctrine like the use of eugenics, it was really quite impressive.

The story, although reasonably well written, wasn’t really the selling point. It was the excellent world building of this dystopian society that makes it. The protagonist isn’t the most compelling character, and there is some eye rolling lack of believability such as the narrator being able to take over the life of a dead German, and not a single person realizing that he was an imposter. It’s not conceivable that the dead German chemist would not have interacted with anybody so that they wouldn’t realize it was a different person posing as the Chemist. The ending was also a bit difficult to swallow, but on the whole this was an enjoyable novel that I would recommend.

Carl Alves – author of Reconquest Mother Earth ( )
1 stem Carl_Alves | Mar 16, 2020 |
It’s the year 2151. The German state, after sweeping through Eurasia and the Middle East in the Second World War which began in 1988, has been pushed back to the Armoured City of Berlin. The Ray, a weapon that calcifies bones, keeps the armies of the World State at bay. Aerial bombing cannot harm the vast underground fortress, the Black Utopia, which holds 300 million Germans.

But one man, Lyman de Forrest, a student of German culture and language from Chicago, penetrates its upper depths, impersonates one of its chemists, and learns its secrets. But should he destroy it with his knowledge? Or attempt to bring it into the larger family of the World State?

Hastings’ novel is an astonishing novel on several levels.

It stands, with the possible exception of Jack London’s The Iron Heel (a novel I have not read) as the first of the great 20th century dystopias. It anticipates elements of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and George Orwell’s 1984, and it stands the equal, in terms of the plausibility of its speculations, with the latter two. Its underground city of regimented workers also brings to mind Fritz Lang’s Metropolis from 1927.

First serialized as “Children of Kultur” in True Story Magazine from May through November 1919, it was also prophetic in spotting major themes of the German state under the Nazis.

So why was it forgotten?

It wasn’t, exactly. In February 1941, Murray Teigh Bloom in Saturday Review of Literature mentioned Hastings as a “prophet for modern Germany” though his description isn’t completely accurate of the 1920 novel I read.

Hyperion Press issued the novel again in 1974 with an introduction by science fiction critic and historian Sam Moskowitz. (Unfortunately, Dover Books didn’t spring for an afterword or introduction by any sf scholar.) He placed it in the ranks of Zamyatin’s novel as well as Victor Rousseau’s 1917 Messiah of the Cylinder, and H. G. Wells’ When the Sleeper Wakes. I don’t know about Rousseau’s novel, but Hastings work is far superior to Wells’ novel both in readability for modern audiences as well as prescience.

Hasting adopts the device of many utopian works, the traveler to a strange society who notes his observations and conversations with the locals, and uses it for a dystopian narrative. Lyman de Forrest, who adopts the guise of a low rank German chemist, Karl Armstadt, after the latter is killed when de Forrest has Berlin’s potash mines bombed with gas (this too convenient match between the two men’s appearance and chemical training is the book’s weakest point), is even more removed from the sensibilities of the Armoured City of Berlin than Huxley’s Savage is from the world After Ford.

Orwell and Zamyatin have their rebels born into the dystopian societies depicted. Armstadt also finds rebels waiting for him in Berlin.

There is, perhaps, no influence of Hastings on Orwell and Huxley – and it’s even less likely a 1920 American novel would have been in a form for Zamyatin to read, but there are similarities.

The German state registers citizens with names and numbers which brings to mind the abstract names of Zamyatin’s work. 1984 has its Two Minutes of Hate sessions. The young chemistry students Armstadt visits are allowed to practice the two vital emotions of hate and rage. Carefully staged entertainments, often of war, are staged for Berliners. There is some surveillance of the laborer class, the proletarian base of what the Holy House of Hohenzollern, headed by Kaiser Eitel I of divine blood, calls “autocratic socialism”.

And the novel looks backward to the Great War, not even formally concluded yet by the Treaty of Versailles when this novel first appeared. There is mention of Prussianism; German synthetic food; aerial bombardments; the Ray , which is one of those death rays that were casually accepted as a real technological reality in the early 20th century; mass propaganda; the social change wrought by men absent in war and women taking their place in industrial production. There even seems to be a fear that, should the German soldier again be leashed upon the world again, his barbarism will surely incite utter annihilation by the World State. That seems a reference at the German atrocities in the Great War, their extent and character was exaggerated by the Allied propaganda but some still did occur.

Hastings future history already has the nascent World State, the League of Nations, killed by “American obstructionists” said to be of the same party as a dead American hero who must be the unnamed Woodrow Wilson.

Hastings keeps his plot moving with surprising twists. Armstadt’s moral inclinations and plans create complications as he meets “one righteous man”, Zimmern, Berlin’s Chief Eugenicist. (Hastings’ maternal grandfather was a noted abolitionist preacher, and Hastings is found of biblical allusions.) Like the Old Testament God contemplating Sodom and Gomorrah’s destruction, Armstadt has to decide whether he wants to destroy Berlin or reform it by opening it to the outer world.

But none of that accounts for the remarkableness of the novel. That lays in the strange society Hastings envisions, envisions and makes plausible, a society that prefigures the Third Reich.

The Armoured City of Berlin is a society based on eugenics, a strange mixture of proletarian atheism and aristocratic religion. Hastings makes his eugenic speculations plausible in the details of administration and results and political consequences. He also lays out not only a map for how Berlin works but how it arose from the 1920 world.

Hastings was a man of wide ranging interests, most of which he wrote about: urban planning, nutrition, physical fitness, and chickens.

Yes, chickens. Oddly enough, he was an early inventor of techniques, particularly egg incubation, to raise poultry on an industrial level. Yet, he also wrote The Dollar Hen in 1911, a book still read by those interested in raising free range chickens.

This attention to agriculture and the artificial selection of breeding, i.e. eugenics, leads Hastings to plausible specificity on how Berlin’s genetic state works to create lines of soldiers, laborers, intellectuals, doctors, actor-models, and the Royal Family. Armstadt learns what happens with those Berliners who do not meet the personality, mental, and physical standards for their intended class. In this Black Utopia, “civilization has gone to seed” with over specialization. German eugenics have created a state that works as intended, but it is not, fears Zimmern, a state that can survive. It is not as adaptable, Zimmern says, as the “mongrel races” of the World State. Nor, as Armstadt knows from his previous life as de Forrest, is it even as scientifically advanced.

Armstadt is particularly horrified to see the distortions in family life, sex, and male-female relations. Except to those of the Royal Family, conventional family life and marriage are forbidden. Male laborers are not even allowed near women, interest in sex drummed out of them by the same genetic principles that make domestic animals more docile than their wild ancestors. Only exceptional laborers are allowed to breed.

Men of the intellectual class are assigned paternity duty with a small roster of acceptable women – women they will not see again and to produce children they will not be involved with. The sexual urges and money of the men of the intellectual class is spent on the Free Level of Berlin.

This is one of the most vivid parts of the novel, and the women Armstadt meets there will propel major parts of the plot. One in particular, Marguerite, is the heart of the rebel movement. But most are women with no other support living in state sponsored prostitution, locked in competitive struggle with each other for the payment of men.

One even preys upon Armstadt’s oh-so-male desire to rescue an unfortunate woman. When her schemes and lies are unveiled, she asks him why he loved when he thought her innocent but despises her when he finds she is clever.

Armstadt’s relationship with Marguerite is complicated by a morality which is conventional for 1920s. He is the repulsed by the insinuation that he should enter into a sexual ménage a trois with her and Zimmern. He’s somewhat thick in not seeing, as the reader will quickly surmise, Zimmern and Marguerite’s true relationship.

Hastings also presents, in a closed circuit of obedience, a realistic of depiction where a state where power flows from the laborers up to the Kaiser (labor strikes are quite different in this world) and then back down. The Kaiser is Emperor, servant, and tyrant. Armstadt is surprised by this, but Hellern, a dissident who manages the state’s propaganda and publishing, tells him this is simply Napoleon’s principle of being able to demand anything “if you tell men they are equal you can do as you please with them”. Something of a similar principle also existed in Stalin’s reign.

The Armoured City of Berlin practices no genocide. Jews have been driven out by the overwhelming reliance on sophisticated piggeries. (In fact, the whole idea of the underground and Armoured City of Berlin came to Kaiser Wilhelm III when his armored swineries survived a bombing. But there are elements in the novel that bring the Nazis of Hasting’s future to mind.

The five stages of human evolution culminate in the “Blond Brute” of Berlin. In something that sounds like Christian Identity, Jesus is declared to be of “Teutonic Blond” and not of a “servile Jewish” strain. Anything good in human civilization was produced by Germans or those with German blood in other countries.

But, at its bottom, the most startling thing about Hastings’ novel is that it reminds us of a political truth that was not startling in Hastings time but made repellent and unthinkable post-Nazi Germany.

Human societies are not, ultimately, based on culture. They are based on blood, or, more precisely the personalities, physiques, and IQ of those in the culture. Those factors, in turn, are determined by natural selection over a long period of time and a variety of environments selecting for different things. Those factors can be modified by artificial selection. The corollary is displayed in the novel: culture plays its part in determining what human traits will be passed on because they are valued.

The Armoured City of Berlin has built themselves the desired culture with the tools of genetics. But Armstadt sees where the ultimate application of science and management has taken this society. The brute laborers may not, as Zimmern fears, be able to survive in any other kind of society. The women Armstadt meets come across often as victims to this logical order. Even if not sympathetic because of their ugliness or coldness or personalities that repel Armstadt, he knows they are inevitable products of a state of citizens bred for the main trait of the Germans, obedience. ( )
4 stem RandyStafford | Apr 28, 2017 |
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Milo Hastingsprimaire auteuralle editiesberekend
Follis, KateVertellerSecundaire auteuralle editiesbevestigd
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A fascinating and disturbing dystopian vision from a neglected sci-fi master, imagining an all too terrifying alternate ending to World War Inbsp;and its implications for the human race The year is 2041. Since the end of WWI, Berlin has been an enormous subterranean city, home to 300 million citizens who have never seen the sun, and presided over by the autocratic Hohenzollern dynasty. Every aspect of life is regimented; from controlled rations that are issued on the basis of work-for-food, to a press that works exclusively under the auspices of the Information Service. Christianity has been abolished and all breeding is carried out on the basis of strict eugenic principles. Lyman De Forrest, an American chemist, discovers a way of neutralizing Berlin's defenses and, assuming the identity of a dead German man, enters the city to discover its hidden truths. The first outsider for decades to enter the forbidden metropolis, he is horrified to find a society where women are kept in isolation for breeding or the pleasuring of high status men. Can De Forrest escape this living tomb? Published shortly after the end of WWI,nbsp;this tremendous example of early dystopian science fiction is thoughtnbsp;to have been the inspiration behind Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

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