A remarkable science fiction novel for children, by a female author, depicting a future technological, interstellar and vegetarian utopia.
The novel narrates the adventures of Pollie (or Polly) Trevalian, a girl living in Chicago in 2002. At the opening of the novel the heroine, together with her brother Ben and their friend Billy, enjoys a short afternoon flight, propelled by removable wings. After a while the boys fly off to Milwaukee, leaving Pollie alone with directions to fly home.
The girl, however, gets caught up in a thunderous storm, loses consciousness and is finally rescued by an airship passing by. The ship lands in Hawaii, from where Pollie’s family is informed (by video telephone!) about her whereabouts.
By submarine, fitted out with a library, she then travels to San Francisco where she is reunited with her family. Before traveling back to Chicago, the Trevalians call at New York and find, rather biblical, lions grazing with lambs.
Pollie lives in a vegetarian and social utopia that has enjoyed “Perpetual Peace” since 1980, where everybody wears the same paper clothes, and America votes “with overwhelming majority” for a woman president.
On her travels she encounters voting machines, video telephones, weather control, and commercial transportation by submarine and airship. She learns about the inhabitants of Mars (“we hear from it daily”), walks on moving sidewalks, and visits restaurants with food laden tables rising out of the floor, serving manufactured meat, since “the slaughtering and eating of animal life had been forbidden by law”.
The remarkable novel is very rare on the marke, with no auction records in RareBookHub.
A remarkable utopian science fiction novel for children by a female author
Laura Dayton Fessenden. "2002". Childlife One Hundred Years from Now.
Chicago, Jamieson-Higgins, [1902].