City of Endless Night M Milo Milton Milo 9781444449259 Books
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City of Endless Night M Milo Milton Milo 9781444449259 Books
Long before the USSR began its territorial seizures, long before the Berlin Wall was erected, Hastings envisioned an encapsulated and deep-underground Berlin, highly developed technologically and socially engineered, battling with the rest of the world for more than a hundred years, and not losing. A network of tunnels (some accommodating submarines) supplies critical resources; an above-ground bubble-shield offers protection from bombs. Now, drop an 'outsider' engineer into one of those tunnels and watch him shake things up! The story itself is OK - the lead character is kind of pompous, but virtuous and very clever, and he learns well. Things like these kept me intrigued: the spinning out of ultimate consequences of then-popular Social Darwinism via eugenics; the throw-back social caste system and the deification of the Hohenzollern emperor; the application of Frederick Taylor's scientific management (everyone is weighed regularly and food provisions are adjusted according to what's considered ideal weight for each person's duties). How could you not love a futuristic fantasy so well-rooted in then-current intellectual thought?Product details
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City of Endless Night M Milo Milton Milo 9781444449259 Books Reviews
Written shortly after the guns of World War I fell silent, CITY OF ENDLESS NIGHT presents a strange yet well-conceived vision of the future that might have been, had the Great War ended differently. The premise is that allied bombing in an extended WWI had driven the Germans in Berlin underground into a series of bunkers and subterranean factories. The Germans quickly discovered ways of surviving under these bizarre conditions, while the Allies failed to figure out any means of ferreting them out, and the war turned into a frustrating stalemate.
The story is set long after this event, when an American accidentally ends up in underground Berlin and attempts to pass himself off as a citizen. The underground city is a horrifying dystopia built along the latest scientific principles.
Milo Hastings has a nice appreciation for the possibilities and perils of civilization and technology. He was at one point a poultry scientist, and later a proponent of health food and healthy living in an era where such things were unusual. A scientist, a believer in the Common Man, in fresh air, sunshine, good food, and healthy living, Hastings wrote convincingly of a society that made Orwell's 1984 look like a walk in the park.
I find this book to be strangely compelling. The plot runs along familiar pulp-fiction lines, but because the story comes from an era where even non-fiction was written as if it were pulp fiction, this rarely detracts from the story. And the underground city and its society, with their odd combination of WWI-era archisms and appallingly plausible innovations, kept me fascinated to the very end.
Ok, so I wonder how I haven't heard of this book. I read old classics like Farenheit 451, 1984, etc., and they are lauded for their "prophetic" nature. This book falls right into that same category. I'd rank it right up there with them, except that perhaps the ending seemed a bit ... well, anti-climatic... or rushed. It was weird to really, really enjoy the book, and then boom, its over. I don't re-read books a lot, but I'd re-read this one just to clip quotes out of them. There are a lot of places where you read a paragraph that makes you think ... wow... and that should tell us something about where we are today... in 2014... I'm definitely going to recommend this to people. The ending is, well, just the ending, and I guess when it comes down to it, I'm not sure there would have been much of a way to do it differently without writing a sequel or something like that - but the book wasn't really about marathon storywriting, it was about considering what the future might hold under certain circumstances.
There is something about the nature of this book that seems very much ahead of its time.
In the guise of an alternate future where the world has united against Germany, the author writes a character from the outside world who assumes a stolen identity in the barricaded and isolated city of Berlin- the last stronghold against the World Government, depicted as a black spot on the map that had haunted the protagonist.
In a fortuitous circumstance, he infiltrates this society and his guise is most perfectly suited for him. It seems only too easy thrashed would speak the language and find someone that closely resembles him as well as shared his profession, whom he could conveniently dispose of and therefore observe this world undetected. This is just part of the story- the tale of a man in culture shock but with an almost ethnographic eye for this bewildering world he finds himself in.
This is where this book really shines. It seems almost unbelievable this book was written almost a hundred years ago... and yet some things just don't change. People can have cultures which manifest the same basic needs and drives and impulses- universal motivations, that are expressed in a variety of different ways.
Some issues this book touches are still things we struggle with in the modern world. The idea of human worth, the value of resources, economic efficiency. Just how much humanity is worth sacrificing to maintain control? How much control can be exercised to manipulate the masses before they rebel? What kind of cost are we willing to pay for the enforcement of morals- furthermore what moral benefit what demographics? The ethical dilemmas of those days, the idea of German superiority, eugenics, genetics, human rights, female rights, ethnic cleansing. All huge issues in the 1920's... and still huge issues to this day.
Despite the decades that have passed, the ideas of this book are still very much alive. Although the protagonist has some views which seem fairly standard to a reader of today, his viewpoint must have been somewhat radical in a time when so much of the progress we take for granted today had not even happened yet.
I find it a most curious read. A bit light, somewhat preachy at times, but incredibly interesting and I would highly recommend it.
Long before the USSR began its territorial seizures, long before the Berlin Wall was erected, Hastings envisioned an encapsulated and deep-underground Berlin, highly developed technologically and socially engineered, battling with the rest of the world for more than a hundred years, and not losing. A network of tunnels (some accommodating submarines) supplies critical resources; an above-ground bubble-shield offers protection from bombs. Now, drop an 'outsider' engineer into one of those tunnels and watch him shake things up! The story itself is OK - the lead character is kind of pompous, but virtuous and very clever, and he learns well. Things like these kept me intrigued the spinning out of ultimate consequences of then-popular Social Darwinism via eugenics; the throw-back social caste system and the deification of the Hohenzollern emperor; the application of Frederick Taylor's scientific management (everyone is weighed regularly and food provisions are adjusted according to what's considered ideal weight for each person's duties). How could you not love a futuristic fantasy so well-rooted in then-current intellectual thought?
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