Three Hundred Years Hence

Three Hundred Years Hence

First edition title page
Author Mary Griffith
Country United States
Language English
Genre Utopian Science fiction novel
Publisher Prime Press
Publication date
1836
Media type Print (Hardback)
Pages 131
ISBN 978-1514738016
OCLC 3253783

Three Hundred Years Hence is a utopian science fiction novel by author Mary Griffith. It is the first known utopian novel written by an American woman, if you don't count Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915) [1] and was published by Prime Press in 1950 in an edition of 300 copies. The novel was originally published in 1836 as part of Griffith's collection, Camperdown, or News from Our Neighborhood.

Plot introduction

The novel concerns a hero who falls into a deep sleep and awakens in the Utopian states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York.

Successors

Writers of utopian fiction generally need to set their imagined societies either in a remote place (as in Sir Thomas More's original Utopia and many imitators), or in a different time. Griffith was the earliest American writer to project her protagonist into the future to encounter a vastly improved social order. Many successors would follow her example; most famously, Edward Bellamy used the same trick in his Looking Backward (1888), as did many of the writers who produced sequels and responses to his work. The same tactic is exploited in John Macnie's The Diothas (1883), W. H. Hudson's A Crystal Age (1887), Elizabeth Corbett's New Amazonia (1889), Bradford Peck's The World a Department Store (1900), Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Moving the Mountain (1911), and other works.


Another, later book bears the same title: William Delisle Hay called his 1881 work Three Hundred Years Hence or A Voice From Posterity, probably in ignorance of Griffith's earlier but then-obscure work.

Critical reception

Reviewing the 1950 edition, Boucher and McComas characterized the novel as "an odd and delightful item of 1836 dealing with a strongly feminist future.".[2]

Publication history

Notes

  1. Suksang, Duangrudi (2000-01-01). "Mary Griffith's Pioneering Vision: Three Hundred Years Hence.". Retrieved 2008-04-15.
  2. "Recommended Reading," F&SF, December 1950, p.104

References


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