The Humanisphere
NOTE: YOU ARE PURCHASING AN E-BOOK, NOT A PAPER BOOK. WHEN ORDERING, PLEASE SPECIFY IN THE COMMENTS IF YOU PREFER A PDF OR AN EPUB FILE. THE FILE WILL BE E-MAILED TO YOU AS SOON AS PAYMENT IS RECEIVED.
THE HUMANISPHERE
Four French utopian fantasies by Paul Adam, Victor Considérant, Joseph Déjacque & Fernand Giraudeau
adapted by Brian Stableford
cover by Jean-Felix Lyon
"Here we produce joyfully to consume ourselves. You produce sadly in order to sell. How can you expect that our labor would not be a hundred times more productive than yours?"
This collection presents four French "utopian fantasies" which were all ground-breaking in their day.
Victor Considerant's The Complete News from the Moon (1836) is a utopia in which the society described is only related to existing societies in satirical terms, and very subtly.
Fernand Giraudeau's The New City (1868) and Joseph Déjacque's The Humanisphere (1899) are both set in future Paris, one imagining the ideal society that might result from the politics of Anarchism, the other a dystopia arguing the opposite viewpoint.
Paul Adam's Letters from Malaisie (1898) presents a society that, although founded by eutopians, has produced a compromised result, in which eutopian and dystopian elements are fused, thus raising the question of whether any program of political reform could possibly produce the intended results, given the vagaries of human nature.
Contents:
Introduction and Notes by Brian Stableford.
The Complete News from the Moon by Victor Considerant [Publication complete des nouvelles découvertes de sir John Herschel dans le ciel austral et dans la lune] Masson & Dupré, 1836.
The Future World (or The Humanisphere) by Joseph Déjacque [L'Humanisphère, utopie anarchique], Bibliothèque des Temps Nouveaux, 1899
The New City by Fernand Giraudeau [La Cité nouvelle], Amyot, 1868.
Letters from Malaisie by Paul Adam [Lettres de Malaisie], Editions de la Revue Blanche, 1898.