Henry Hartshorne 42 min read

An 1881 writer keeps a diary from fifty years in the future, the far-off year 1931.

Framed as the journal of a leisured gentleman in a year its author would never see, Hartshorne's forecast imagines Mexico joining the Union as the 52nd state, a Congress meeting in St. Louis, and the political weather of a century turning. Less story than speculative almanac, it's a fascinating time-capsule of what one thoughtful Victorian-American thought 'will probably occur.' Read it for the peculiar pleasure of a bygone future, a past's guess at our present, right and wrong in revealing ways.

In its time

Published in 1931, during the 1930s, space opera soars.

Reading it

42 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).