John Collins 34 min read

Written in 1870, a poem-vision eavesdrops on the messages humming down the wires of a wondrous year: 1970.

John Collins dreams a century forward in verse, imagining a world knit together by the 'thought-road' of the telegraph, business cables from Japan, lovers' proposals, summonses to distant deathbeds, all flashing along the wire. A gentle, earnest piece of Victorian futurism that treats connected communication as the marvel that will define the coming age. Read it for a charming period reverie that, in its way, half-glimpsed the networked world to come.

In its time

Published in 1970, during the 1970s, feminist sf emerges.

Reading it

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