John Jacob Astor ~6 hr read

The millionaire who built the Waldorf-Astoria imagined the year 2000: a world of harnessed power, and a voyage to Jupiter and Saturn.

John Jacob Astor IV's 1894 romance forecasts a technologically triumphant future, electricity, terraforming, and interplanetary travel, before sending its adventurers off to explore the giant planets. A fascinating artifact from the pen of one of the Gilded Age's richest men (who would later die on the Titanic), full of earnest futurism and Victorian confidence. Read it for a moneyed dreamer's sincere vision of the coming century.

In its time

Published in 1894, during the 1890s, wells arrives.

Reading it

~6 hr read (a novel-length work, settle in).