Milo Hastings ~5 hr read

Beneath a besieged Berlin, an American infiltrates a subterranean German super-state, a walled dystopia of eugenics, synthetic beer, and total control.

Milo Hastings's 1920 novel is a striking early dystopia, imagining a Germany that retreated underground to wage endless war, its regimented 'Black Utopia' of bred castes and manufactured everything explored by a horrified outsider. Prescient and vivid. Read it for a remarkable, little-known dystopian classic that anticipated much of the century's darkest speculation.

In its time

Published in 1920, during the 1920s, the pulp era proper.

Reading it

~5 hr read (a novel-length work, settle in).