Edward Bellamy 25 min read

On a long, tedious train ride, a man who cannot read on the cars marvels at the ingenious new devices of a future age, where books are heard, not read, and machines speak the printed word aloud.

Edward Bellamy's 1889 story, by the author of Looking Backward, is a charming, prophetic social-SF tale. Clever, gentle, remarkably foresighted. Read it for a delightful little piece of technological prophecy, a future of talking clocks, recorded books, and voice-machines that anticipates the audiobook and much else, from the great American utopian, imagined with warmth and wit.

In its time

Published in 1889, during the 1880s, lost races and dying earths.

Reading it

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