Luckily, one of them told us exactly how he imagined the century to come. In 1894, New York publishers D. Appleton and Company released A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future, written by John Jacob Astor IV, one of America’s wealthiest men. The Astor clan had originally made their fortune in the fur trade, and had added to their millions through investment in land and property. In 1897, John Jacob would build the Astoria Hotel in New York, next door to the Waldorf, owned by his cousin William. The hotel was both a symbol of the Astor family’s wealth and a honeypot for New York’s fashionables (Tesla himself lived there until he was turfed out for failing to pay his bills). It’s Astor’s authorship that makes the book such a fascinating insight into the Gilded Age’s fantasies about its prosperous tomorrows.
A Journey in Other Worlds is an example of what was once called “scientific romance”. The thriving genre was not only published in book form, but also in popular magazines aimed at a middle-class readership. Publications such as Cassell’s Magazine, Pearson’s Magazine, or the Strand (where Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories first appeared) allowed readers to discover scientific romances about strange new inventions, machines that could think, and travels in space. Some of Astor’s readers might, for example, have been familiar with Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race, written a couple of decades earlier and featuring a superhuman race of subterranean, electricity-harnessing beings. They would have read Jules Verne’s fantastic tales of adventurers journeying to the centre of the earth, or descending two thousand leagues under the sea. They might have read Edward Page Mitchell’s short story, “The Ablest Man in the World”, in the New York Sun, about a man with an artificial brain. And in the same year as Astor’s book was published, readers could have encountered Gustavus W. Pope’s Journey to Mars the Wonderful World.
That is to say, Astor’s tale would have been familiar territory for his readers, though presumably their knowledge that its author was one of the world’s richest men gave it an added edge of interest. Written at the end of a century, the story was set in the year 2000: the beginning of a new millennium. It describes a world transformed by technology, awash with free energy. The novel’s protagonists are already on their way to Jupiter in its opening chapter, relaxing in the aftermath of the triumphant campaign to straighten the Earth’s axis, doing away with the inconvenience of seasons. Readers are treated to a potted history of the past century, including how the world’s politics had been transformed, before following their heroes on a jaunt through space.