The Millennium: A Comedy of the Year 2000

by Upton Sinclair

In 1907, Upton Sinclair looked forward 93 years and imagined the year 2000, when capitalism would find its zenith with the construction of The Pleasure Palace, a glittering half-mile-high structure in the middle of Central Park. During the grand opening of the towering building, a scientific experiment with radiumite explodes killing everybody throughout the world except eleven of the people at the Pleasure Palace. They escape the deadly rays by flying high in the sky in a revolutionary 1000-mph airplane called "The Monarch of the Air!" The fortunate eleven survivors struggle to rebuild their lives by creating a capitalistic society. After that fails, along with several other inept efforts, they create a successful utopian society on the lush grounds of a grand country estate in the Pocantico Hills above the Hudson River. Sinclair's life-long vision, "The Cooperative Commonwealth," reigns happily forever after, in this classic of the literature of political imagination.

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy, Utopia

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1924

About the author

Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle (1906). To gather information for the novel, Sinclair spent seven weeks undercover working in the meat packing plants of Chicago. These direct experiences exposed the horrific conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. The Jungle has remained continuously in print since its initial publication. In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the “free press” in the United States. Four years after the initial publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created. Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence." In 1943, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Sinclair also ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Socialist, and was the Democratic Party nominee for Governor of California in 1934, though his highly progressive campaign was defeated.

Reviews

[Debbie Zapata · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sep 22, 1130pm ~~ Review asap.

Sep 24, 930pm ~~ I discovered Upton Sinclair back in high school (The Jungle) but had not read more of his work since then, except for Oil! which I finished a month or so ago. I remembered while reading that book that I might have read his book The Millennium, but when I went looking for it in my overstuffed bookcases, I couldn't find it anywhere.

Well, turns out it was just buried deeper than I thought. I needed to replace a couple of titles in our Zapata Reading Club list and spent one afternoon moving books around to be able to get my hands on possible choices. All of a sudden there was my copy of The Millennium! So I put it out in my Next Up basket and now here we are.

Before I started reading I could not remember anything about it. Twenty years since a first reading will sometimes create that little blank spot in a person's mind. After a few pages the story came back a little bit, but overall it still seemed brand new to me.

The tale surprised me, especially with the experience of Oil! being so fresh in my mind. This book was originally a play that Sinclair wrote in 1907, but it never was performed and for some odd reason all copies of the work were lost over the years. So in 1924 he wrote the theme again only in the form a novel.

In the author's foreword he mentions that he paid a Mr. Fred D. Warren for the original idea. I eventually did a little research to see who that person might have been. Turns out he was the editor of the Socialist journal Appeal To Reason, and the very man who had commissioned Sinclair to investigate the meat packing industry and write The Jungle. Well, you just never know what things you learn when you read, right?

Something else that came from the foreword was this: "It is amusing to note that many details about airplanes and wireless telephones, imaginary when the play was written, are now everyday affairs to us all!" Remember, this version and therefore the foreword were written in 1924. Sinclair might have been shocked and not amused at how one of the devices in his novel came true in a slightly different form. You will see what I mean in just a moment.

Because there was an explosive device involved in the story. An explosive device that would kill all the people in the world but not harm any buildings. Here is what happens: all the cream of Society has gathered at the top of the newly built Pleasure Palace in Central Park, New York City. We are celebrating the Palace itself, a place for the elite of the elite to escape the rest of the dreary world. And tonight we are to have a plane ride that will follow the sun around the world in the fancy new plane that is capable of traveling 1000 miles per hour.

Only there is that issue of the explosive device. When events happen that make it clear the device will go off, ten of our Society Elite get on the plane and the pilot flies up into the sky before the detonation. When they return they are the only eleven people on the planet. Everyone else is merely a pile of dust. But thank goodness, we have both the Leader Of The World and his wife. We have his second-in-command and his wife (who happens to be the Leader's daughter). We have the Leader's other daughter, then a poet, a reporter, the Leader's butler, a somewhat random Society Lady, the Bishop of a church, and of course our pilot. The world is saved, right?

Right.

My husband and I always laugh at the science fiction movies that make sure to rescue all the leaders of the world and other government officials before The End comes. The idea being that they are the ones who can set up a new world. But do they know how to actually DO anything? Can they light a fire? Prepare food? Wash dishes? Scrub the floor? Run the machinery? Clean the toilet? No, of course not. And it was the same with our Eleven. Rich spoiled people in general (there are a couple of exceptions) that immediately begin to whine and wonder who is going to do the work.

And then we are treated to the progress of civilization in a micro society. As Sinclair works his way through the story, we see the rise and fall of slavery, feudalism, capitalism and so on. This is in one way a goofy story, but at the same time it showed just how all those isms develop, as well as the problems with each one. Will our intrepid eleven ever get the idea of which ism they are supposed to follow in their brave new world? Well, it is a wild ride to the decision, and I'm not telling.

I got a kick out of this and appreciated the ideas in it much more than when I first read it. Does that make me a follower of the chosen ism? Not sure. No ism ever seems to work out in the real world the way it does on paper. I think all we can do is try to remember that we are supposed to respect each other, help each other, see in each other a brother or sister simply because we are all human beings, and hope for the best. Whether there are eleven or eleven billion of us, what better ism is there for the future of society?

[Brandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The last capitalist had starved to death. He had been too lazy to work, so he perished; and with him perished his system." Well, we can dream, right?

[Amelia Patane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I honestly loved this book very much. It came out in 1907 so I was NOT expecting Upton Sinclair to go into the depth of anti-capitalism that he did but I guess I should’ve anticipated it more given the time. His writing is very shrewd and there are a lot of quotable sentences that are pretty relevant to now. I absolutely loved the ending, I think that it wrapped up the story very well and was very succinct to the overarching theme that was being woven into the story the entire time. The book also was funnier than I think most people would expect so that made it pretty cool for the time too

[Fran Britschgi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A truly exemplary analogy to the development of class consciousness, all wrapped in sardonic excellence

[J · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Poets had sung, prophets had preached, scientists had studied---and the best they had been able to produce was a world in which millions of abject and degraded people toiled without cease, in order that a few hundred idle parasites might squander the sur-plus of their labour."

1907. Sinclair wrote this four years after the first airplane flew, and had the foresight and imagination to assume that someday there would be massive airliners. I'd class this as speculative fiction, didactic as it may be.

The story is classically Sinclair: simply told, heavy-handed in its moralizing at times, but always respectful of the reader. As ever, he's spreading the gospel of socialism, and good on him. What a shame to see us here in 2025, groveling at the feet of billionaires and charlatans -- elevating them to become our god-kings.

A friend of mine recently remarked that only far-right/reactionary revolution is possible in the United States, and I think he's right. Our founding revolution, the secession that led to the Civil War, January 6th, all seem to lend credence to the idea.

But, I was born here and will likely die here in the US, so I stay. Besides, to paraphrase "The Simpsons," it's where all my stuff is.

Fuck Trump.

[Cheryl · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m not for sure how this was billed as a comedy play, back in its time. I must have missed all the punch lines.

This, to me, was a boring read and not well written. Also, socialism just doesn’t work. 🤷‍♀️

[Two Envelopes And A Phone · Rating 3 out of 5]

The cotton candy of post apocalypse novels, so there’s a certain charm to that. I thought of Thorne Smith, at times, as I read this - which is not a good thing, in my case, as I’m not a fan of Smith’s particular brand of hijinks. I also flashed back to P G Wodehouse’s early SF satire from around the same time as The Millennium first saw life (as a play script), The Swoop: Or, How Clarence Saved England. And that is more along the lines of praise from me, for Upton Sinclair’s end-of-the-world snack food for not much thought. Thirdly, I was reminded of the Radium Age SF novel I read just before The Millenium - Capek’s The Absolute at Large…which means I’m ready for some serious, depressing Radium Age Science Fiction, instead of all this silliness. Though, the silliness was a nice break from all the depressing 1904-1933 SF that preceded it - so time to swing back the other way.

The synopsis of the plot for The Millennium: A Comedy of the Year 2000 had me worried about being on a predictable treadmill; “eleven people survive a scientific catastrophe that ends humanity by flying around in an aeroplane as the world ends, and then come down and try various forms of government/society to establish their new civilization”. Hilarity ensues? Actually, that plot summary sounded boring, and suggested a very mechanical structure to the proceedings. Tyranny, funny failure; feudalism, funny failure; capitalism, funny failure; socialism, funny failure (or, probably, successful socialism, because if binging on Radium Age SF this year has taught me anything, it’s that socialism was it, baby - the only cure for what ails ya). Thankfully, the book should not be summed up like that - as if it’s just a series of reboots of political systems. Things are more fluid and organic than that; and that description doesn’t account for the break down into factions, or the fun in the details. Don’t come for the characters, or certainly not the style, but the author does keep it moving, and lively, and got grins, not guffaws, from me. In fairness, I don’t know if I’ve ever guffawed; if I have, it was probably while reading Wodehouse. So if you can find The Swoop: or, How Clarence Saved England, by Wodehouse and from around 1909 or 1910, I recommend that over Upton Sinclair’s style-starved hot old mess. But The Millennium is worth an easy chair and a preferred beverage one afternoon, if you want the end of the world without any of the baggage that usually goes with it.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a lost treasure! I really enjoyed it. Deals with the same theme as Orwell's Animal Farm, and is about the same brief length, but Sinclair's book offers humor and a solution but is lesser known.

The Millenium is more explicit than Animal Farm in illustrating how several historic socio-economic systems work in principle. At the same time it is much lighter-hearted than Animal Farm and is not depressing but rather a delight to read. Simple plot, consistent and distinct characters, hilarious satire at times. It was originally intended to be performed as absurd comedy and I found that imagining how it might be staged was a fun way to read it.

Written during the time of the original robber barons (first copyright 1907), it predicts what life might be like in the year 2000. Well, in the year 2025 this takes on renewed significance as the "tech bro" robber barons once again conspire to bring the boot of global capitalism down hard on us common folk (the "workers").

After the chuckles subside, there are some meaty issues to ponder. And a decision to make: whose side are you on?

[Mariam Younes · Rating 5 out of 5]

oh man.
There's a special force at work in this universe, I feel it everytime I stumble upon a book or a song or a person, how do ideas and people show up in our lives this way? how do they shake us to the core and then keep moving, how does systems create them, or do they create themselves despite the system?

[Klaus Dieter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hilarious and heartwarming

[Ernie Jr. · Rating 1 out of 5]

Naive.

It is interesting to look into the past like this, into the mind of a socialist before so many socialist experiments were run in the 20th century proving that it doesn't work (and still isn't no matter how smooth a talker Barry is). As an attempt at philosophy, Mr. Sinclair comes across as extraordinarily naive, biased, and very ignorant or very very willing to misrepresent the opposing position. He, like so many others, attempts to drag the Bible into his arguments on the negative side but his characters do not represent the Biblical faith well. His characters use the Bible as a disjointed series of unrelated verses used completely out of context. This may very well be an accurate portrayal of the denominations of the world, but the way Sinclair uses it is more in line with an attack on the Bible itself and all who hold it to be Truth. He also either does not understand or utterly misrepresents "capitalism" (which is more precisely the free market economy since all nations are, by definition, capitalistic in that they all use capital). He even utterly fails to actually represent communism to any degree other than to say "and they lived happily ever after." The humerous irony of the whole book is that it was written after his own experiment in communism in New Jersey failed epically.

As a novel, Sinclair fails as well. It isn't that he is writing decades ago and I can't relate. I disagree with Ayn Rands position on religion, but Atlas Shrugged was just shy of prophetic with regard to economics. His characters are 1 dimensional. His dialogue was like watching actors "act" instead of truly becoming the character (yes, I know it was originally a play but that is no excuse). It was billed as a comedy but was never funny. It addressed deep issues in a superficial manner and allowed no suspension of disbelief whatsoever. If this were a movie it would be MST3K material for sure.

Even if you are a socialist to your core, I'd avoid this book. There are more entertaining ways to reinforce your brainwashing.

[Mike Pietrosante]

Read this a few months back. This was Sinclair pumping up his ideal of a Utopian commune, took a bit of time off from muckraking the oil and meat packing industries and had some fun.

Written in early 20th century, talks about the world ending in the year 2000 and only a handful of survivors living in NYC and how they sustain themselves. Most are rich but useless once they have no servants. Talks about wireless phones, cars and air travel way before their time. Pretty cool

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting look at turn of the century view of the future. Characters represent economic philosophies to the extreme.

[Brandi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Socialism doesn't work. This book was entertaining, but pointless as a political commentary.

[Sally · Rating 3 out of 5]

Heavy handed and rather cartoon like utopian satire.

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

Poorly written, this is one of the least favorite works in my library. It reads like a strong high school creative writing assignment given more length.

[Stephanie Davis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strange look into the future from the past that has eery resonance.