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The Future Took Us
Two English schoolboys are suddenly transported from the mid-20th century to the end of the third millennium.
160 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1958
22 people want to read
About the author
David Severn
37 booksDavid Severn was a pseudonym for David Storr Unwin, a British writer. He was the son of publisher Sir Stanley Unwin, of whom Severn wrote a biography in 1982, Fifty Years with Father.
Severn attended Abbotsholme School, Derbyshire from 1933–36, and worked for the League of Nations Secretariat, Geneva (1938), Unwin Brothers (printers), 1939, Blackwells (1940) and George Allen & Unwin (1941-43), having been declared medically unfit for the armed services.
His first series for children (1942-46) featured "Crusoe" Robinson, who was befriended by youngsters in holiday adventures, many featuring a Romany group. The Warner family series followed (1947–52), featuring pheasants, ponies and country life. The scraperboard illustrations of Joan Kiddell-Monroe greatly enhance these two series.
A number of books experimented with the paranormal and time-slip, and can be compared with many modern books revisiting supernatural themes. Drumbeats! has a musical youngster beating a native drum which transports children to a lost expedition to Africa twenty years earlier. Dream Gold shows the hypnotic power of one boy over another, with dreams reliving the conflicts of their ancestors. The Future Took Us is a time-slip. The Girl in the Grove, his longest book, is a psychological ghost story. He also produced illustrated books for younger children.
Severn attended Abbotsholme School, Derbyshire from 1933–36, and worked for the League of Nations Secretariat, Geneva (1938), Unwin Brothers (printers), 1939, Blackwells (1940) and George Allen & Unwin (1941-43), having been declared medically unfit for the armed services.
His first series for children (1942-46) featured "Crusoe" Robinson, who was befriended by youngsters in holiday adventures, many featuring a Romany group. The Warner family series followed (1947–52), featuring pheasants, ponies and country life. The scraperboard illustrations of Joan Kiddell-Monroe greatly enhance these two series.
A number of books experimented with the paranormal and time-slip, and can be compared with many modern books revisiting supernatural themes. Drumbeats! has a musical youngster beating a native drum which transports children to a lost expedition to Africa twenty years earlier. Dream Gold shows the hypnotic power of one boy over another, with dreams reliving the conflicts of their ancestors. The Future Took Us is a time-slip. The Girl in the Grove, his longest book, is a psychological ghost story. He also produced illustrated books for younger children.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
Want to read
March 31, 2017I read this book as a teenager and I was enthralled by it. I enjoyed the language of the future (Braid and budden) and I would love to read it again. The horror of The Wheel...
March 2, 2020
Unpretentious Kids SF From the 1950s.
David Severn wrote quite a bit of children’s fiction, and this is one of his more memorable efforts.
Two schoolboys (age unstated but from internal evidence probably about 17 – a popular age for boy heroes in this kind of story) narrowly escape a caning from their headmaster when they are unceremoniously whisked away without visible human agency and deposited in a totally unfamiliar country. .At first it appears to be empty and desolate, but they eventually encounter people, whose language they cannot at first understand and whose society seems to be about that of Dark Age Anglo-Saxons – except for the complete absence of the wheel, which is apparently a sensitive subject with them. They take exception even to a drawing of one.
The boys begin to see features of the landscape which look vaguely familiar, and to suspect that they may have moved in time rather than space, a suspicion reinforced when they spot familiar words in their hosts’ language and realise it is a variant of English. But the real shocker – perhaps the most memorable part of the whole book – is when they find an old girder embedded in the trunk of an oak tree - which has clearly grown round it over the course of centuries.
So far just another primitive post-apocalypse world. But all is not as it seems. Getting to London (little more than a village now) they see the first wheel in this world – a big one used by the local ruling class for public executions! And one of them, while running off, encounters a shaft leading down into the earth, from which engine-like sounds can be heard – rather reminiscent of Wells’ The Time Machine. The place isn’t really primitive. It just suits its rulers to keep the rabble thus.
From here on things follow a familiar course, but with a twist. The boys are drawn into a plot to overthrow the tyrants (who show an unaccountable interest in them) and eventually succeed with the aid of a fellow abductee from the 22nd century and another from the Stone Age. The machinery which snatched them through time is found intact, and they are free to go home – but only one of them wants to.
Well, that’s it. If you can overlook the 1950s assumptions – esp where school discipline is concerned - it’s still a perfectly good read. Enjoy.
David Severn wrote quite a bit of children’s fiction, and this is one of his more memorable efforts.
Two schoolboys (age unstated but from internal evidence probably about 17 – a popular age for boy heroes in this kind of story) narrowly escape a caning from their headmaster when they are unceremoniously whisked away without visible human agency and deposited in a totally unfamiliar country. .At first it appears to be empty and desolate, but they eventually encounter people, whose language they cannot at first understand and whose society seems to be about that of Dark Age Anglo-Saxons – except for the complete absence of the wheel, which is apparently a sensitive subject with them. They take exception even to a drawing of one.
The boys begin to see features of the landscape which look vaguely familiar, and to suspect that they may have moved in time rather than space, a suspicion reinforced when they spot familiar words in their hosts’ language and realise it is a variant of English. But the real shocker – perhaps the most memorable part of the whole book – is when they find an old girder embedded in the trunk of an oak tree - which has clearly grown round it over the course of centuries.
So far just another primitive post-apocalypse world. But all is not as it seems. Getting to London (little more than a village now) they see the first wheel in this world – a big one used by the local ruling class for public executions! And one of them, while running off, encounters a shaft leading down into the earth, from which engine-like sounds can be heard – rather reminiscent of Wells’ The Time Machine. The place isn’t really primitive. It just suits its rulers to keep the rabble thus.
From here on things follow a familiar course, but with a twist. The boys are drawn into a plot to overthrow the tyrants (who show an unaccountable interest in them) and eventually succeed with the aid of a fellow abductee from the 22nd century and another from the Stone Age. The machinery which snatched them through time is found intact, and they are free to go home – but only one of them wants to.
Well, that’s it. If you can overlook the 1950s assumptions – esp where school discipline is concerned - it’s still a perfectly good read. Enjoy.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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June 5, 2025Two mid-20th century schoolboys (Peter, the protagonist, and Dick) are saved from being caned by their headmaster by being suddenly and inexplicably plunged out of his study and into the countryside. It is a not quite right countryside, which disturbingly includes an impossibly high (by mid 20th century standards) metal tower, partially ruined.... Its inhabitants, living Medieval subsistence farming sort of lives, with no technology (not even the wheel), speak an almost intelligible English, and are friendly enough. And the two boys realize after picking up on various clues, including a ruined girder from the tower embedded in an ancient oak tree, that they have travelled in time and are in the future.
Dick, who embodies the spirit of the British empire, immediately wants to bring technology to their lives, but his first effort at steam power goes badly, and his attempt to introduce the wheel is met with horror. There is good reason for the horror.
The medieval-esque peasants aren't the only class of people around; there is also a ruling priestly class, who practice mathematics to excess and hoard technology to themselves. They are clearly Bad. For instance, as well as looking Bad--they have bald shaven heads and glower nastily, they are the only ones who get to use the wheel, and they do, as a means of killing people who dissent or disobey their fanatical rule. They have used their own rather marvelous technology to bring people from the past to add to their store of knowledge. Attempt #1 brought them a Neanderthal, which wasn't useful, Attempt #2 was a winner, resulting in a 22nd century engineer (who wants to get back to his family), and Attempt #3 another dude-the two boys. But even though the boys aren't any use to them, they aren't going waste time sending them back.
There is also a Resistance of people fed up with being killed on wheels, featuring a remarkable girl who can do everything physical (archery, riding, hunting etc.) better than the boys (Dick is very taken with her), and her brother, described over and over again as "the crippled boy" which grated more than a little. Adventures and perils ensue as the boys and their allies break into the Mathematicians citadel, bring down their regime, and get home.... except for Dick, who chooses to stay with the Atalanta of the resistance (one gets the sense that he can't leave until he is better at archery, riding, hunting, etc. than she is....)
This is a book best read by 1950s children who haven't read all the better books still to come. The plot, though fine, is not quite well developed and nuanced enough to make this a great book, and the story is slowed by lots and lots and lots of description (so much description it was hard to actually picture anything due to my mind's eye glazing over...). There isn't much to speak of in the way of characterization, or finely drawn emotional peaks and valleys. I doubt I will ever want to reread it.
However, this is an interesting one for us serious readers of juvenile time travel. E. Nesbit's The Story of the Amulet is the first time travel book in juvenile fiction written in English to take children into the future, but that was just one episode of many. The Future Took Us seems to be the earliest book published in English that makes this sort of time travel the plot of the whole book. This particular twist on time travel hasn't gotten much attention since (in my time travel book list, there are only ten that involve travelling to what is the future from the main character's point of view). Bits are reminiscent of H.G. Wells, and Severn adds very little in the way of wild original imagination. The time travel ends up reading more like a portal fantasy to an alternate England than travel to a future one, and I wonder if Severn had just read the Narnia books when the idea for this story came to him.
Dick, who embodies the spirit of the British empire, immediately wants to bring technology to their lives, but his first effort at steam power goes badly, and his attempt to introduce the wheel is met with horror. There is good reason for the horror.
The medieval-esque peasants aren't the only class of people around; there is also a ruling priestly class, who practice mathematics to excess and hoard technology to themselves. They are clearly Bad. For instance, as well as looking Bad--they have bald shaven heads and glower nastily, they are the only ones who get to use the wheel, and they do, as a means of killing people who dissent or disobey their fanatical rule. They have used their own rather marvelous technology to bring people from the past to add to their store of knowledge. Attempt #1 brought them a Neanderthal, which wasn't useful, Attempt #2 was a winner, resulting in a 22nd century engineer (who wants to get back to his family), and Attempt #3 another dude-the two boys. But even though the boys aren't any use to them, they aren't going waste time sending them back.
There is also a Resistance of people fed up with being killed on wheels, featuring a remarkable girl who can do everything physical (archery, riding, hunting etc.) better than the boys (Dick is very taken with her), and her brother, described over and over again as "the crippled boy" which grated more than a little. Adventures and perils ensue as the boys and their allies break into the Mathematicians citadel, bring down their regime, and get home.... except for Dick, who chooses to stay with the Atalanta of the resistance (one gets the sense that he can't leave until he is better at archery, riding, hunting, etc. than she is....)
This is a book best read by 1950s children who haven't read all the better books still to come. The plot, though fine, is not quite well developed and nuanced enough to make this a great book, and the story is slowed by lots and lots and lots of description (so much description it was hard to actually picture anything due to my mind's eye glazing over...). There isn't much to speak of in the way of characterization, or finely drawn emotional peaks and valleys. I doubt I will ever want to reread it.
However, this is an interesting one for us serious readers of juvenile time travel. E. Nesbit's The Story of the Amulet is the first time travel book in juvenile fiction written in English to take children into the future, but that was just one episode of many. The Future Took Us seems to be the earliest book published in English that makes this sort of time travel the plot of the whole book. This particular twist on time travel hasn't gotten much attention since (in my time travel book list, there are only ten that involve travelling to what is the future from the main character's point of view). Bits are reminiscent of H.G. Wells, and Severn adds very little in the way of wild original imagination. The time travel ends up reading more like a portal fantasy to an alternate England than travel to a future one, and I wonder if Severn had just read the Narnia books when the idea for this story came to him.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews