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Anno Domini 2000, or, Woman's Destiny
Julius Vogel's 1889 vision of the year 2000
"Based on the 2000 commemorative edition published in New Zealand by Exisle Publishing Limited"--P. 4. "The utopian novel that got the future right"--Cover.
"Based on the 2000 commemorative edition published in New Zealand by Exisle Publishing Limited"--P. 4. "The utopian novel that got the future right"--Cover.
- GenresFiction
184 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1889
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
April 17, 2014
I read this primarily because it’s a significant historical text, the first New Zealand science fiction novel, written by a former Premier of NZ after whom the prestigious Sir Julius Vogel Awards for speculative fiction are named. It’s also an early feminist novel, which is something I have an interest in.
I was told the book itself was bad, and it is. The author makes most of the typical new-writer mistakes. All his characters (even, arguably, the villain) are Mary Sues, paragons of virtue and accomplishment, brave, good-looking, popular, intelligent, and wealthy. Here’s a sample description: “She was dear to all who had the privilege of knowing her. The fascination she exercised was as powerful as it was unstudied. Her success in no degree changed her kindly, sympathetic nature. She always was, and always would be, unselfish and unexacting.”
He constantly tells instead of showing (as in the extract I just quoted). He infodumps – for an entire chapter, at one point. He’s longwinded and tendentious, even more than was usual in the 19th century. Remarkably for a politician, though not unusually for a utopian novelist, he appears not to know how human minds actually work; everyone is remarkably lacking in self-interest, greed or power-hunger, especially those who have a lot of money and power. He doesn’t appear aware, either, that the discovery of millions of tons of gold would devalue gold and cause economic chaos. There are plot holes and continuity errors. He several times describes things as indescribable. It’s pretty much the perfect storm of bad writing, apart from the fact that he could spell and punctuate and knew what the words he was using meant. At its very best, it’s pulp, and it doesn’t reach that level often.
The edition I read is from the NZ Electronic Text Centre, and they’ve done a fairly average job with proofreading the OCR scan – by which I mean that it’s full of errors that a spell-check should have caught.
The ideas, though, are interesting. At the end of the epilogue (with no heading to mark the transition from “I’m telling the story” to “I’m telling you why I wrote it”), Vogel says, “It is perhaps desirable to explain that three leading features have been kept in view in the production of the foregoing anticipation of the future.” (That’s how he writes. It’s awful.) Firstly, he was writing “to show that a recognised dominance of either sex is unnecessary, and that men and women may take part in the affairs of the world on terms of equality…” He does this by the simple expedient of showing a government full of women which works extremely well. By an odd coincidence, in 2004, only a few years after this book was set, New Zealand had women in all of the following positions: Prime Minister, Governor-General, Attorney General, Chief Justice, and CEO of the largest public corporation.
His second purpose was to depict the dominions of Great Britain (New Zealand, Australia, Canada, South Africa and a home-ruled Ireland) joined into “a powerful and beneficent empire” - so attractive that Egypt and Belgium join it too, rather randomly, and later so do some of the states of the US.
His third purpose was to suggest what amounts to a universal basic income, an idea which is now under serious consideration in several places as automation continues to eat jobs. Apart from the opening prologue and another long infodump later, this idea doesn’t really come into the novel at all, and it has no significance to the plot whatsoever, but it’s clearly something he believes in strongly, since out of the three ideas he spends the longest time talking about this one in his epilogue.
I found some of his other predictions interesting, as well. He spends a whole chapter infodumping about the invention of heavier-than-air flying craft which can fly easily and safely at 100 miles an hour. In his British Empire of the future, a previous Emperor has declared that learning dead languages is a waste of time, and everyone should be educated in science and engineering instead. At every desk in the federal parliament (which moves periodically between the countries of the empire) is a “hand telegraph” for the member to communicate with people outside. Waves, tides and wind provide energy which is converted to electricity or compressed air to power labour-saving devices.
There’s a written constitution, and free speech, except that it’s forbidden to even discuss several specific articles of the constitution: that the Empire should continue to be an Empire, that the current royal family should continue to rule it, and that none of the dominions should leave it. This becomes a plot point.
The Empire is protectionist, because free trade just sets cheap labour from outside against the labour of those inside. There’s a considerable estate tax (nevertheless, there seem to be plenty of people who have inherited a large amount of wealth). The Empire believes in “making the prosperity of its own people [its] first object,” which I actually think is a good political idea that could do with more exploration in our own time.
The Americans don’t believe in standing armies or fleets, because they can spend as much as they want any time they choose to fight and are the world’s greatest organisers. This doesn’t stop them from getting soundly trounced by the Empire after they invade Canada on a pretext because the President is annoyed with the Emperor for not marrying her daughter. (His main reason is that the young woman has red hair. He’s a ginger bigot.)
I wasn’t aware that Antarctica hadn’t been discovered in Vogel’s day. He refers to “a large island, easily accessible, which received the name of Antarctica,” but from the geographical description it’s clearly not the Antarctica we know. “From causes satisfactorily explained by scientists” (blatant technobabble for “because I want it to be this way,” not that it has any significance to the plot whatsoever), the temperature close to the Pole itself is “comparatively mild”. The island is inhabited by people who speak a language close to Maori but who have a lot of body hair, described as “a docile, peaceful, intelligent people” (noble savages, in other words). This is the only mention of Maori, or any other native people, in the entire book.
Vogel was setting out to do two things in this book: to communicate some of his ideas and speculations about the future, and to tell a story. He’s much more successful at the first than he is at the second. So, as a historical text, very interesting. As a novel, painfully bad. Let’s compromise on three stars here.
I have an extended plot summary at my blog (http://mikerm.blogspot.com/2014/04/i-...) which was too long to include in my review. I publish it in the expectation that it will be a lot more enjoyable to read than the book was.
I was told the book itself was bad, and it is. The author makes most of the typical new-writer mistakes. All his characters (even, arguably, the villain) are Mary Sues, paragons of virtue and accomplishment, brave, good-looking, popular, intelligent, and wealthy. Here’s a sample description: “She was dear to all who had the privilege of knowing her. The fascination she exercised was as powerful as it was unstudied. Her success in no degree changed her kindly, sympathetic nature. She always was, and always would be, unselfish and unexacting.”
He constantly tells instead of showing (as in the extract I just quoted). He infodumps – for an entire chapter, at one point. He’s longwinded and tendentious, even more than was usual in the 19th century. Remarkably for a politician, though not unusually for a utopian novelist, he appears not to know how human minds actually work; everyone is remarkably lacking in self-interest, greed or power-hunger, especially those who have a lot of money and power. He doesn’t appear aware, either, that the discovery of millions of tons of gold would devalue gold and cause economic chaos. There are plot holes and continuity errors. He several times describes things as indescribable. It’s pretty much the perfect storm of bad writing, apart from the fact that he could spell and punctuate and knew what the words he was using meant. At its very best, it’s pulp, and it doesn’t reach that level often.
The edition I read is from the NZ Electronic Text Centre, and they’ve done a fairly average job with proofreading the OCR scan – by which I mean that it’s full of errors that a spell-check should have caught.
The ideas, though, are interesting. At the end of the epilogue (with no heading to mark the transition from “I’m telling the story” to “I’m telling you why I wrote it”), Vogel says, “It is perhaps desirable to explain that three leading features have been kept in view in the production of the foregoing anticipation of the future.” (That’s how he writes. It’s awful.) Firstly, he was writing “to show that a recognised dominance of either sex is unnecessary, and that men and women may take part in the affairs of the world on terms of equality…” He does this by the simple expedient of showing a government full of women which works extremely well. By an odd coincidence, in 2004, only a few years after this book was set, New Zealand had women in all of the following positions: Prime Minister, Governor-General, Attorney General, Chief Justice, and CEO of the largest public corporation.
His second purpose was to depict the dominions of Great Britain (New Zealand, Australia, Canada, South Africa and a home-ruled Ireland) joined into “a powerful and beneficent empire” - so attractive that Egypt and Belgium join it too, rather randomly, and later so do some of the states of the US.
His third purpose was to suggest what amounts to a universal basic income, an idea which is now under serious consideration in several places as automation continues to eat jobs. Apart from the opening prologue and another long infodump later, this idea doesn’t really come into the novel at all, and it has no significance to the plot whatsoever, but it’s clearly something he believes in strongly, since out of the three ideas he spends the longest time talking about this one in his epilogue.
I found some of his other predictions interesting, as well. He spends a whole chapter infodumping about the invention of heavier-than-air flying craft which can fly easily and safely at 100 miles an hour. In his British Empire of the future, a previous Emperor has declared that learning dead languages is a waste of time, and everyone should be educated in science and engineering instead. At every desk in the federal parliament (which moves periodically between the countries of the empire) is a “hand telegraph” for the member to communicate with people outside. Waves, tides and wind provide energy which is converted to electricity or compressed air to power labour-saving devices.
There’s a written constitution, and free speech, except that it’s forbidden to even discuss several specific articles of the constitution: that the Empire should continue to be an Empire, that the current royal family should continue to rule it, and that none of the dominions should leave it. This becomes a plot point.
The Empire is protectionist, because free trade just sets cheap labour from outside against the labour of those inside. There’s a considerable estate tax (nevertheless, there seem to be plenty of people who have inherited a large amount of wealth). The Empire believes in “making the prosperity of its own people [its] first object,” which I actually think is a good political idea that could do with more exploration in our own time.
The Americans don’t believe in standing armies or fleets, because they can spend as much as they want any time they choose to fight and are the world’s greatest organisers. This doesn’t stop them from getting soundly trounced by the Empire after they invade Canada on a pretext because the President is annoyed with the Emperor for not marrying her daughter. (His main reason is that the young woman has red hair. He’s a ginger bigot.)
I wasn’t aware that Antarctica hadn’t been discovered in Vogel’s day. He refers to “a large island, easily accessible, which received the name of Antarctica,” but from the geographical description it’s clearly not the Antarctica we know. “From causes satisfactorily explained by scientists” (blatant technobabble for “because I want it to be this way,” not that it has any significance to the plot whatsoever), the temperature close to the Pole itself is “comparatively mild”. The island is inhabited by people who speak a language close to Maori but who have a lot of body hair, described as “a docile, peaceful, intelligent people” (noble savages, in other words). This is the only mention of Maori, or any other native people, in the entire book.
Vogel was setting out to do two things in this book: to communicate some of his ideas and speculations about the future, and to tell a story. He’s much more successful at the first than he is at the second. So, as a historical text, very interesting. As a novel, painfully bad. Let’s compromise on three stars here.
I have an extended plot summary at my blog (http://mikerm.blogspot.com/2014/04/i-...) which was too long to include in my review. I publish it in the expectation that it will be a lot more enjoyable to read than the book was.
May 17, 2022
The author is an ex-premier of New Zealand, and our national science fiction awards are named after him. This is a generally readable utopia, and it's a strongly feminist piece for 1889, in that women not only have the vote but routinely hold high political office, and are prominent in science, diplomacy, law, and any number of other fields. The protagonist is actually a young woman MP, and the Prime Minister of Britain and the President of the United States are also women. They are, notably, white women - for a settler country, for a colonising empire (and this book is uncritically adulatory of empire) there's nothing here that looks at race relations. Indigenous peoples are notably absent, and the one sustained objection to the British Empire being an assimilating juggernaut comes from the Irish, but they are inevitably folded in and made to like it.
The really interesting thing here, though, apart from the treatment of women, is the strong ethical stance against poverty. Vogel clearly finds it disgraceful that anyone, anywhere, is in want of a decent standard of living, and although he doesn't use the phrase, there's the equivalent of universal basic income in Anno Domini that provides every citizen with adequate food, shelter, and clothing no matter the employment choices they make. I side-eye some of the rest of what goes in this book, but UBI sounds like a fantastic idea to me.
The really interesting thing here, though, apart from the treatment of women, is the strong ethical stance against poverty. Vogel clearly finds it disgraceful that anyone, anywhere, is in want of a decent standard of living, and although he doesn't use the phrase, there's the equivalent of universal basic income in Anno Domini that provides every citizen with adequate food, shelter, and clothing no matter the employment choices they make. I side-eye some of the rest of what goes in this book, but UBI sounds like a fantastic idea to me.
January 18, 2023
This probably says more about me than it does about the book, but I seriously considered giving it five stars.
This is coming from me, the guy who gave a one star review to a Pulitzer prize winner and couldn't muster more than two or three stars for books that have been canonised as some of the greatest works of literature in the English language.
And yet, this strange, obscure, shambling and rambling science fiction novel from the late 19th century has impressed me more than any of those books.
Obviously, I can't give it five stars because the book has some gaping flaws. It's very much a product of its time, in terms of the weird sentence structures, the long digressions and the god-awful Victorian romantic subplots.
However, compared to other writers of the era (Disraeli and even Dickens both come to mind), I found this book eminently more readable and enjoyable. Julius Vogel is no Oscar Wilde, but I much preferred his writing to that of Benjamin Disraeli, with whom he shares a lot of common traits. (Both were Jewish, both were Prime Ministers around the same time and both are also authors.)
Widely touted as "New Zealand's first ever science fiction novel", Anno Domini 2000 is interesting not because it has a particularly interesting vision for the future but rather for what it tells of us about the attitudes during the period in which it was written. The book was written shortly before New Zealand became the first country in the world to give women the vote and in an age when feminism actually meant something and was more than just a trendy hashtag used by deeply unpleasant people on social media.
It's also remarkable because of how accurately it predicted some aspects of the 21st century. For example, as we all know, the British Empire recently conquered the United States (whose female President tried to invade Canada because... someone wouldn't marry her daughter) and the United States are famous for having no military and being largely unarmed. And of course today Ireland is as much an integral part of the United Kingdom as ever.
But it also got many things wrong - the idea of women voting, let alone holding most of the highest offices in the land is just unthinkable in this day and age and his "air cruisers" (flying machines made of aluminium powered by the combustion of petroleum) are clearly a work of fantasy; to the best of my knowledge no such form of transportation exists in real life.
All in all, I really enjoyed the book and devoured it in about two days. Even though large parts of the book were spent rambling about the intricacies of various Parliamentary procedures, I was still thoroughly entertained because I'm an absolute madman who finds that sort of stuff interesting.
Genuinely, I think the book deserves a wider audience. It's not a difficult read, it's often quite enjoyable (at least I thought so) and it's one of the most important parts of New Zealand's still-latent literary canon.
I don't know why other people rate it so low - it deserves at least four stars.
This is coming from me, the guy who gave a one star review to a Pulitzer prize winner and couldn't muster more than two or three stars for books that have been canonised as some of the greatest works of literature in the English language.
And yet, this strange, obscure, shambling and rambling science fiction novel from the late 19th century has impressed me more than any of those books.
Obviously, I can't give it five stars because the book has some gaping flaws. It's very much a product of its time, in terms of the weird sentence structures, the long digressions and the god-awful Victorian romantic subplots.
However, compared to other writers of the era (Disraeli and even Dickens both come to mind), I found this book eminently more readable and enjoyable. Julius Vogel is no Oscar Wilde, but I much preferred his writing to that of Benjamin Disraeli, with whom he shares a lot of common traits. (Both were Jewish, both were Prime Ministers around the same time and both are also authors.)
Widely touted as "New Zealand's first ever science fiction novel", Anno Domini 2000 is interesting not because it has a particularly interesting vision for the future but rather for what it tells of us about the attitudes during the period in which it was written. The book was written shortly before New Zealand became the first country in the world to give women the vote and in an age when feminism actually meant something and was more than just a trendy hashtag used by deeply unpleasant people on social media.
It's also remarkable because of how accurately it predicted some aspects of the 21st century. For example, as we all know, the British Empire recently conquered the United States (whose female President tried to invade Canada because... someone wouldn't marry her daughter) and the United States are famous for having no military and being largely unarmed. And of course today Ireland is as much an integral part of the United Kingdom as ever.
But it also got many things wrong - the idea of women voting, let alone holding most of the highest offices in the land is just unthinkable in this day and age and his "air cruisers" (flying machines made of aluminium powered by the combustion of petroleum) are clearly a work of fantasy; to the best of my knowledge no such form of transportation exists in real life.
All in all, I really enjoyed the book and devoured it in about two days. Even though large parts of the book were spent rambling about the intricacies of various Parliamentary procedures, I was still thoroughly entertained because I'm an absolute madman who finds that sort of stuff interesting.
Genuinely, I think the book deserves a wider audience. It's not a difficult read, it's often quite enjoyable (at least I thought so) and it's one of the most important parts of New Zealand's still-latent literary canon.
I don't know why other people rate it so low - it deserves at least four stars.
December 15, 2021
The premise a Federal Empire of Britain with all Commonwealth countries as member states except Ireland, that got their independence due to the commonwealth countries, is more interesting than the story itself. Which is forgettable and tedious.
September 25, 2024
As I've said before, the year 2000 may already seem past us now, but can you even believe this is really New Zealand's first and oldest work of "science fiction"? Never even heard of it until quite recently...Much of this doesn't seem as relevant or accurate now as it was when it was first written in the late 19th century. This may have also been the first work outside of the America's about women's rights.
May 23, 2015
Wow. Not for the writing, which, frankly, was awfully tedious, long winded, and boring, but for his predictions. Julius Vogel, in 1889, has predicted with almost scary accuracy the aeroplane (for example), equal rights for men and women, and the wide use of electricity instead of coal, world war on the horizon in 1915 (only in his prediction it was averted). The only big thing he got completely wrong was America - he wrote that it had 'no standing army' and disapproved of one - the real US of today is quite the opposite. Also, by the end of the novel America is once more a British colony.
He underestimated a couple of things - instant communication in the form of a 'hand telegraph' or 'noiseless telegraph' - totally underestimated the power of telephones and the internet.
He also overestimated a few things in terms of equality. He seems to despise communism, but created a whole safety net for the poor. He also decided that the USA would have a woman president, (wrong) all the major positions of power in NZ and Britain would be held by women, and much more. Sadly, most of that is yet to come.
All in all, a very interesting quick read.
He underestimated a couple of things - instant communication in the form of a 'hand telegraph' or 'noiseless telegraph' - totally underestimated the power of telephones and the internet.
He also overestimated a few things in terms of equality. He seems to despise communism, but created a whole safety net for the poor. He also decided that the USA would have a woman president, (wrong) all the major positions of power in NZ and Britain would be held by women, and much more. Sadly, most of that is yet to come.
All in all, a very interesting quick read.
April 19, 2011
This book is worth reading for its insigths into the future, but certainly not for the flow of prose or characterisation. Written in the last 19th century, it predicts future technology and change in societal gender expectations.
September 2, 2008
A hideously written NZ sci-fi melodrama. It's redeeming feature is Vogel's ability to predict future technology and issues surrounding women's rights etc.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews