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The World as It Shall Be

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The World as It Shall Be

by Emile Souvestre

Translated by Margaret Clarke

Wesleyan University Press $234

The World as It Shall Be was written to satirise the world and to warn of the dark future humankind was creating. Much of the satire can find a contemporary target today. The feared future Emile Souvestre described was simply the present writ large. Looking around us, a century and a half into that future, we perhaps see the same present and accept the logic for the same future, waiting in the wings.

This is the first English translation of the French novel Le Monde tel qu'il sera, the first fully illustrated book of science fiction when published in 1846. It provides a link between the earliest works

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