TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Terrific, Nick. I read Looking Backwards eons ago, and via Gutenberg, here’s the passage I most remember:

“For all that they were so easy, the seats were very insecure, and at every sudden jolt of the coach persons were slipping out of them and falling to the ground, where they were instantly compelled to take hold of the rope and help to drag the coach on which they had before ridden so pleasantly. It was naturally regarded as a terrible misfortune to lose one’s seat, and the apprehension that this might happen to them or their friends was a constant cloud upon the happiness of those who rode.”

That’s far too timely today when so many Americans are losing their homes and other assets—and when the 21st century is looking more and more like the 19th in terms of economic differences.

David

P.S. Best of luck with your booksinmyphone.com site!

Thanks David.

Yes I recall that metaphor making a big impression on me also. Upton Sincair’s The Jungle is very timely also (there is specific parallel to today’s sub-prime mortgages) and all the more distressing for being a commentary on what is rather than a hypothetical.

I enjoyed reading The Sleeper Awakes several years ago. One detail of the retro-futuristic Wellsian city described in the novel was especially intriguing. The hero clambers to the top of the metropolis and finds the following remarkable cityscape:

He saw he had come out upon the roof of the vast city structure which had replaced the miscellaneous houses, streets and open spaces of Victorian London. The place upon which he stood was level, with huge serpentine cables Iying athwart it in every direction. The circular wheels of a number of windmills loomed indistinct and gigantic through the darkness and snowfall, and roared with a varying loudness as the fitful wind rose and fell. Some way off an intermittent white light smote up from below,
touched the snow eddies with a transient glitter, and made an evanescent spectre in the night; and here and there, low down, some vaguely outlined wind-driven mechanism flickered with livid sparks.

Wells envisioned a city whose primary source of energy was wind power generated by massive turbines placed on the tops of city buildings. One of the most powerful unions in this world consists of the engineers of the “wind-vanes”. The book describes “Wind-Vane Offices” and a “Wind-Vane police”.

So Wells was contemplating large-scale renewable wind energy at the turn of the last century. One-hundred years later T Boone Pickens is proposing enormous wind farms in the Midwest and a UK energy plan calls for large off-shore wind farms.