William Le Queux

The Unknown To-morrow - How the Rich Fared at the Hands of the Poor, Together with a Full Account of the Social Revolution in England

Anti-Socialist dystopia, 1910

The Unknown Tomorrow (1910) imagines a near-future England in the throes of a socialist revolution in the mid-1930s. Industries are nationalized, marriage abolished, and children made wards of the state. The prevailing slogan "Death to the Rich" echoes through a nation stripped of sentiment, where "all love, paternal affection, sympathy, and softness of heart seemed dead, killed by law." Le Queux was a prolific writer of invasion literature and political thrillers, and this novel reflects the anti-socialist anxieties common among Edwardian conservatives alarmed by the rise of the labor movement.

Hardcover. First Edition. Octavo, blue cloth stamped in gilt. London: F. V. White & Co., 1910. Locke, A Spectrum of Fantasy, p.139. Claeys, Dystopia: A Natural History, p.304. #10639.
Bright near fine copy.