City of Endless Night
Early anti-fascist dystopia, 1920
City of Endless Night (1920) by Milo Hastings is set in a subterranean Berlin of 2041, where Germany has been sealed underground for over a century, walled off from the rest of the world by a mysterious weapon called the Ray that destroys the oxygen-carrying capacity of blood. Inside, millions live in a vast concrete city, never seeing daylight, governed by a military-eugenic state that controls food production through synthetic chemistry, regulates reproduction through detailed breeding records, and sustains its population on the ideology of perpetual war. The story is narrated by an American chemist who infiltrates Berlin through an abandoned potash mine, assumes the identity of a dead German officer, and gradually maps the society from within.
First serialized as "Children of Kultur" in True Story Magazine from June through November 1919, then revised and published in book form by Dodd, Mead in 1920, the novel predates We, Brave New World, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, yet anticipates with uncomfortable specificity the racial ideology, population engineering, and totalitarian machinery that would define German fascism two decades later. Hastings was a nutritionist and agricultural writer with no particular literary pedigree, which partly explains why the book vanished almost immediately after publication. First editions are now quite scarce.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, black cloth stamped in white on front panel and spine. New York: Dodd Mead, 1920. #11371.
Bright, very good copy, slightly bumped at one corner.
First serialized as "Children of Kultur" in True Story Magazine from June through November 1919, then revised and published in book form by Dodd, Mead in 1920, the novel predates We, Brave New World, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, yet anticipates with uncomfortable specificity the racial ideology, population engineering, and totalitarian machinery that would define German fascism two decades later. Hastings was a nutritionist and agricultural writer with no particular literary pedigree, which partly explains why the book vanished almost immediately after publication. First editions are now quite scarce.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, black cloth stamped in white on front panel and spine. New York: Dodd Mead, 1920. #11371.
Bright, very good copy, slightly bumped at one corner.