Round Trip to the Year 2000
Paperback original, 1903
William Wallace Cook’s A Round Trip to the Year 2000 (1903) is an early science-fiction satire of automation and corporate monopoly. Originally serialized in The Argosy in 1903 and issued in paperback by Street & Smith in 1925, it introduces the “muglug,” a mechanical worker that predates the robots of Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. by seventeen years. The novel also imagines an “Air Trust” that controls and sells access to oxygen, an idea later developed more fully in George Allan England’s socialist dystopian novel of the same name. Rare first edition, published as Book No. 4 in The Adventure Library series.
Paperback. First Edition, Paperback Original. Octavo, wrappers. New York: Street & Smith, 1903. #11485.
A solid, good copy, with darkened pages and some chipping at the spine ends.
Paperback. First Edition, Paperback Original. Octavo, wrappers. New York: Street & Smith, 1903. #11485.
A solid, good copy, with darkened pages and some chipping at the spine ends.
Additional Details
William W. Cook’s A Round Trip to the Year 2000 presents a future shaped by automation, monopoly, and the displacement of human labor. Everson Lumley leaves the year 1900 aboard Dr. Kelpie’s “time coupé” and arrives in a society divided between “the Grinders and the Ground.”
At the center of this society is the “muglug,” a steel automaton that has made the human working class obsolete. As one character explains, “When the muglug came in the working man went out,” forcing displaced laborers to retreat to the agricultural Middle West. The muglugs are not autonomous machines, but are controlled through a “Head Center,” a single human operator who projects subconscious rays capable of animating millions of steel bodies at once. Cook thus places an entire industrial workforce under the control of one directing consciousness.
The same concentration of power appears in the “Air Trust,” which meters and sells the atmosphere itself. Citizens wear buttons that measure their oxygen consumption, and those unable to pay can simply be “turned off.” Even light has been privatized, with the Compressed Sunshine Company supplying it in hermetically sealed cans.
The novel concludes with a muglug revolt after the Head Center loses control of the subconscious rays. The machines turn against both property and their masters, leaving the society that replaced human labor with mechanical obedience unable to restrain its own creation.
At the center of this society is the “muglug,” a steel automaton that has made the human working class obsolete. As one character explains, “When the muglug came in the working man went out,” forcing displaced laborers to retreat to the agricultural Middle West. The muglugs are not autonomous machines, but are controlled through a “Head Center,” a single human operator who projects subconscious rays capable of animating millions of steel bodies at once. Cook thus places an entire industrial workforce under the control of one directing consciousness.
The same concentration of power appears in the “Air Trust,” which meters and sells the atmosphere itself. Citizens wear buttons that measure their oxygen consumption, and those unable to pay can simply be “turned off.” Even light has been privatized, with the Compressed Sunshine Company supplying it in hermetically sealed cans.
The novel concludes with a muglug revolt after the Head Center loses control of the subconscious rays. The machines turn against both property and their masters, leaving the society that replaced human labor with mechanical obedience unable to restrain its own creation.
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