In the World of Future: A Russian Scientific Romance from Before Space Age

AN AIRSHIP BOUND FOR THE NORTH POLE. A KINGDOM BENEATH THE ICE. A THOUSAND-YEAR SLEEP. In 1891, four European explorers discover an ancient message on India's Elephanta Island-a summons left by a scientist who lived ten thousand years before them. The trail points north. Backed by a fortune and joined by an international company of scientists, engineers, and sailors, they launch the experimental airship Mars toward the North Pole. What begins as a triumph of invention becomes a struggle for survival. Sabotage, volcanic catastrophe, and a descent into an unknown world beneath the ice separate a handful of travelers from their century. When they wake in 2892, Russia-and the planet-has been remade. Airships cross continents at impossible speed. Moving images and voices travel across vast distances. Matter is transformed, human life has lengthened, old nations have vanished, and Russia stands at the center of a new technological order. Yet this future is no simple paradise. Its prosperity rests on strange social arrangements, its political certainties conceal unsettling assumptions, and another global conflict is gathering. Published in Moscow in 1892, Nikolai Shelonsky's In the World of the Future is a remarkable work of early science fiction: part polar expedition, part lost-world adventure, part time-travel story, part utopian argument, and part future-war novel. Written before powered flight, radio broadcasting, or the modern cinema, it imagines technologies and political transformations that still feel startling today. This complete English reader's edition restores the novel's prologue, twenty-six chapters, epilogue, chapter synopses, and the full sequence of A. E. Hoffmann's original illustrations. New editorial material places the story in its historical and technological context without interrupting the adventure. For readers drawn to classic science fiction, Russian literature, time travel, polar exploration, airships, utopian fiction, lost worlds, and the strange futures imagined before the space age. Discover a forgotten scientific romance-and a future dreamed more than a century ago.