Jorgo.org Review: The Pleasures of a Futuroscope By Lord Dunsany

By Brian Martin

Lord Dunsany begins his last novel, The Pleasures of a Futuroscope, published for the first time in an attractive hardcover edition by Hippocampus Press, with an intensely bright flash of light and an ashy snowfall lasting several days. London is wiped out in a single stroke, and along with it, we infer, the rest of the world as we know it. Mankind--what's left of it--is blasted ignominiously back to the Stone Age.

If this seems altogether too grim an opening for the author of The King of Elfland's Daughter, keep in mind that none of this has happened--yet. The novel's narrator, a retired newspaper man with time on his hands, discovers that an eccentric inventor friend of his has created a remarkable device that allows the viewer to peer hundreds of years into the future. Sensing an opportunity for amusement, the narrator borrows the "futuroscope" and takes it home. Keeping the images close to home and relatively near to his own time at first, he witnesses wonderful marvels of science and technology as mankind continues to pursue its present course. And then, suddenly, the flash and the snow. It's enough to make even an old Englishman shed a radioactive tear.

But again, that's just the beginning, and Dunsany, stealthily satirical to the last, soon turns his gaze (and the narrator's futuroscope) 500 years into the future where a neolithic family--poised, like us, between the past and the future--struggles for survival in a less complex yet still dangerous age. Threatened on one side by the paleolithic incursion of a wild man stalking the countryside and on the other by a band of Iron Age gypsies roaming the forest, theirs seems a very exciting life to the sedentary narrator, and it isn't any wonder that he is so quickly hooked into their "story." It's a story that really gets rolling when the gypsies, led by a Pied Piper named Lee, seduce and kidnap the oldest son's betrothed.

That we are hooked almost as quickly is a tribute to Dunsany's insight: we are like the narrator, largely removed from nature and to one degree or another dependent upon books, television, and movies for our excitement. To us, a family living much nearer to their environment and dependent only upon their own resources and ingenuity for their survival is exciting. While the narrator frets about keeping his home tidy, the family is fighting off wolves.

But one of the charms of this book is that Dunsany recognizes that we, too, are not without resources or ingenuity. If in one instance they have led us inevitably to catastrophe, in another they might just save us. One of the novel's best moments occurs when the narrator, who can only see and hear these people 500 years away from him (and they, of course, can neither see nor hear him), nevertheless finds a way to help them.

Leave it to Lord Dunsany to make nuclear Armageddon almost palatable.