Le meraviglie del Duemila
Le meraviglie del Duemila (The Miracles of the Two Thousand) is a science fiction novel by the Italian author Emilio Salgari , in which two friends from 1903 spend 100 years in a crypt using the sap of a plant in a death-like coma, around 100 years a year To be revived in 2003. In 2003, a descendant of one of the protagonists showed them the world of the future.
Salgari first published the novel in 1907 under the pen name Guido Altieri.
content
On the American island of Nantucket in 1903, the young and immensely wealthy Brandok, suffering from boredom and melancholy, visits his older friend, the doctor Toby. Toby asks his friend, who tells him about suicidal thoughts, whether he would be interested in exploring the world with him in 100 years, and tells him that he intends to sleep through this period in a dead-like sleep under the influence of a practically unknown plant tincture. Brandok joins Toby, who has already prepared everything. In a prepared cave, the two spend the 100 years after which, according to Toby's instructions to a descendant and a lawyer, they will be resurrected.
The undertaking succeeds; Toby's descendant Holker awakened the two friends in 2003. A world of miracles awaited them there, which Brandok would heal from his paralyzing boredom; Airships with wings, underground tunnels and submarine-like boats are used for transport. The energy for these applications comes from gigantic electricity-generating plants, for example at Niagara Falls or from floating facilities along the Gulf Stream. The two people from the past soon notice that the citizens of the future will move faster; they scurry through the cities as if electrified. Brandok and Toby soon feel a kind of dizziness, a physical discomfort, because they are not used to the electricity-charged environment of 2003.
In the future, people will eat almost exclusively vegetarian food - not out of conviction or idealism, but because meat production would make it impossible to feed the now immensely growing number of people. You live in gigantic cities because every usable square meter is needed for agriculture. Land animals hardly exist anymore; only on the Canary Islands, now devastated by a volcanic eruption, were animals released to prevent their complete extinction.
Holker shows Brandok and Toby the city at the North Pole, the exile of the anarchists and political muddles of the world, mostly Russians and Germans, who are allowed to exist there under difficult conditions, but who in freedom are seen as a danger to the peace of civilized humanity. The difficult existence in the eternal ice is supposed to cool their revolutionary tendencies. They also meet some representatives of the endangered Eskimos who still traditionally live in igloos and are considered incompatible with the modern world.
On the way to Europe in an airship, the travelers are forced by a storm to seek refuge in one of the submarine cities reserved for criminals. Criminals are allowed to live from fishing there without further supervision; however, any rebellion is punished with the destruction of the entire city, to the calm of civilization.
But the airship carried alcohol, which is strictly forbidden in the submarine cities. While the tour group is having dinner with the captain and a city official, the convicts steal the alcohol and start a wild drinking orgy with the crew of the flight ship. The protagonists can flee to the city's dome protruding from the surface of the sea, but the flight ship has disappeared; the storm continues to rage. Meanwhile, the alcoholic residents of the underground city begin to fight each other; numerous deaths occur. The underground city is torn from its anchorages by the storm of the century and is now transformed into a kind of giant boye or floating city that is being driven to the Canary Islands. There, shortly before the city shatters and goes under, travelers can save themselves from the dome on land, but now they have to defend themselves against wild animals that smell human flesh. At the last second, a flying ship appears in the sky and saves the castaways.
But now Brandok and Toby suffer a collapse on board the heavily electrified airship. They are taken to Paris and then to a hospital, where they are finally declared terminally insane.
Predictions & Errors
The novel describes news reports straight into the house and a kind of television; In addition, the ability given to humanity for mutual total annihilation is described as a triggering element for world peace. In addition, the re-establishment of Poland through the incorporation of Russian and German regions with a mixed population is described.
However, the assumption that the Eskimos will not arrive in the modern world has not been confirmed; here Holker reports "they are beings who are incapable of civilization, which is why they are doomed". Salgari shows a similar ethno-cultural racism when describing the crew of the flight ship, who drank the loaded alcohol with the convicts of the submarine city: "They are all Irish, these people cannot resist the alcohol."
The novel ends with a warning that scientists should exercise caution in electrifying the world - lest mankind share the fate of Brandok and Toby and be driven mad by the electrically charged world.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Claudio Gallo, Giuseppe Bonomi, Emilio Salgari, La macchina dei sogni, BUR, Rizzoli, 2011, page 460, ISBN 978-88-586-2802-7