Hudson sets his story more than a 'hundred centuries' into a new, saner, and more balanced human culture.Īs with his other books, Hudson wrote A Crystal Age in a rich and highly descriptive style. Ī 'small remnant' of humanity rebuilds on a more 'humble' basis. a sort of mighty Savonarola bonfire, in which most of the things once valued have been consumed to ashes – politics, religions, systems of philosophy, isms and ologies of all descriptions schools, churches, prisons, poorhouses stimulants and tobacco, kings and parliaments cannon with its hostile roar, and pianos that thundered peacefully history, the press, vice, political economy, money, and a million things more – all consumed like so much worthless hay and stubble. Modern 'pride and folly' lead to 'corruption and decay ' a global disaster follows, Hudson's book follows this approach he envisions the modern society he knew as eventually collapsing into chaos through its hubris – 'For in their madness they hoped by knowledge to gain absolute dominion over nature'. Otherwise they have no machines and only simple devices they plow their fields with horses and use axes to chop down trees.Īnother subgenre of the utopian literature has been termed the 'apocalyptic utopia.' These books anticipate a disastrous future, usually as a precursor of a later, superior phase of human development. The people of his imagined future possess only one piece of technology, a system of 'brass globes' that produces a form of ambient music. Hudson's A Crystal Age belongs securely in the latter category of pastoral utopia. Conversely, though, a minority of utopian writers reacted with a skepticism toward, or even a rejection of, technological progress, and favored a return to an agrarian simplicity these 'pastoral utopias' included William Morris's News from Nowhere (1891) and the 'Altrurian trilogy' of William Dean Howells, his A Traveler from Altruria (1894) and its sequels.

Whether they wrote fiction or non-fiction, most utopian writers of Hudson's generation placed a strong emphasis on technological progress as a way to a better future examples range from Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) to King Gillette's The Human Drift (1894) to Alexander Craig's Ionia (1898) to H.

A Crystal Age by William Henry Hudson