The Humanisphere — Brian Stableford

Four French utopian fantasies by Paul Adam, Victor Considérant, Joseph Déjacque & Fernand Giraudeau. This collection, the fifteenth in this series, presents four French "utopian fantasies" which were all ground-breaking in their day. Victor Considerant's The Complete News from the Moon (1836) is a utopia in which the society described is only related to existing societies in satirical terms, and very subtly. Fernand Giraudeau's The New City (1868) and Joseph Déjacque's The Humanisphere (1899) are both set in future Paris, one imagining the ideal society that might result from the politics of Anarchism, the other a dystopia arguing the opposite viewpoint. Paul Adam's Letters from Malaisie (1898) presents a society that, although founded by eutopians, has produced a compromised result, in which eutopian and dystopian elements are fused, thus raising the question of whether any program of political reform could possibly produce the intended results, given the vagaries of human nature.