Hartmann the Anarchist; or, The Doom of the Great City

E. Douglas Fawcett’s Hartmann the Anarchist; or, The Doom of the Great City is not the first science fiction novel ever written, but this illustrated version with twenty five drawings by Fred T. Jane, being originally published in 1893, is certainly an early science fiction novel, having been published in the midst of Jules Verne’s output and nearly coinciding with H. G. Wells’s first effort, The Time Machine, published two years later in 1895.

The storyline is surprisingly relevant to modern times, paralleling current events involving Antifa thugs and suchlike anarchists creating destruction and other mischief around the world.  Mr. Fawcett (1866–1960), an English novelist and philosopher, asks the question: What would happen if anarchists should be the ones who develop the next great scientific breakthrough?  What would happen if people who explicitly hate civilization should invent a new weapon of mass destruction?  While taking a largely sympathetic view of the socialist political philosophy behind anarchism, the author nevertheless presents a stark, brutal, and horrifying answer.

Preparing old books for digital publication is a labor of love at Travelyn Publishing.  We hold our digital versions of public domain books up against any others with no fear of the comparison.  Our conversion work is meticulous, utilizing a process designed to eliminate errors, maximize reader enjoyment, and recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the original book even as we are adding the navigation and formatting necessary for a good digital book.  While remaining faithful to a writer’s original words, and the spellings and usages of his era, we are not above correcting obvious mistakes.  If the printer became distracted after placing an ‘a’ at the end of a line and then placed another ‘a’ at the beginning of the next line (they used to do this stuff by hand you know!), what sort of mindless robots would allow that careless error to be preserved for all eternity in the digital version, too?  Not us.  That’s why we have the audacity to claim that our re-publications are often better than the originals.