Henry Crocker Marriott Watson

Written in 1890 and set in the 2990s this is an early science fiction - speculative fiction - alternate history - time travel novel.

It's certainly interesting containing some rather on point predictions about China such as "China's [cheap goods] are not the gifts of Nature; they are the products of starvation and slavery, of children's tears, of widows' sighs, of human degradation and misery" which is basically how China is currently able to undercut the world's manufacturing industry with labour verging into slavery territory forced to live on site with meager wages, and some places even having to put up suicide nets to stop their employees jumping from the upper storey's in order to end their suffering.

The bulk of the story however commences after a trip from a futuristic Australia of 400,000,000 people to a dystopian London/England of mere thousands after an economic and social collapse of the country. It's here our protagonist encounters a witch that allows him to travel back in time ~1,000 years and we learn of the current social pressures within England. The growing inequality gap, and the growing dissatisfaction with such. In some ways it's a timely warning of the dangers of inequality and the latter agitation of the classes is somewhat similar to the large scale protests currently being undertaken in America.

Overall, it's an interesting early science fiction book, whilst there's a bit of a dull spot towards the end were it diverges into the merits of religion as an opiate for the masses and whether it allows or prevents people to strive to better themselves, in general I found it to be a unique read.

It's available on the internet archive here: https://archive.org/details/TheDeclineAndFallOfTheBritishEmpire

And a better synopsis of the book than I have written here is available within 'Science-fiction, the Early Years' at the end of page 316 & beginning of page 317 here: https://books.google.com.au/books?id=KEZxhkG5eikC&pg=PA316&lpg=PA316&amp...… (mehr)