By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
April 19, 2020
Roughly a quarter-century ago, I read a story in a science-fiction magazine or anthology about an American writer who had been commissioned to write an introduction for a volume commemorating the 20th century. The tale was published, I suppose, in the 1990s, and was set at least a year before the turn of the century. (Which technically began on Jan. 1, 2001.)
Two things about the piece have stuck with me for a very long time. One is the central character’s struggle with the station wagon he rents in England. The driver’s seat is on the car’s right or starboard side; cars travel on the left or port side of the road; and the clutch is on the driver’s left side rather than his right. And yet the clutch, brake and gas pedals are arranged in the same configuration as in America and the rest of the world.
The writer has a harrowing drive to an isolated part of the United Kingdom, which helps inform the second thing I recall about the story. The character, having researched the atrocities of the 20th century, is overwhelmed by pessimism about the coming hundred years. And yet, shell-shocked both by his research and by his trip, when he begins writing the forward to A History of the Twentieth Century, With Illustrations, the author borrows what turns out to have been ludicrously optimistic words first printed in A History of the Nineteenth Century, With Illustrations.
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