David Lindsay - 50+ Space Action Adventure Classics

Introduction: The Dream Book of Dr. Philip Raven

Book the First: Today and Tomorrow: The Age of Frustration Dawns

1. A Chronological Note

2. How the Idea and Hope of the Modern World State First Appeared

3. The Accumulating Disproportions of the Old Order

4. Early Attempts to Understand and Deal with These Disproportions; The Criticisms of Karl Marx and Henry George

5. The Way in Which Competition and Monetary Inefficiency Strained the Old Order

6. The Paradox of Over-Production and Its Relation to War

7. The Great War of 1914-1918

8. The Impulse to Abolish War; The Episode of the Ford Peace Ship

9. The Direct Action of the Armament Industries in Maintaining War Stresses

10. Versailles: Seed Bed of Disasters

11. The Impulse to Abolish War: Why the League of Nations Failed to Pacify the World

12. The Breakdown of “Finance” and Social Morale after Versailles

13. 1933: “Progress” Comes to a Halt

Book the Second: The Days After Tomorrow: The Age of Frustration

1. The London Conference: the Crowning Failure of the Old Governments; The Spread of Dictatorships and Fascisms

2. The Sloughing of the Old Educational Tradition

3. Disintegration and Crystallization in the Social Magma. The Gangster and Militant Political Organizations

4. Changes in War Practice after the World War

5. The Fading Vision of a World Pax: Japan Reverts to Warfare

6. The Western Grip on Asia Relaxes

7. The Modern State and Germany

8. A Note on Hate and Cruelty

9. The Last War Cyclone, 1940-50

10. The Raid of the Germs

11. Europe in 1960

12. America in Liquidation

Book the Third: The World Renascence: The Birth of the Modern State

1. The Plan of the Modern State Is Worked Out

2. Thought and Action: the New Model of Revolution

3. The Technical Revolutionary

4. Prophets, Pioneers, Fanatics and Murdered Men

5. The First Conference at Basra: 1965

6. The Growth of Resistance to the Sea and Air Ways Control

7. Intellectual Antagonism to the Modern State

8. The Second Conference at Basra, 1978

9. “Three Courses of Action”

10. The Life-Time Plan

11. The Real Struggle for Government Begins

Book the Fourth: The Modern State Militant

1. Gap in the Text

2. Melodramatic Interlude

3. Futile Insurrection

4. The Schooling of Mankind

5. The Text Resumes: The Tyranny of the Second Council

6. Æsthetic Frustration: The Note Books of Ariston Theotocopulos

7. The Declaration of Mégève

Book the Fifth: The Modern State in Control of Life

1. Monday Morning in the Creation of a New World

2. Keying Up the Planet

3. Geogonic Planning

4. Changes in the Control of Behaviour

5. Organization of Plenty

6. The Average Man Grows Older and Wiser

7. Language and Mental Growth

8. Sublimation of Interest

9. A New Phase in the History of Life

Table of Contents

The unexpected death of Dr. Philip Raven at Geneva in November 1930 was a very grave loss to the League of Nations Secretariat. Geneva lost a familiar figure — the long bent back, the halting gait, the head quizzically on one side — and the world lost a stimulatingly aggressive mind. His incessant devoted work, his extraordinary mental vigour, were, as his obituary notices testified, appreciated very highly by a world-wide following of distinguished and capable admirers. The general public was suddenly made aware of him.

It is rare that anyone outside the conventional areas of newspaper publicity produces so great a stir by dying; there were accounts of him in nearly every paper of importance from Oslo to New Zealand and from Buenos Aires to Japan — and the brief but admirable memoir by Sir Godfrey Cliffe gave the general reader a picture of an exceptionally simple, direct, devoted and energetic personality. There seems to have been only two extremely dissimilar photographs available for publication: an early one in which he looks like a blend of Shelley and Mr. Maxton, and a later one, a snapshot, in which he leans askew on his stick and talks to Lord Parmoor in the entrance hall of the Assembly. One of his lank hands is held out in a characteristic illustrative gesture.

Incessantly laborious though he was, he could nevertheless find time to assist in, share and master all the broader problems that exercised his colleagues, and now they rushed forward with their gratitude. One noticeable thing in that posthumous eruption of publicity was the frequent acknowledgments of his aid and advice. Men were eager to testify to his importance and resentful at the public ignorance of his work. Three memorial volumes of his more important papers, reports, memoranda and addresses were arranged for and are still in course of publication.

Personally, although I was asked to do so in several quarters, and though I was known to have had the honour of his friendship, I made no contribution to that obituary chorus. My standing in the academic world did not justify my writing him a testimonial, but under normal circumstances that would not have deterred me from an attempt to sketch something of his odd personal ease and charm. I did not do so, however, because I found myself in a position of extraordinary embarrassment. His death was so unforeseen that we had embarked upon a very peculiar joint undertaking without making the slightest provision for that risk. It is only now after an interval of nearly three years, and after some very difficult discussions with his more intimate friends, that I have decided to publish the facts and the substance of this peculiar cooperation of ours.

It concerns the matter of this present book. All this time I have been holding back a manuscript, or rather a collection of papers and writings, entrusted to me. It is a collection about which, I think, a considerable amount of hesitation was, and perhaps is still, justifiable. It is, or at least it professes to be, a Short History of the World for about the next century and a half. (I can quite understand that the reader will rub his eyes at these words and suspect the printer of some sort of agraphia.) But that is exactly what this manuscript is. It is a Short History of the Future. It is a modern Sibylline book. Only now that the events of three years have more than justified everything stated in this anticipatory history have I had the courage to associate the reputation of my friend with the incredible claims of this work, and to find a publisher for it.

Let me tell very briefly what I know of its origin and how it came into my hands. I made the acquaintance of Dr. Raven, or to be more precise, he made mine, in the closing year of the war. It was before he left Whitehall for Geneva. He was always an eager amateur of ideas, and he had been attracted by some suggestions about money I had made in a scrappy little book of forecasts called What is Coming? published in 1916. In this I had thrown out the suggestion that the waste of resources in the war, combined with the accumulation of debts that had been going on, would certainly leave the world as a whole bankrupt, that is to say it would leave the creditor class in a position to strangle the world, and that the only method to clear up this world bankruptcy and begin again on a hopeful basis would be to scale down all debts impartially, by a reduction of the amount of gold in the pound sterling and proportionally in the dollar and all other currencies based on gold. It seemed to me then an obvious necessity. It was, I recognize now, a crude idea — evidently I had not even got away from the idea of intrinsically valuable money — but none of us in those days had had the educational benefit of the monetary and credit convulsions that followed the Peace of Versailles. We were without experience, it wasn’t popular to think about money, and at best we thought like precocious children. Seventeen years later this idea of appreciating gold is accepted as an obvious suggestion by quite a number of people. Then it was received merely as the amateurish comment of an ignorant writer upon what was still regarded as the mysterious business of “monetary experts.” But it attracted the attention of Raven, who came along to talk over that and one or two other post-war possibilities I had started, and so he made my acquaintance.