containing all the leitmotifs of utopian literature: an obsession with clothing and it's subclause decorum, superfast transport demolishing distance, the technological regulation of reproduction, the mass specification of housing and the destruction of the nation state.
“You are now in the capital of the world—in Peerless City, on the island known to the ancients as the Island of Borneo.”
“Then the world has ceased to be divided into nations?”
“Bless you! yes, long ago. The last nation to come into the general arrangement was an old republic on the continent of America called South Carolina. You will find the whole story in the school histories.”
“And what has become of the old nations?”
“Most of them have disappeared altogether......"
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Originally from Harper's New Monthly Magazine, vol. 12, iss. 68, January, 1856.