There’s something so grimly fascinating in staring into the abyss of societal terror and feeling it gazing back at us through a security camera. Yet, it was a good read and the end was quite original.Despite the very idea being a horrifying one, we love dystopias. Sadly, I couldn't help the feeling of familiarity with this dystopian, fictional century.

Somehow England inspired authors to predict an authoritarian and tyrannical future, even a generation before George Orwell's '1984', like this novel. There is world peace at last and all the peoples are united and the new leader is loved by all, amazed at his speeches, though no one recalls what he had said, except that he was thrilling.īut a vermin is identified for elimination: the Christians in the independent enclave of Rome. In this dystopian society, war is a constant threat, but a charismatic senator appears in the Americas and goes around the world bringing enlightenment and hope as man had never found, even in the Christian religion. Religion is barely tolerated and the only surviving religions are Catholicism in the West and in the Americas and Islam in the East all other religions deflated and Mason secularism is the official religion. Countries are mere entities in larger blocks of countries, like 'West', 'East' and 'Americas'. The story depicts a technological century where thoroughfares, telecommunications and air travel are common, though with a Victorian flavor, for the highways are paved with rubber, people have telegraphs at home and fly on airships.īut it also has other almost prophetic descriptions of the society of the 21st century, where euthanasia is the morally acceptable way to assist victims of accidents and is widely provided by a state healthcare system. 'The Lord of the World' is an interesting novel by Robert Benson, the son of an Anglican bishop who converted to Catholicism. Now psychology claims all the rest of the ground and the supernatural sense seems accou First, you see, there was Materialism, pure and simple that failed more or less-it was too crude-until psychology came to the rescue. Then there is the enormous progress of psychology-all clean against us for at least a century. In Italy? Well, we have Rome again to ourselves, but nothing else here, we have Ireland altogether and perhaps one in sixty of England, Wales and Scotland but we had one in forty seventy years ago. We hold our position in the East, certainly but even there we have not more than one in two hundred-so the statistics say-and we are scattered. In France and Spain we are nowhere in Germany we are less. I suppose that we have, nominally, about one-fortieth of America now-and that is the result of the Catholic movement of the early twenties. 'Now, we Catholics, remember, are losing we have lost steadily for more than fifty years. E established legally in another ten years at the latest.

Hugh benson lord of the world