A Crystal Age

Description

“The day has happily passed when the work of W. H. Hudson needs to be introduced to an unacquainted public, or his place in our literature asserted. Many years after his books were written, Mr. Hudson is "famous’ now. In the presentation of work new to American readers there ‘is at last, as there should have been twenty years ago, the assurance of the welcome of a great writer to a great place.” -The New York Times “A significant science fiction milestone." -Darko Suvin, Victorian Science Fiction in the UK: The Discourse of Knowledge and Power Regaining consciousness, half-buried by a landslide after a fall in the mountains, a young man finds himself in a landscape he hardly recognizes. Wandering through the country in search of a means to return to civilization, he is given shelter by a family living in a great house in the middle of the wilderness. Trying to explain who he is and where he comes from he finds that his world is completely unknown, and his descriptions are regarded as delusions of a mind deranged by his recent fall. As he struggles to learn the rules and customs of a society very different from his own he falls in love with one of the daughters of the house, but finds that even love, as he knows it, is apparently unknown among his new people. A Crystal Age is one of the earliest science-fiction novels which deals with a utopia of the distant future. The first-person narrator, a traveler and naturalist, wakes to find himself buried in earth and vegetation. He comes across a community of people who live in a mansion together, under a foreign set of rules and cultural assumptions. He falls desperately in love with a girl from the community, but the very basis of their utopia forbids his ever consummating his desires.