Lord of the World

Long Prairie, Minnesota: The Neumann Press, 1982. Reissue. Hard Cover. Near Fine/Very Good. 9x6x1. 1982 reissue of 1907 original. Jacket lightly toned with 1 inch open tear to top corner and minor loss from other corners. xxii, 322 pp. A dystopian novel from a Catholic perspective, depicting the reign of the Antichrist. A quote from Evelyn Waugh on the front jacket flap reads as follows: "He was a magnetic preacher, an excellent story-teller, a ready writer; he had enthusiasm and unremitting energy, a rich imagination, an exuberant curiosity about people and things. But he knew that there was only one relationship of absolute value, that of the soul to God." Benson's rejected the views of H.G. Wells, which heralded atheism and Marxism as the causes which would lead to a future Utopia. He instead showed how Wells's future would become a global police state. Benson's work is numbered among the earliest modern works of dystopian fiction. Pope Francis and Pope Benedict XVI have both called the novel prophetic. "Described by Fulton Sheen as one of the three greatest depictions of the advent of the demonic in world literature, Lord of the World is science fiction with a difference. The West has succumbed to a sort of international socialism. The forces of secular materialism, relativism and state control are everywhere triumphant. Protestantism is no more, and Catholicism - which had made some major advances in the first half of the twentieth century - has been devastated by the development of new psychologies and the exodus of intellectuals in the wake of an Ecumenical Council. Euthanasia has become an instrument of the state, Esperanto the universal second language. Nevertheless, although organised religion has largely collapsed in the face of institutional secularism, a vague, humanistic religiosity - militantly hostile to the exclusive and supernatural claims of the Church - is present everywhere. Finally, the East, which has amalgamated into a single, pantheistic bloc, continues to pose a military threat. Enter Julian Felsenberg - diplomat, scholar, guru, Antichrist...