City of Endless Night: 100 Year Anniversary Annotated Edition

By: Milo Hastings

Narrated by: Luke Boardman

Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins

Publisher's summary

"In the Berlin of 2151, 300 million people live underground. The city is in a state of perpetual war with the rest of the world, its besieged population locked beneath an impenetrable dome. Religion has been rewritten; information is controlled by the state; and breeding is governed by eugenics. But a ray of hope descends into the underworld when a young American chemist manages to infiltrate the subterranean society in an attempt to rally the demoralized citizens and spark a revolution. This gripping dystopian novel offers remarkably prescient views of Germany's resurgence and the rise of fascism. A landmark of science fiction, Hastings' pioneering book was the precursor to Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and other visionary tales which came after it." (doverpublications.com)

In the wake of World War I, Milo Hastings imagined a future in which the then newly established League of Nations and Weimar Republic had both collapsed. He described a theoretical scenario in which Germany would be ruled by a single man who had leveraged the forces of ethnonationalism, socialism, and religion to declare himself a god. Hastings mused that Germany would instigate a second world war in 1983, and that a radical breakthrough in weapons technology would cause that war to devolve into a stalemate. He reasoned that such a war would allow Germany’s dictator to seize absolute control over every aspect of society. Books would be banned, the family would be replaced by a breeding program aimed at creating a “super-race”, the Jewish problem would be solved once and for all, and Germany would aspire to cleanse the earth of the “mongrel peoples”.

Hastings’ pessimistic predictions turned out to be 40 years too optimistic.

©1920 Milo Milton Hastings (P)2020 Luke Boardman

Classic Dystopian Fiction. Excellent Narrator.

I chose this book after reading some recommendations for classic literature, and I’m glad I did! I have a 45 minute commute to work each day, and there have been several days now that I was so captivated by this book that I lost track of time and didn’t even realize the trip was already over! The narrator does a great job of capturing the tone of the book, and keeping you engaged end-to-end.

I found this book to be similar to “1984” by George Orwell, and “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley. City of Endless Night was written in 1920 and the story is set in a dystopian Berlin during the year 2151. While there are certainly some eerily accurate predictions about Germany during World War II, what I enjoyed most about this book was the world the author builds, because it’s a world you can put yourself in. While the society is characterized by horrible concepts such eugenics, synthetic food, and using women for the sole purpose of procreating, many of the people in the book seem… oddly content. And while stories like expose the awful things people are capable of, there’s a sense of honesty you feel when you examine it, and a feeling of control over your own environment to prevent the same thing from happening. For anyone interested in dystopian literature, I highly recommend this book.