Three Hundred Years Hence
First edition title page
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| Author | Mary Griffith |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Utopian Science fiction novel |
| Publisher | Prime Press |
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Publication date
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1836 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages | 131 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 3253783 |
Three Hundred Years Hence is a utopian science fiction novel by author Mary Griffith, published in 1836. It is the first known utopian novel written by an American woman. The novel was originally published in 1836 as part of Griffith's collection, Camperdown, or News from Our Neighborhood, and later published by Prime Press in 1950 in an edition of 300 copies.
The novel concerns a hero who falls into a deep sleep and awakens in the Utopian states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York.
Writers of utopian fiction generally need to set their imagined societies either in a remote place (as in Sir Thomas More's original Utopia and many imitators), or in a different time. Griffith was the earliest American writer to project her protagonist into the future to encounter a vastly improved social order. Many successors would follow her example; most famously, Edward Bellamy used the same trick in his Looking Backward (1888), as did many of the writers who produced sequels and responses to his work. The same tactic is exploited in John Macnie's The Diothas (1883), W. H. Hudson's A Crystal Age (1887), Elizabeth Corbett's New Amazonia (1889), Bradford Peck's The World a Department Store (1900), Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Moving the Mountain (1911), and other works.
Another, later book bears the same title: William Delisle Hay called his 1881 work Three Hundred Years Hence or A Voice From Posterity, probably in ignorance of Griffith's earlier but then-obscure work.
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