"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.