"Mack Reynolds - Equality in the Year 2000" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Mack)

Though a sequel to Looking Backward: From the Year 2000, this novel
can be read without a knowledge of the first book. However, it will do no
harm to have a brief summary of what has gone before.



When Julian West, playboy multimillionaire, is informed by his doctor
that his heart gives him at most two years to live, he seeks out the top
authority on stasis—placing bodies into artificial hibernation. With the
hope that science will evolve to the point where his disease is curable and
he can be revived, he creates a foundation to finance the radical
experiment.
Julian had expected it to be a matter of a few years at most. He is
flabbergasted to be awakened thirty-three years later in the apartment of
Academician Raymond Leete, his wife Martha, and daughter Edith. They
have been given the task of helping him adjust to the geometrically
developing changes.
Leete points out that since 1940, when Julian was a child, human
knowledge has been doubling every eight years, so that now the race has
256 times the knowledge that prevailed then. The computers and
automation are in full swing, so that only two percent of the population
are needed to produce all that the country can consume and ninety-eight
percent are on Guaranteed Annual Income. There have been radical
changes in government, in industry, in the arts and sciences. Julian finds
himself at sea in almost every field. Money is no longer in use, so all his
efforts to perpetuate his fortune were meaningless. Cities no longer exist,
nor wars, nor pollution. nor the threat of the exhaustion of the planet's
resources—none of the problems of his own time. There is no crime, no
juvenile delinquents or the use of drugs.
He cannot believe so many changes could take place in but a third of a
century. Leete asks him to consider, in comparison, the changes that took
place between June 1914… June 1947. the same length of time.
The book ends with Julian disillusioned with this world as a Utopia—at
least for him. lnterlingua, an international language, has been established
and the new generations do not even speak English. The Leetes had been
especially trained to take care of him, as an interesting experiment. But
the generation gap is such now, with human knowledge over 250 times
greater than in his youth, that Julian cannot even communicate with the
average person. When he proposes to Edith, she points out the
impossibility. And he is too far behind, at the age of thirty-five, to ever
catch up. By the time he got through the equivalent of grammar school,
human knowledge would have doubled again.
He says, in despair, "I've been calling this Utopia, but it isn't. For me,
it's dystopia, the exact opposite. I'm a freak. Why did you ever awaken
me?"
Edith shook her head sadly. "It wasn't my decision to make, Julian. I
was against it."