Once in London, and deposited within the body of assistant advertisment manager Nicholas Brent, Calland must make sense of the antiquated society he finds himself cast into. The plot twist is that Philip Calland – with partner Kay, escape the future-horrors not physically, but through downloading themselves into the unsuspecting bodies of two victims, by secretly using a development of the Loetze theorum. For Maine, those events were still unknowably beyond tomorrow.īut it was precisely that date in 1961 that Maine’s two time-travellers hurtle backwards through four-hundred years from their devastated radioactive hell, to arrive in London. Now, with hindsight, we know that during that exact week Elvis Presley would be no.1 in the chart with “Wooden Heart”, thirty-one anti-nuke protesters were arrested outside the London US Embassy, and on the twelfth of that month the Soviet Union launched Yuri Gagarin into orbit as the first human in space. When the character pretending to be Nicholas Brent picks up the ‘Daily Courier’ and reads of ‘Rockets poised behind Iron Curtain, ready to strike within two minutes’, and ‘US Rocket Orbits Moon, ready to make a landing by radio control’ Maine was speculating about what was to come. When Charles Eric Maine wrote ‘Calculated Risk’ (1960) it was still a date in future-time. He also believed that feminism entailed a rebellion against sexual dimorphism.1960, and it’s still makes for a powerful read! Maine believed that feminism, as he understood it, derived its fundamental premises from hatred of, not respect for, the natural order. Maine saw in the nascent feminism of his day (the immediate postwar period) a dehumanizing and destructive force, tending towards totalitarianism, which had the potential to deform society in radical, unnatural ways. Maine's bases his vision of an ideological dystopia not on criticism of socialism or communism per se, nor of technocracy per se, but rather of feminism. Nevertheless, while not rising to the artistic level of the Orwell and Huxley masterpieces, "World Without Men" merits being rescued from the large catalogue of 1950s paperback throwaways. The blurb on the thirty-five cent Ace paperback likens Charles Eric Maine's 1958 novel "World Without Men" to George Orwell's "1984" and Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World." Ordinarily one would regard such a comparison skeptically. Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software.
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