A Torrent of Faces [antikvár]

PREFACEThis novel makes the assumptionsuggested by the epigraph from Henry Georgethat the world will support a population of about one trillion (one thousand billions, or 1,000,000,000,000) by the year 2794. The part of the assumption contained in the word "support" is admittedly the wildest sort of fantasy.It is of course likely that world population will continue to double itself each century, though the rate may flatten out toward the end of the second millennium. It is also likely that by that time most of these people will be starving to death, and the rest will be scraping desperately.We chose to examine an alternative. Physically, George is right; given a huge cooperative endeavor, the Earth could support such a population. But a human society of this magnitude will never develop if the race does not organize itself into some uniform political and economic unit before the population has expanded much beyond its present numbers.What sort of unit? We concluded that nothing less than a Utopia would do. We realize that Utopias are out of fashion lately; on the other hand, the picture of the future as a universal Asiatic despotism atop the starving masses has been painted to death by all the modern dystopians from Huxley onand we could not believe that a population of this size could be a slave9