Let’s be honest: if you had access to a time machine, you’d be up for a bit of pranking. And the first person to build a time machine would no doubt have been a fan of science fiction books. So what better prank than going back in time and inserting some ‘prank’ sci-fi books into libraries just to mess with people’s minds?
You probably think I’m talking about that 1949 sci-fi novel that names the leader of Martian civilisation as ‘Elon’? But no, we have a new addition (or is that ‘new edition’?): the 1893 sci-fi book Baron Trump’s Marvellous Underground Journey, written by one Ingersoll Lockwood.
Barron (with a double ‘r’) Trump is of course President Donald Trump’s son with wife Melania. And though the name is slightly different, according to The Huffington Post…
…in Baron Trump’s Marvellous Underground Journey, Baron is a wealthy young man living in a place called Castle Trump, but his real adventures begin when Don, the “Master of all Masters,” inspires him to travel to Russia, where he finds a portal that allows him to travel to other lands.
Damn, that Russia thing won’t go away…even when it’s 124 years in the past! But if that’s not enough, HuffPo also notes that Lockwood wrote another book, two years later in 1896, titled The Last President…
…which does not feature the Baron Trump character but has some interesting parallels to modern times. It begins in New York City, which is up in arms over the election of an outsider candidate. The news causes those “in the upper portions” of the city to sit “as if paralyzed with a nameless dread… Mobs of vast size are organizing under the lead of anarchists and socialists, and threaten to plunder and despoil the houses of the rich who have wronged and oppressed them for so many years,” an early passage of the book reads.
Time travel, the imaginal world bleeding into reality, low-pay-grade simulation engineers, or coincidence – take your pick. Let’s just hope War of the Worlds isn’t the next sci-fi book to be based on a future reality…
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