Introduction by Carl Jensen
In 1907, Upton Sinclair looked forward 93 years and imagined the year 2000 when capitalism would find its zenith with the construction of The Pleasure Palace, a glittering half-mile-high structure in the middle of Central Park. During the grand opening of the towering building, a scientific experiment with radiumite explodes, killing everybody throughout the world except eleven of the people at the Pleasure Palace. They escape the deadly rays by flying high in the sky in a revolutionary 1000-mph airplane called "The Monarch of the Air!" The fortunate eleven survivors struggle to rebuild their lives by creating a capitalistic society. After that fails, along with several other inept efforts, they create a successful utopian society on the lush grounds of a grand country estate in the Pocantico Hills above the Hudson River. In The Millenium: A Comedy of the Year 2000, Sinclair's life-long vision, "The Cooperative Commonwealth," reigns happily forever after.
Collected in
Speculative Fiction for All
CARL JENSEN (1929–2015) was born in Brooklyn, NY, served in Air Force intelligence during the Korean War, and later worked in advertising during its Mad Men-era heyday. In the late sixties, realizing that his current occupation did not match his intellectual and humanitarian ambitions, he went back to school and earned his PhD in sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. In the mid-seventies, observing the increasing stranglehold corporate interests had on U.S. news media, Jensen saw the need for an independent organization capable of monitoring the news and exposing the corporate bias reflected in how events were—or weren’t—portrayed there. This organization became Project Censored, the media watchdog group that to this day continues its work covering stories suppressed or underreported by the mass media. In addition to editing Project Censored’s yearly anthologies, Jensen wrote and edited several other books of media criticism, including The Millennium: A Comedy of the Year 2000 and Stories That Changed America: Muckrakers of the 20th Century.
A true Renaissance man and fearless crusader for social justice, Upton Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1878. His novel The Jungle led to the clean-up of nation's meat supply industry, and to the creation of the Food and Drug Administration; another, The Brass Check, paved the way for the Newspaper Guild; Boston influenced America's perception of the Saccho-Vanzetti case; OIL! opened the country’s eyes to avaricious corporate oil swindlers; Dragon's Teeth brought him the Pulitzer Prize for Literature; and his eleven-volume Lanny Budd series became an internationally popular history of the world from 1911 to 1950. After more than 60 years of writing and a life of activism in and out of the political arena, Sinclair died in Bound Brook, New Jersey in 1968.
