Frank R. Stockton[197] gives another supernatural scientific glimpse into the future, showing as impossibilities certain things that have since come to pass, while some of the changes prophesied as imminent are yet unrealized and apparently far from actualities. Jack London's _Scarlet Plague_ pictures the earth returned to barbarism, since most of the inhabitants have been swept away by a scourge and the others have failed to carry on the torch of civilization. H. G. Wells[198] gives account of a tour into futurity, wherein the miracles of modern science work revolutions in human life, and[199] he satirizes society, showing a topsy-turvy state of affairs in A.D. 2100. His _Dream of Armageddon_ is a story of futurity wherein a man has continuous visions of what his experiences will be in another life far in the future. That life becomes more real to him than his actual existence, and he grows indifferent to events taking place around him while rent with emotion over the griefs to come in another age. Of course, Edward Bellamy's _Looking Backward_, with its social and mechanistic miracles that now seem flat and tame to us, might be said to be the father of most of these modern prophecies of scientific futurity. Samuel Butler's _Erewhon_ contains many elements of impossibility in relation to life, and is a satire on society, though perhaps not, strictly speaking, supernatural. These prophecies of the time to come are in the main intended as social satires, as symbolic analyses of the weaknesses of present life. They evince vivid imagination and much ingenuity in contriving the mechanisms that are to transform life, yet they are not examples of great fiction. Mark Twain reverses the type in his _Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court_, for he shows a man of the present taking part in the life of the far past, managing to parody both mediævalism and the Yankee character at once. H. G. Wells is particularly interested in studying the unused forces of the world and fancying what would happen under other conditions. His play of scientific speculation has produced many stories that he does not greatly value now himself, but which are of interest as showing certain tendencies of fiction. [197] In _The Great Stone of Sardis_. [198] In _A Story of Days to Come_. [199] In _When the Sleeper Wakes_. * * * * *