Introduction

When City of Endless Night first appeared in 1920, the world was still reeling from the most devastating conflict it had ever known. The Great War had shattered the optimism of the nineteenth century, leaving behind a Europe scarred by trenches, gas attacks, and the staggering machinery of industrialized death. Out of this rubble, writers began to imagine futures both terrible and instructive—worlds shaped by the technologies and ideologies that had so recently turned the planet into a charnel house. Milo Hastings, an American agricultural scientist, journalist, and inventor with a restless and inquisitive mind, gave us one of the most prophetic and unsettling of these visions. His novel imagines a world in which a single nation, sealed away from humanity, has perfected the arts of war, propaganda, and human breeding to a degree that would make any tyrant envious. It is a book that speaks to its own moment with extraordinary clarity, yet it reaches across more than a century to address concerns that feel startlingly urgent to us now.

This modern translation has been carefully adapted for the contemporary reader. The aim has been to preserve the texture and atmosphere of Hastings’s original prose—its sense of foreboding, its intellectual ambition, its sly humor—while smoothing the archaisms and stylistic conventions that can sometimes make century-old fiction feel distant or laborious. The result is a reading experience that honors the author’s intentions while inviting you into the story as if it were written for your own time. What follows in these introductory pages is meant to enrich that experience: to provide context, to sharpen your appreciation of the novel’s themes, and to prepare you for the journey ahead without spoiling the discoveries that await. The pleasures of this book lie in its gradual unfolding, in the slow revelation of a society so alien and yet so eerily plausible, and so the discussion here will stay clear of the plot’s twists and turns.

To understand the achievement of this novel, it helps to know something of the curious and gifted man who wrote it. Milo Hastings was born in Kansas in 1884 and spent his early life immersed in the practical sciences. He trained in agriculture and nutrition, and he possessed the kind of mind that could not resist tinkering, improving, and reimagining the world around him. He designed an early incubator for chickens, wrote extensively on diet and health, and became a popular columnist dispensing advice on food and living. He was, in short, a man of facts and systems, fascinated by how living things could be measured, managed, and optimized. This background is not incidental to the novel he produced—it is central to it. The book is suffused with the sensibility of a scientist, someone who understands intimately how breeding, nutrition, and engineering can be applied to populations of animals, and who follows that logic with chilling rigor to its application upon human beings.

This was no accident of imagination. The early twentieth century was the heyday of the eugenics movement, a pseudoscientific enterprise that commanded enormous respectability among intellectuals, politicians, and reformers across the Western world. The idea that human populations could and should be improved through controlled reproduction—that society could weed out the “unfit” and cultivate the “desirable”—was taught in universities, endorsed in legislatures, and celebrated at international congresses. In the United States, eugenic thinking led to forced sterilization laws; in the decades that followed, in Germany, it would furnish part of the intellectual scaffolding for crimes of almost unimaginable scale. Hastings, writing in 1920, perceived with remarkable foresight where such thinking might lead if pursued without conscience and married to the absolute power of a militarized state. His novel is, among many other things, one of the earliest and most pointed literary warnings against the eugenic dream. It dramatizes a civilization that has accepted the breeding of humans as a settled matter of policy, sorting its citizens into rigid castes engineered for specific functions, and it asks us to recoil at what such a society costs in dignity, freedom, and the irreducible value of the individual.

What makes Hastings’s vision so prescient is not merely his anticipation of eugenic horror but the broader portrait he paints of total state control. The society he imagines anticipates, in striking detail, the apparatus of the totalitarian regimes that would rise in the decades after the book’s publication. Here is a government that controls information absolutely, that rewrites history to serve its purposes, that manufactures the beliefs and emotions of its citizens through relentless propaganda, that maintains its power through surveillance and the careful management of every aspect of human life. Readers familiar with the great dystopian novels of the mid-twentieth century—the works of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and others—will recognize a remarkable kinship. Indeed, City of Endless Night predates Huxley’s Brave New World by more than a decade and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four by nearly thirty years. It deserves to be understood as a foundational text in the dystopian tradition, a book that mapped the dark territory those later masterpieces would explore. That it has been less celebrated than those successors says more about the accidents of literary fortune than about the quality of Hastings’s accomplishment.

The novel’s imaginative power also rests on its vivid and unforgettable central conceit: an entire civilization that lives underground, sealed away from the surface world, illuminated by artificial light, sustained by synthetic food and ingenious engineering. This is the “endless night” of the title—a world where the sun never rises because the people have buried themselves beneath the earth, both literally and morally. The image is haunting and richly symbolic. A society that has chosen perpetual darkness, that has cut itself off from the natural world and from the rest of humanity, that mistakes its technological mastery for enlightenment while dwelling in a kind of spiritual blindness—this is a metaphor that resonates far beyond the particular story Hastings tells. The subterranean city is at once a triumph of human ingenuity and a monument to human folly, a place where the most advanced science serves the most retrograde tyranny. As you read, you will find that the darkness is never merely a setting; it is a condition of the soul, a comment on what happens when a people surrenders its freedom and its connection to the wider world in exchange for security, order, and the seductive promises of a controlling state.

Hastings was writing in the immediate aftermath of a war in which Germany had been cast, in the Allied imagination, as the great threat to civilization. The novel projects forward into a future where this conflict has never truly ended but has instead hardened into a permanent siege, a frozen confrontation between an isolated militarist power and the rest of the world. Modern readers should approach this dimension of the book with a degree of historical awareness. The novel reflects the anxieties and the rhetoric of its era, including attitudes toward the nation it depicts as antagonist that are very much products of the wartime moment in which Hastings wrote. Yet it would be a mistake to read the book as mere wartime propaganda. Hastings’s true subject is not any particular nation but the universal human temptation toward tyranny, the way any society—including his own—might be seduced by visions of perfect order and racial purity. The warning he issues is meant for all of us, and the regime he depicts functions as a cautionary mirror rather than a simple portrait of an enemy. The careful reader will notice how often the novel turns its critical eye toward ideas that were, at the time, perfectly respectable in the author’s own country. This self-implicating quality is one of the things that elevates the book above the level of period polemic and grants it lasting moral seriousness.

The Pleasures and Provocations of the Story

Beyond its prophetic themes and its place in literary history, City of Endless Night is, first and foremost, a gripping and entertaining story. Hastings understood that ideas alone do not make a novel; they must be embodied in action, in suspense, in the predicament of a compelling protagonist whose fate we come to care about. The book unfolds as an adventure, an act of espionage, a journey of discovery into a forbidden world. There is intrigue and danger at every turn, a constant tension between concealment and exposure, between the desire to understand this strange civilization and the necessity of surviving within it. The narrative carries forward with genuine momentum, and the reader is drawn ever deeper into the labyrinthine society Hastings has constructed, learning its rules, its hierarchies, its hidden cruelties, and its unexpected vulnerabilities alongside the protagonist.

One of the great satisfactions of the novel is the sheer thoroughness of its world-building. Hastings does not content himself with sketching a few exotic details and leaving the rest to vague suggestion. He thinks through the implications of his imagined society with the methodical care of the scientist he was. How does such a city feed itself? How does it organize labor and reproduction? How does it manage information, maintain its defenses, sustain its ideology across generations? How does a population live and love and die in a world of artificial light and total control? The novel answers these questions with an inventiveness and consistency that lend the whole edifice a remarkable solidity. Reading it, one has the sense of genuinely visiting another place—a place that feels coherent, lived-in, and disturbingly logical. This is the hallmark of the finest speculative fiction: not merely the conjuring of strange marvels, but the rigorous working-out of their consequences. Hastings belongs in the company of those rare writers who can make the impossible feel inevitable.

The novel also rewards attention to its quieter dimensions. Amid the espionage and the social criticism, there is a thread of genuine human feeling—the longing for connection, the stirrings of conscience, the question of whether love and loyalty can survive in a world engineered to suppress them. Hastings is interested in how individuals respond to systems that seek to define and confine them, in the small acts of resistance and the larger awakenings of moral awareness that can occur even in the most oppressive circumstances. The “rebellion” promised in the subtitle is not merely a matter of plots and uprisings, though there is drama enough on that front. It is also a rebellion of the spirit, an assertion of human individuality against the machinery of conformity. This is the moral heart of the book, and it is what gives the adventure its weight and resonance. We read not only to discover what happens, but to consider what it means to remain human in a dehumanizing world—a question as pressing in our own age of algorithms, surveillance, and engineered consensus as it was a century ago.

It is worth dwelling for a moment on how remarkably the novel’s concerns map onto the anxieties of the present day. Hastings could not have foreseen the specific technologies that now shape our lives—the digital networks, the genetic editing tools, the artificial intelligences—but the questions he raises hover over all of them. What happens when a society gains the power to redesign human beings according to a plan? Who decides which traits are desirable, and to what ends? How does a controlling power maintain itself through the management of information and belief, through the shaping of what people are permitted to know and feel? What is lost when efficiency and order are pursued at the expense of liberty and dignity? These are not abstract academic puzzles; they are live issues debated in newspapers and legislatures and laboratories today. The novel’s continued relevance is, frankly, a little uncanny. Reading it, one repeatedly encounters passages that seem to anticipate developments and dilemmas of the twenty-first century with an accuracy that no mere guesswork could produce. Hastings’s gift was to understand the deep logic of certain ideas and to follow that logic without flinching to its endpoint. The future he imagined is not ours, but it rhymes with ours in ways that should give us pause.