CAESAR'S COLUMN (New York Dystopia) (Annotated)

Ignatius Donnelly's Caesar's Column (1890) is a grim speculative romance that imagines New York in 1988 as a technological marvel ruled by plutocrats, militarized police, and predatory finance. Told with melodramatic urgency and reformist indignation, it turns the utopian energies of late-nineteenth-century fiction into dystopian warning. Its unforgettable central image—a monument built from the b...