100,000 Years Hence

STAR OF THE UNBORN--Franz Werfel --Viking ($3).

In 1943 a severe heart attack warned Novelist Franz Werfel that he might not have long to live. So the author of The Song of Bernadette decided to spend the days before darkness writing a satirical novel about the world of the future. Last August, a few days before he died, Werfel was revising the last of Star of the Unborn's 645 pages. It describes how Werfel rose again from the grave, none the worse for a sleep of some 100,000 years, on the "Third Day of the Fourth Earth-Month of the Seven Hundred and Forty-Second Sun Week of the Zero Point Zero Zero Third Evolution in the Eleventh Cosmic Capital Year of Virgo."

Lo, from the Tomb. The scientists of the new Astromental Era had remade the Earth so completely that when "F.W." emerged from his coffin (he wore the swallow-tailed coat and cracked patent-leather shoes that he had been buried in), he could not believe that he was in California. The ground was as flat as a pancake. The whole world had become a garden city without political frontiers, war, disease or extremes of climate.

Astromental Californians were delighted with primitive F. W. They did not shake hands with him, because physical contact made them slightly sick (it was only by overcoming extreme distaste that most Astromental married couples managed to produce the regulation one-child family). They chirped away politely in Monolingua--the global language in which it was impossible to say anything unkind. "Is this your first trip to California?" asked one of the ladies, who looked devastating in the gold wig that covered her bald astromentality (all Astromentalists were bald).

Astromentalists were also delighted to learn that F. W. was only 52 years old and therefore practically in his bassinet. For no Astromentalist went into "voluntary retirement" (the new name for death) before he was 200. "Retirement" was sheer pleasure, anyway; cellular scientists simply reduced the living body, by rapid stages, first from maturity to infancy, then back into a cozy, synthetic womb (complete with umbilical cord), and finally to the stage where the heart of the "retiring" fetus ceased to beat.

Astromental historians updated F. W. Though the last Englishman had long been dead, the British Empire continued to exist. The Germans had been the first people to ask to have their chauvinisms removed by the Central Psycho-Surgical Bureau. Russian Communism ("hoary with age") had clothed itself in such "intoxicating religious pomp" that the young Marxist clergy swung censers (full of disinfectant), chanted rhymed statistics and wore miters inscribed with the sacred text: "The Welfare of the Greatest Number of Microorganisms is the Purpose of the Cosmos." The U.S. had passed a Constitutional amendment "by virtue of which the economic law of supply and demand was declared null and void."

Back to Beer. At first F. W. thought that the new era's Olympians were satisfied with their uneventful life. Later, he was secretly informed that more & more Astromentalists were plotting to recreate the old world of pain and sin. In remote regions these retrogrades had made settlements where they kept chickens, cats, drank beer, traded, worshiped in churches, and raised families like beasts.

Most of Star of the Unborn is a travelogue through the future. Its chief action involves a halfhearted love affair between F. W. and an Astromental girl and the final fierce clash between the retrogrades and the Astromentalists. The nub of Author Werfel's posthumous philosophy lies in his quotation from Valentinus the Gnostic: "There are two fundamental species of angels. The ones helped man from the beginning to make the earth habitable. The others prevented him from doing it. Mankind is still far too immature to be told which of these angels are the good ones and which the bad ones."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.