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Folingsby, Kenneth

Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.

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The possible pseudonym of a probable Scotsman (?   -    ) whose Meda: A Tale of the Future (1891) – though the events it recounts turn out to be a dream experienced during a four-month trance – remains of some sf interest for the imaginative scope of the 5575 CE Utopia depicted, in which large-headed brainy "Scotonians" are fed by ambient electricity, possess Antigravity, and represent the end of a long (and detailed) world-history, including a Comet-caused Disaster. In a curious anticipation of satellite Communications, messages are exchanged between different parts of Earth by projecting them on to the Moon. After learning all of this, the protagonist begins to suffer erotic longings, and, like a good Scotsman, quickly steers the dream to its conclusion. He marries, incautiously reveals that he had a wife in his nineteenth-century existence, and is tried for violating the iron rule of lifelong monogamy irrespective of a spouse's death. Condemned to this society's direst punishment – "Men or women that are guilty of this terrible crime are allowed to float away alone into endless space" – he duly awakens in his own time. [JC/DRL]

Kenneth Folingsby

born

works

  • Meda: A Tale of the Future (Glasgow, Scotland: privately printed by Aird and Cogshill, 1891) [a trade edition was published in 1892 by H F Mitchell, London: hb/]

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