Synopsis
A prescient dystopia confronts faith, power, and the peril of utopian peace.
Lord of the World by Robert Hugh Benson, originally published in 1907, envisions a future convulsed by ideology and disillusion. As a charismatic world leader rises, priest Percy Franklin and politician Oliver Brand face choices that test conviction and conscience.
Readers encounter airships, state ritual, and underground believers in tense, unadorned scenes. Themes of conscience, loyalty, and ultimate hope drive this early dystopian novel without modern sensationalism. It offers a sober strand of apocalyptic fiction that invites reflection as much as suspense.
A formative classic of speculative faith and politics, it rewards thoughtful dystopia readers.
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Book Description
Can a timeless book become timely 100 years after its first appearance?
In this profound and prescient novel, Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson gives us an imaginative foretelling of the end of the world. All stories, Aristotle said, have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but most ends are relative, the terminus of this chain of acts or that. But what of the end that terminates all human action as we know it, the end of time itself, the Second Coming? Since this novel appeared in 1906, many others have been devoted to nuclear disaster, destructive comets, and other hair-raising possibilities. What sets Benson’s story apart and makes it as readable today as when it was written is the Catholic and biblical context that provides the ultimate meaning.
Robert Hugh Benson (1871–1914) was the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and his conversion to Catholicism caused a stir. He became a great apologist for the faith, in spiritual works as well as in works of the imagination. Lord of the World is first of all a tremendous “read,” but it is also spiritual food for thought.
The late Ralph McInerny contributed a fine preface to the work, and recently Fr. C. John McCloskey III, a specialist on the work of Robert Hugh Benson, added a fascinating introduction.
From the Publisher
LORD OF THE WORLD is a bitingly satiric science fiction novel of a secularized world state. As Rosa Mulholland, Lady Gilbert, declared, "It is a brilliant, beautiful, and terrible book," a judgment in which the public has fully concurred for nearly a century. LORD OF THE WORLD is the only one of Benson’s novels to remain continually in print from its first publication in 1907 down to the present day. Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen declared, "The three great apocalyptic pieces of literature dealing with the advent of the satanic are Father Hugh Benson’s LORD OF THE WORLD, Dostoyevsky’s THE BROTHERS KARAMOZOV, and Soloviev’s THREE CONVERSATIONS ON WAR."
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