Floyd Phillips Gibbons

"On the night of February 27, 1917, when the Laconia was two hundred miles off the coast of Ireland, the Gibbons' "hunch" was fulfilled. The Laconia was torpedoed and sunk. After a perilous night in a small boat on the open sea, Gibbons was rescued and brought into Queenstown. He opened the cables and flashed to America the most powerful call to arms to the American people. It shook the country. It was the testimony of an eye witness and it convinced the Imperial German government, beyond all reasonable doubt, of the wilful and malicious murder of American citizens. The Gibbons story furnished the proof of the overt act and it was unofficially admitted at Washington that it was the determining factor in sending America into the war one month later" -- Foreword.

Published in 1929, this classic social-science-fiction novel is a tale of the future in which we are now living: the angry rise of the Third World, supported by communism and desperately resisted by capitalist countries. The story closes in what is now the faintly distant past, 1941, when at the novel’s dramatic climax North America wins a great sea battle in the Caribbean, defeating the world-conquering hordes of the Mongol Karakhan, the Red Napoleon,” which have invaded Canada and penetrated the Eastern seaboard of the United States. Gibbons’s prophetic view includes the beginning of the Second World War with a lightning thrust into Poland, the unification of China, worldwide depression, and the astonishing prediction of the rise of the Third World and the conflict over white supremacy. In a brilliant Afterword to this new edition, John Gardner notes that time has proven Gibbons right, that this is a book to bring above-ground into light”; it is, he states, a landmark that slipped by unnoticed.”