The Novel of the Next Century (original: A Jövő Század Regénye) was created by Mór Jókai. Jókai (1825-1904) was one of Hungary’s greatest novelists, described as equal parts Dickens, Scott, and Dumas père. Although Jókai was enormously prolific, producing hundreds of novels, only a fraction of his output has been translated into English, and that in poor translations.

The Novel of the Next Century, set in 1952, tells the story of Dávid Tatrangi, a scientist from the post-Hungary nation of Monarchy who discovers “ichor,” a glass-like super-metal of volcanic origin. Ichor is flexible and can be bent while being treated but is otherwise unbreakable. Because of this it is the perfect material for armor. Bullets made out from ichor do not kill, only anaesthetize. Tatrangi uses ichor to build himself a flying machine, the “aerodromon,” an airship powered by electricity and armed with powerful, ichor-based weapons. With the help of the aerodromon and ichor-based weapons Tatrangi and the Hungarian forces defeat an invading army from Nihil, the country which replaced Czarist Russia. Later, Tatrangi uses the power of the aerodromon and his new weaponry to unilaterally disarm, and a subsequent threat from Nihil is destroyed. Tatrangi and the Monarachists take territory away from the Nihilists and their local allies and impose world peace on every country. A utopia develops. However, the utopia is endangered when a comet arrives in the solar system. The comet destroys Saturn's rings and threatens to destroy the earth, but in the end it provides the moon with its own atmosphere, and in a precursor to Emmanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision (1950), which theorized that Venus began as a comet ejected from Jupiter, begins orbiting the sun as a new planet. The novel ends with the moon colonized by humans.

The Novel of the Next Century was not the first work of Hungarian science fiction:

The end of the eighteenth century was characterized by the popularity of Fantastic Voyages and Utopias. French and other sources inspired Tariménes utazása ["The Voyage of Tariménes"] (1804) by György Bessenyei (1747-1811). The hero, who gets to an unknown country, not only describes the perfect order of the state but also presents a copy of its constitution. Another important fantastic utopia was Utazás a Holdba ["Voyage to the Moon"] (1836) by Ferenc Ney (1814-1899), a novel in which travelers find that the Moon has everything they miss on Earth: the possibility of happiness and the happiness of equality. János Munkácsy (1802-1841), in his Hogy áll a világ a jövö században? ["How Stands the World in the Next Century?"] (1838), describes the wonderful future development of Transportation and many social changes: deadly Weapons are put aside and conflicts between states are settled by competitive poetry recitals. The first Hungarian Space Opera was Végnapok ["The Final Days"] (1847) by Miklós Jósika (1794-1865). This apocalyptic novel had an immense success. The story takes place on Earth in a Far-Future ice age.¹

But Jókai was the first important Hungarian author to write science fiction or fantasy, and, as Dickens did with Bleak House and mysteries, Jókai leant the genres of the fantastic a respectability they had previously lacked in Hungary. Jókai’s fantastika includes a novel about Atlantis (original: Óceánia, 1856), To the North Pole (original: Egész Az Északi Pólusig, 1876), about notable men and women from long ago being revived from suspended animation, and Where Money is Not God (original: Ahol a Pénz Nem Isten, 1904), another utopia, but The Novel of the Next Century was his most important piece of fantastika. While “the real watershed for SF writing [in Hungary] can be located in the early 20^th century,”² Jókai gave Hungarian science fiction respectability and momentum; without Jókai, such authors as Frigyes Karinthy would either not have written fantastika or not received any sort of attention for the fantastika which they wrote.

The Novel of the Next Century’s approach to flight is not particularly original. A number of stories and novels about powered flight and trips into space appeared in the nineteenth century before Jókai and before Jules Verne (see: Robur the Conqueror), from J.L. Riddell’s Orrin Lindsay’s Plan of Aerial Navigation (1847), with its magnetic anti-gravity field, to the pseudonymously-written The History of a Voyage to the Moon. And the idea of advanced science creating a utopia begins with Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627) and Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun (1637).

The most interesting and original aspect of The Novel of the Next Century is the idea that one man could, through his own genius and his scientific and technological discoveries, single-handedly create a utopia. This is the benign version of the utopias created by anarchists which would appear toward the end of the century (see: The Angel of the Revolution). Tatrangi himself is a precursor to the scientist-adventurer of Verne (see: Robur the Conqueror, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea) and Wells (see: The Time Traveler) and anticipates the scientist-as-world-savior of the pulps of the twentieth century. Tatrangi may have been, as Csaba Toth writes, “a projection of the Hungarian elite’ teleological commitment to the notion of catching up with the intellectual and economic progress of Western Europe,”³ a projection which would later spectacularly collapse as Hungary became a country with a “bureaucratic polity, a pseudo-market and a neo-corporatist society,”⁴ but within the genre of science fiction he remained an archetype for later Hungarian writers to draw upon.

Jókai’s utopian novel also resembles the fiction of the contemporary French writer Jules Verne (1828-1905) in as much as the development of technology is of central importance. As Zsuzsa D. Zöldhelyi (1981: 607) states, the great difference between Verne’s and Jókai’s approach is the focus. The development of technology is important for Jókai for its social and political aspects, whereas Verne mostly concentrates on technology for its own sake, without considering social aspects (with the exception of The Begum’s Millions in 1879). It is obvious that the popular French writer had an influence on Jókai, but we cannot consider his work derivative. Even the idea of an electrical flying machine precedes his French counterpart; in Verne’s fiction it only appears in Robur the Conqueror published in 1886, more than a decade after The Novel of the Century to Come.⁵

Lastly, The Novel of the Next Century needs to be placed in the context of Future War novels, as Miklós Veres notes.⁶ Chesney’s “The Battle of Dorking” was hugely popular and influential across Europe, and its ideas reached Hungary, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and enemies to Russia since at least the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. The role of Russia (renamed “Nihil”) in Novel of the Next Century is that of the invaders in any Future War novel. But Jókai anticipates the science fictional approach of later English and American Future War novels.

¹ Péter Kuczka, “Hungary,” in John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls, and Graham Sleight, eds., The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, accessed Feb. 11, 2019, http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/hungary.

² John Fekete, “Science Fiction in Hungary (La science-fiction en Hongrie),” Science Fiction Studies 16, no. 2 (Jul. 1989): 194.

³ Csaba Toth, “The Transatlantic Dialogue: 19^th-century American Utopianism and Europe,” (PhD diss. University of Minnesota, 1992), 139.

⁴ Andrew C. Janos, The Politics of Backwardness in Hungary, 1825-1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 24.

⁵ Zsolt Czigányik, “From the Bright Future of the Nation to the Dark Future of Mankind: Jókai and Karinthy in Hungarian Utopian Tradition," Hungarian Cultural Studies 8 (2015): 15-16.

⁶ See Veres, “A nagy háború gondolata a dualizmus kori utópisztikus és sci-fi irodalomban.” Paper presented at Sorsok, frontok, eszmék. Tanulmányok az első világháború 100. évfordulójára, Budapest, May 2014.