Release Message:  William Purley, an Australian in 2992, describes the fallen state of the British Empire, travels to England, and falls down a hole to 1890 London where he tries to warn people about the coming collapse. Written by Henry Crocker Marriott Watson.

Description:  William Purley, an Australian in 2992, describes the fallen state of the British Empire and then travels to England where he meets a version of Alice's White Rabbit and falls down a hole to 1890 London where he tries to warn people about the coming collapse. The story opens in 2989 and is narrated by William Purley, a student of Melbourne University. Purley embarks on a tour of Australia with some friends. They set out to visit the capital, Eyreton, and later decide to extend their adventure with a trip to the African continent and then England. In England, they visit many cities that have become greatly diminished and barely inhabited. The narrator is then transported back to London in the last years of the 19th century to see the origin of England's decline. Ambivalently dystopian, it reverses the pattern of Watson's earlier tale (Erchomenon; or, The Republic of Materialism): a narrator from the thirtieth century visits the nineteenth century by a means of witch-enabled Time Travel, and tells us what is to come unless something is done. A republican Australia has become dominant; the Gulf Stream having been diverted, Britain is frozen, and London is in ruins; an Invention-rich planet has relegated the English-speaking world to secondary status. But at the very end of the nineteenth century _ that is, in the Near Future _ a proletarian revolution causes decent Englishmen to emigrate; the narrator returns to his own time.