R.C. Churchill – A Short History of the Future

The 1950s seem to have been a particularly fertile period for writers exploring both the near and far future. In the wake of the totalitarian regimes which proliferated in Europe during the 1920s and 30s, with the coming of the Cold War and the horrors of Hiroshima, the Holocaust, and Stalin’s purges still fresh in the collective memory, these speculative visions tended toward the dystopian. Influenced by accelerating cultural and technological change, popular topics included authoritarianism, mechanisation, post-apocalypse survival, social control and state tyranny, reflecting the fears of a post-War generation. 

In the middle of the decade, the English writer R.C. Churchill delved into this world to produce A Short History of the Future. Presented as a factual work based on ‘historical’ sources, Churchill constructed a chronology of the future from the 1950s to the sixtieth century, including maps and a timeline to trace the rise and fall of various fictional empires and regimes. The Airstrip One of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a primary text, is supplemented by American author David Karp’s One, which expands on the terrors of Winston Smith and the Ministry of Love with Professor Burden and the Department of Internal Examination. Ranging across the world, the benign New Cretan Epoch documented by Robert Graves’ Seven Days in New Crete is followed by Gilbert Frankau’s Second Christian Empire in 4192 (from Unborn Tomorrow). Churchill concludes by drawing on Bertrand Russell’s short story ‘Zahatopolk’, which depicts the fall of a sixtieth-century ‘religious dystopia’ governed from the University of Cuzco, Peru, and its succession by a reformation centred on Mount Kilimanjaro.

The works and writers considered in A Short History of the Future range from the well-known to the obscure and all-but-forgotten, concentrating on the literary tendency of sf rather than the pulp magazines. Thus Ray Bradbury, Bertrand Russell, Kurt Vonnegut and Evelyn Waugh are cited alongside Margot Bennett, Charles Chilton, Geddes MacGregor and C. H. Sisson. Sometimes Churchill references a lesser-known work by a famed author; Aldous Huxley’s Ape and Essence rather than Brave New World, or Nevil Shute’s In the Wet, as On the Beach was yet to come. The skill with which the various sources are woven together is satisfying, providing a portrait of the times which produced them, and leaving scope for the future updating of this history.

R.C. Churchill (1916-1986) was born in Bromley, Kent – also the birthplace of H.G. Wells. In a long and varied literary career, he worked as a journalist and book reviewer for the Birmingham Post. He had pieces published in T.S. Eliot’s prestigious literary magazine The Criterion and the journal Scrutiny, founded by the influential critic F. R. Leavis. Churchill wrote extensively on English Literature, mainly Shakespeare and Dickens – his essay ‘The Genius of Charles Dickens’ appears in The Pelican Guide to English Literature. His interests and subject matter were wide-ranging, with titles and topics including Art and Christianity (1945), culture and democracy (Disagreements, 1950), The English Sunday (1954), and Sixty Seasons of League Football (1958). A Short History of the Future is, to my knowledge, his only foray into the field of science fiction.

I am grateful to Nick Reynolds for his help with my initial research into A Short History of the Future; his blog contains valuable information on the book, which otherwise has a very small digital footprint.