City of Endless Night

Starred review from December 1, 2014
Hastings' 1920 dystopian SF novel gets a new edition and the opportunity to reach a new generation of readers. Set in 2041, it tells the story of an American chemical engineer, Lyman de Forrest, who gets trapped in the city of Berlin, which, after more than 150 years of unrelenting war, has become a sort of underground fortress, walled in and cut off from the outside world. Posing as a dead German chemistthe opening of the book, frankly, relies heavily on coincidencethe American interloper infiltrates this strange new society, determined to find a way to escape it. Hastings, who seems to have been a fascinating fellow (writer, urban planner, pioneer in free-range chicken production, inventor of Weeniwinks health snacks), wrote the book just after WWI and posited a second world war that would begin in the 1980s and continue into the 2100s, with Germany's fiercest weapon being the mysterious Ray, which destroys the oxygen-carrying power of living blood. Berlin, hidden away under the earth, is like a different world, highly regimented and class-structured. Hastings had no way of knowing it while he was writing the book, but his fictional Berlin operates quite a bit like the world Hitler envisioned. De Forrest is a prototypical dystopian hero, a stand-in for the reader, a stranger in a seriously strange land. For fans of dystopian fiction, not to mention early-twentieth-century sf, the book should be considered required reading.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)