Retro Review - The Island of Unreason (1933) by Edmond Hamilton up at Fantastic Worlds
Synopsis: This is the tale of Allan Mann (serial number 2473R6), a young man who is a bit too passionate to fell well into the rigidly-Technocratic society of the early 4th Millennium A.D. When he refuses to let the atomic-motor project he's been working on for the past two years be simply turned over to another engineer, he is arrested for a "
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writing was exceptionally good…repeatedly anthologized… still read
No argument there. Every so often the environment produces unexpected and literally exceptional quality. One of the fifty-two films Warner Bros cranked out in 1942 - that's one complete movie every week, all year long, and that's just one studio; when they speak of the “film industry” that's what's meant - was a somewhat slap-dash production called Casablanca.
It happens. But now, name any of the fifty-one others! For every Gary Larsen's The Far Side, there are dozens of “Larry Garsons.” Sometimes the stuff in these old pulps is halfway decent; other times it keeps the pages from being blank. A lot of Ace Double novels are the same: For every Andre Norton or Murray Leinster there are dozens of authors unknown today - save to collectors of Ace Double novels!
[And as for Edgar Rice Burroughs imitators, hoo, I should hope to tell you!]
I'm fascinated by Technocracy, Utilitarianism, &c., because I'm working on and within an alternate history setting where the “Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic” lasted no longer than did the “Confederate States of America,” and the 20th century unfolded with no Communist Party shaping the result. Yet the Party hooked “useful fools” in the West for a reason - because they believed, as you say, that society could be ordered rationally - that things would genuinely be better if the trains were forced to run on time. That sentiment would persist in some weakened form, and I find the possible outcomes interesting.
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