How the Year 2440 Was Imagined in a 1771 French Sci-Fi Novel

Many Americans might think of Rip Van Winkle as the first man to nod off and wake up in the distant future. But as often seems to have been the case in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the French got there first. Almost 50 years before Washington Irving’s short story, Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s utopian novel L’An 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais (1771) sent its sleeping protagonist six and a half centuries forward in time. Read today, as it is in the new