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Paper short abstract

Exploring unnatural disaster in George Griffith’s (1898) and Emilio Salgari’s (1907) turn-of-the-twentieth-century tales, this paper contrasts a British dystopian warning against capitalist hubris with an Italian ambivalent fantasy of technological mastery.

Paper long abstract

This paper contrasts two visions of technological risk from the turn of the twentieth century: George Griffith’s “A Corner in Lightning” (1898) and Emilio Salgari’s Le meraviglie del 2000 (1907, The Wonders of the Year 2000). This comparative and transnational analysis reveals how fin-de-siècle anxieties were filtered through distinct national contexts, yielding a dystopian warning from industrial Britain, alongside an ambivalent fantasy of mastery from a recently unified Italy, still forging its modern identity.

Griffith’s story depicts technological risk as a hubristic gamble that results in a global disaster: a capitalist’s scheme to monopolize the Earth’s natural supply of electricity leads to a catastrophic climate collapse, framing nature as a punitive and violent force. By contrast, Salgari’s work presents a more nuanced and prophetic vision. While it celebrates technological hegemony, depicting a future society that confidently manages both theoretical planetary threats and immediate natural challenges, its optimism is undermined by the unforeseen psychological consequences of this very progress: the 19th century protagonists are awakened into the hyper-electrified environment of 2003 that might eventually drive all of humanity mad.

By comparing Griffith and Salgari’s narratives, this paper argues that early SF was already articulating profoundly ambivalent attitudes towards techno-capitalistic progress. Griffith warns of an apocalypse born of greed, while Salgari foreshadows a disaster unwittingly born of success itself. Together they offer a complex premonition of modernity’s tangled relationship with technology, revealing how narratives of risk fundamentally redefine the boundaries between human ambitions and the natural world.