In the Year Ten Thousand
What if humanity evolves beyond language itself? This visionary novel, written in 1913, imagines the year 10,000 through the eyes of an ancient man and his young companion wandering through a great museum. They encounter something extraordinary: a book. To the boy, it is a mysterious artifact from a primitive age. To his 600-year-old guide, it is a relic of humanity's brutal beginning - when people communicated through crude sounds, when nations were divided by incompatible tongues, when war and ignorance reigned. The old man tells the story of the Dark Ages with a mixture of horror and fascination. He describes a species that had not yet learned to read minds, that imprisoned thoughts in marks on paper, that killed in the name of invented differences. In this utopian future, those conflicts have been transcended. But the price of that progress is the complete loss of what we consider human connection. Harben's speculative fiction is both a warning and a meditation: What do we sacrifice for progress? What will future generations think of us?
