AN AGED SCIENCE fiction novel re-released with 40 pages of ...

Ignatius Donnelly was a peculiarly American kind of oddball, a late-Victorian political radical rebelling against the technocratic subjugation of the masses while dreaming of a workers utopia. Or worse, dreaming the nightmare in which it could not be realized.

Caesar's Column is part of a Wesleyan series of resurrected SF that includes Jules Verne and other people most of us have not heard of. (With some reason, I'd guess.) Donnelly, born in Philadelphia, took himself to the Midwest, joined the farmer-worker political movement and was elected a state and national representative, as well as the youngest lieutenant governor of Minnesota (an earlier incarnation of "boy wonder" Harold Stassen?). He also wrote a "non-fiction" best-seller about Atlantis from which most modern underseas mythology springs. All this from the intro by Nicholas Ruddick, which is quite good.

With his political career in sad shape in 1890, he wrote Caesar's Column, set in a New York of 1988, when the lower classes have been reduced to chattel. Plot: Gabriel Weltstein arrives from his native Swiss colony in Uganda and writes of his experiences to his brother. Initially overwhelmed by the luxury of the metropolis, he is quickly appalled by the treatment of the underclass, becomes involved with the mysterious Brotherhood of Destruction, rescues his true love from the clutches of Prince Cabano (head of the Oligarchy) and watches the inevitable cataclysmic downfall of civilization.

Is it any good? Hmm, let me temporize: The political pontificating is godawful, a soporific rendering of social theory in long paragraphs. Ignore it and turn the pages. His view of the future is a silly hash, with great airships and trains overhead but everyone on the street riding in horse and carriage. In his descriptions, Donnelly often generalizes when he should be specific and vice versa. Most of his characters have the thickness of a mouse fart.

A basic problem, as in most utopian work, is that the stratified classes become monoliths: The Oligarchs meet and plan universal oppression. The workers march in despairing lockstep. Except that isn't how real human beings behave. No matter how elite, they have personalities. No matter how destitute and hapless, they still jostle and joke.

And yet, a long aside on his friend Max's rescue of a young stage singer from a life of degradation has a Dickensian solidity, and the final conflagration, when the workers arise in thunderous mass to destroy America and Europe, has spine-chilling moments, especially Max's horrifying revenge on those who imprisoned his father. Donnelly is definitely at his best when he accentuates the negative.

But the most peculiar aspect of Caesar's Column (one not noted in the intro) is that Donnelly, the perennial politician, never mentions government?city, state or national. This must be a conscious omission, but to what point? Maybe Donnelly couldn't stand the complication. Or he had given up on politics altogether.