An heir with mechanical and literary interests
Astor was born in Rhinebeck, New York, in 1864, a great-grandson of the fur trader of the same name. Education at St Paul’s School and Harvard preceded travel abroad and management of the family fortune. His real-estate projects included the Astoria Hotel, built beside his cousin’s Waldorf in 1897.
Invention formed another part of his activity, including a bicycle brake and a pneumatic road-improver. During the Spanish-American War he served as a lieutenant colonel and made his yacht available to the government. His first marriage, to Ava Willing, ended in divorce; in 1911 he married Madeleine Force. They were returning from travel abroad when he died in the Titanic sinking in April 1912. His novel had appeared eighteen years earlier.
An imagined future with inherited beliefs
The illustrated Appleton volume of A Journey in Other Worlds held here is dated 1894. Its subtitle, A Romance of the Future, frames a journey set in the year 2000. The preface brings scientific speculation and religious thought into the same imaginative undertaking.
The travellers explain unfamiliar animals through adaptation, light and gravity, extending earthly assumptions into another environment. Later conversations with a spirit change the subject from physical mechanisms to suffering and the soul’s fate. Even there, a desired explanation is distinguished from biblical authority. The juxtaposition gives Astor’s future its particular character: technical confidence expands alongside beliefs the explorers already possess. His projected social order likewise reflects the outlook from which he imagines progress.
