The Diothas
 The novel begins with a scene in which the first-person narrator undergoes an episode of "mesmerism," or hypnosis, and wakes up in the far future; he has suddenly passed "from the nineteenth to the ninety-sixth century...." In the company of a friend and guide named Utis Estai, the narrator begins to learn the nature of this future world. He is introduced to the massive city of "Nuiore," the future development of New York City; and he travels with his guide to Utis's home in the suburbs. He learns from Utis and others about the structure and institutions of this future society. The book concentrates most of its attention on the social and technological advances of the ninety-sixth century; and some of Macnie's forecasts and predictions are notably prescient. The one most often cited in criticism and commentary is Macnie's prediction that the paved roads of the future will have white lines running down their centers to divide the traffic flow. Macnie also forecasts advances in communication, with a global telephone network, and recorded lectures by college professors, among other developments that have come to pass in the ensuing centuries. Some of Macnie's anticipations are more characteristic of the early twenty-first century, like electric cars, and rooftop gardens on public and private buildings (a feature of the modern "green building" movement). At one point in The Diothas, the narrator meets an elderly astronomer who has developed a "calculating machine" that can draw geometric figures, and can also begin with a geometric curve and then display the formula it represents&mdash;tasks done by modern computers and computer graphics. Macnie's future has progressive, egalitarian, and semi-socialist elements. The genders have fairly similar rights (though only males have to perform a type of national service). Some gender roles persist; all men are given some training in law, and all women in medicine. The majority of scientists are male, the majority of artists are female. Yet women inventors have been primarily responsible for the development of varzeo and lizeo ("far-seeing" and "live-seeing")&mdash;that is, television and motion pictures. Women do domestic laundry and cooking&mdash;but communally. The average work day is three hours long; people devote their abundant leisure time to the arts and sciences and to further education. A form of capitalism exists, though there are limits on inherited wealth. Workers in business enterprises are often shareholders also. Macnie does envision a significant element of Puritanism in his future society, with Prohibition of alcohol and laws against marital infidelity. The author's conservative opinions are partly represented by his future. He condemns the authors Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens as "maudlin sympathizers with crime...." He even includes in his future the old Roman practice in which "the father had unquestioned power of life and death over his children." There are personal aspects to the novel as well: the narrator meets and becomes enamored of a young woman named Reva Diotha. (She and her female relatives are "the Diothas" of the title). Cleverly, Macnie complicates the frame of his narrative: the narrator is, in his own perception, a time-traveller from the nineteenth century&mdash;but he is known by the other characters as a friend and relative named Ismar Thiusen who has developed a mental illness, and who has the delusion that he is a time-traveller from the nineteenth century. (The narrator arrives in the 96th century able to speak its altered English language, in which the name of West Point has devolved into "Uespa," St. Louis into "Salu," and Buffalo into "Falo.") Utis treats Thiusen rather like a psychiatric patient; Utis humors his friend's delusion and explains the features of their world, as a kind of therapy meant to restore Thiusen to his proper wits. Once Thiusen and Reva Diotha are matched as a couple, they interpret his situation in terms of reincarnation. In the end, however, Thiusen returns to the nineteenth century, after an accidental plunge over Niagara Falls. There, he is united with Edith Alston, the woman he loves.