Knopf Canada kicks off its 1997 "New Face of Fiction" campaign with A Scientific Romance (312 pages, $29.95 cloth), by Ronald Wright, among whose previous works are five acclaimed travel books. The title is a Victorian term for speculative fiction, which includes such well-known examples as The Time Machine, Brave New World, 1984, and, more recently, The Handmaid's Tale. Scientific romances are characterized by a deep foreboding about the pace and the consequences of technological progress, and Wright's novel is no exception.

David Lambert, a museum curator and specialist in Victorian machinery who lives in London (England), has been given access to a letter left by H. G. Wells claiming that his supposedly fictitious time machine had actually been built by Tania, a talented young assistant of the famous Nikola Tesla. And not only had she built it, but she had taken off in it on New Year's Eve, 1899, her return having been scheduled for exactly a century later. Lambert, understandably skeptical but profoundly curious, goes to the location where the machine is supposed to materialize and gets the shock of his life when in fact it does-minus Tania. It doesn't take long for Lambert to decide to try out the machine himself, especially since he has been diagnosed with the incurable Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease (aka Mad Cow) and thinks he might find a remedy if he travels far enough into the future.

The novel's four sections work well together, a chronological sequence in which each part illuminates the whole. Part One is a long letter from Lambert to his jazz musician friend Bird, explaining the events leading up to his planned journey. Part Two is Lambert's journal, addressed to Anita, a beautiful Egyptologist who had died at the age of thirty-two, whom Bird and he had loved, fought over, and lost. The journal chronicles the first leg of Lambert's travels in 2500 A.D. through a Britain that is almost unrecognizable: a tropical land with lush vegetation and exotic wildlife, but no people. Lambert retraces his wanderings with Anita, becoming-paradoxically-an archaeologist of his own time. Part Three finds him captured by a Scottish tribe bearing the name MacBeth but with otherwise little resemblance to the Scots of the twentieth century. They are dark-skinned (an effect, like the tropical climate, of global warming), mostly illiterate, technologically backward. It's as if the human race has gone into reverse, progress not only halted but erased, knowledge wiped out. How Lambert escapes and what he escapes to comprise Part Four, which provides a credible, satisfying ending.

Wright has written a book that shines with intelligence and compassion-albeit a compassion tempered by the dire realization that humanity is responsible for its own impending demise. In short, we'll get what we deserve. But, as in all speculative fiction of this type, there is hope that if we pay attention in the present we can affect what will await our heirs in the future.