Third Millennium

The Third Millennium, as Dan Davis experiences it after waking in 2000, is a future of striking contrasts: he suffers recurring homesickness for the life he lost, yet finds Great Los Angeles so energetic and inventive that it becomes the most wonderful place he has seen. Its crowdedness and unfinished problems coexist with solutions on a scale that astonishes him, making the era a test of what progress can achieve—and what it cannot restore.

A Future Encountered After Sleep

Dan’s arrival in the Third Millennium is shaped by the thirty years he has slept through. The passage of time is not an abstraction: he wakes into a world whose city, technologies, and everyday conditions differ sharply from those he knew in 1970. He likes the year 2000, and likes 2001 when it arrives only a couple of weeks after his awakening, even while homesickness repeatedly becomes almost unbearable.

The tension between loss and discovery defines his response. Dan does not simply condemn the future for separating him from his former life, nor does he treat novelty as a cure for that separation. He can be homesick and impressed at once; his perspective makes the Third Millennium feel like a real historical change rather than a simple promise that the future will be better.

Los Angeles: Congestion and Ambition

Great Los Angeles strikes Dan as fast, clean, and exciting, but also too crowded. The city’s swelling population has not made its housing problem disappear. New Plan developments are the visible response: Dan admires these transformed parts of town as an engineer, while recognizing that even an ambitious municipal program cannot entirely master the influx of people arriving over the Sierras.

His judgment gives the city’s achievement a deliberately mixed scale. If the government had possessed the sovereign power to halt immigration for ten years, Dan thinks it could have solved the housing crisis; without that power, it has to make the best of the continuing influx. The result is spectacular in its successes and colossal even in its failures. The future’s confidence lies not in having eliminated difficulty, but in attempting solutions at a scale commensurate with it.

Technology and Everyday Life

NullGrav is the major technological marvel that impresses Dan. In 1970 he knew of gravitation research at the Babson Institute, but had expected nothing to come of it; as he sees it, that work had produced nothing, and the basic field theory underpinning NullGrav was instead developed at the University of Edinburgh. His recollection of being taught that gravity could never be altered—because it was inherent in the shape of space—sharpens the distance between the scientific assumptions of his old world and the accomplishments of the new one.

A smaller discovery matters to him for a more personal reason: the common cold has been conquered, and nobody has a postnasal drip. Dan considers that improvement worth the thirty years of sleep, even more than the research colony on Venus. The contrast is revealing. The Third Millennium’s scale is measured in spectacular engineering, but its value is also felt in an ordinary bodily discomfort that has vanished.

Historical Meaning

Dan’s account treats the Third Millennium neither as a flawless utopia nor as a diminished version of the past. Los Angeles remains crowded, and its housing response has limits; nevertheless, he sees its speed, cleanliness, ambition, and technical imagination as evidence of a society willing to grapple with problems on a massive scale. His admiration is informed by his own engineering outlook, while homesickness keeps that admiration from becoming uncomplicated triumphalism.

The era’s defining effect is the double vision it imposes on someone displaced from his own time. Thirty years of sleep have taken Dan away from the familiar, but placed him before achievements he could not have expected in 1970. In the same future, gravity becomes a field for engineering and the common cold becomes a thing of the past; the immense and the intimate together make the Third Millennium newly legible to him.