When I queued up "For Us, The Living", I had no idea what to expect beyond the book's basic synopsis: man goes driving in 1939. Man crashes car. Man (apparently) dies. Man wakes up. It's 2086.
None of the how is explained at any point of the film, and having been written in 1939, on the eve of World War 2, this book's language and setting is seriously dated.
There's little ... actual science fiction here; beyond the traditional speculative fiction of a simple "what if" scenario, simply described above.
Instead, what we have is a man doing the reverse of Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court right down to the gender reversals.
Perry (the protagonist) struggles to adjust to the cultural differences of 150 years, and finds himself examining (and re-examining) the history that passed between the events of his accident and his newly found consciousness.
What is left beyond all this, for the reader, is pages and pages of exposition and watching a man fumble through cultural customs that get him in trouble with the law, imprisoned, (well, "treated") in which we get endless lectures on the way economic systems now work, compared to how they used to work, and .. really; while a lot of it is prophetic (particularly for 1939) - it does, at least, today, raise the question - "did anything ever change".
I don't think much has changed, other than the language that we use to described various mechanisms of economics, trade, government, relationships.
It feels as though the human race is trapped in an unending spiral of guilt, envy, and a keen ability to gaslight ourselves that the current state of affairs is indeed the best it has ever been.
Perhaps that might be true, but there's one thing that is lacking in the novel - true, genuine progress; beyond that of the revelation that if you burn your plates and forks and knives after use, you won't have to wash up after yourself and can instead spend more time frolicking at the beach.
This isn't a long, deep, or particularly interesting read, but instead, a disappointing time capsule to remind us that we should always be striving to improve not only our own lives, but the lives of everyone around us.