The Pleasures of a Futuroscope

The Pleasures of a Futuroscope was Lord Dunsany's last work, published posthumously.  Unfortunately, I think it needed a much more severe editing than it got, the kind of editing it might have received had he published it in his own lifetime.

The opening is promising, as the narrator tells us about his view into the future and the coming nuclear cataclysm.  But from there, every page has at least one of the following paragraphs, and sometimes more than one:

• The people in the future have returned to nature, and they are much more alive to the events in their day-to-day lives than we are.
• The narrator doesn't know how the futuroscope works.  It's something like TV, in that it can go indoors and outdoors.  (This is nonsense, of course, but we can assume the narrator is just ignorant).
• Someone who knows about science or history could really make good use of the futuroscope, but the narrator is just following one family.
• I wanted to communicate with the people in the future, but the futuroscope only goes one way.

The story, such as it is, proceeds in the interstices of these paragraphs.  It's pretty dull through the first half of the book, which is where I gave up.  I really wanted to like this book, being a Dunsany fan, but it's just not very good, in addition to being preachy.  (I happen not to agree with his message, but that's a side issue).