As influential as this book may have been, it's not aged well. It feels like a counterpoint to The War of the World's: instead of "what if invasive colonialism happened to us?" resulting in death and destruction, we get benevolent dictators and a passive population that just rolls with it. The two women in the book are both objectified and infantalised, and while a prominent character in the book is black, there's some distinctly awkward race chat when he's introduced. This might have been considered progressive for the 50s, it seems well intended, but it's still pretty ignorant. The books conclusion is a bummer that again relies on the entire population of the earth shrugging when it hits an existential crisis. Always interesting to go back into the greatest hits of the genre, but I'm not sure this improves on TWotW in any meaningful way.