Two hundred years after the Great War of 1914 severed the hemispheres, an officer of the Pan-American navy drifts across the forbidden thirtieth meridian and finds out what became of Europe. Burroughs failed at ranching, gold dredging and pencil sharpeners before deciding at thirty-five that he could write better than the magazines he was reading; this one, published in 1916, imagines the war going on for a century.