Read Anno 2070: Een blik in de toekomst in Dutchwith every sentence explained

Anno 2070: Een blik in de toekomst by Dioscorides was first published in 1865. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked intermediate and filed under science fiction. It runs to about 19,900 words.

One afternoon daydream. Two hundred years into the future.

Settled in his favourite armchair, a Dutch man of science muses on steam engines, telegraphs and the wonders of his age — and drifts into a vision. Suddenly he stands on a vast square beneath a clock tower that reads “1 January 2070”, where a dignified gentleman introduces himself as Roger Bacon, the medieval sage, accompanied by his friend Phantasia.

With these two guides he explores Londinia, a metropolis of twelve million, then sets off by airship across a transformed world. Energy is bottled in cylinders and delivered to homes, a single world time links every nation, crowds listen to music by telephone, war has disappeared and women have won full equal rights — while the Netherlands, too, holds some surprises.

Written in 1865 by the eminent biologist Pieter Harting under the pen name Dioscorides, this playful tour of tomorrow is a classic of early Dutch science fiction, fascinating for what it foresaw and for what it got charmingly wrong.

Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in Dutch. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:

• a natural translation of that exact sentence,
• a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
• the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
• all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.

It's marked intermediate: comfortable once everyday Dutch feels familiar, with the harder sentences one tap away. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.