Lord of the World

Lord of the World is a 1907 dystopian science fiction novel by Robert Hugh Benson about the Antichrist's reign and the end of the world. It's Benson's dystopic vision of a near-future world in which religion has been largely rejected or has simply faded away. The Catholic Church has retreated to Italy and Ireland, while the rest of the world is Humanistic or Pantheistic. There is a "one-world" government in place, and euthanasia is widely available. The plot revolves around a priest named Percy Franklin, who becomes Pope Silvester III, and a mysterious man named Julian Felsenburgh, who looks exactly like the priest and becomes "Lord of the World."