The book begins with a conversation at the London Bank between two friends who, after discussing the world, focus on the strange figure of Professor Benson, a reclusive scientist with great financial ability.

[5] The first part of the story follows Ayrton Lobo, described by Marisa Lajolo [pt] as "clumsy", and by Filipe Chamy as someone extremely imaginative, who suffers a car accident[c] and is cared for on the estate of Dr. Benson, a wealthy scientist, and his daughter, Miss Jane, according to researcher Carlos Minchillo, a "Sherazade"-like character,[d] also a researcher and who doesn't think about "marriage, fashion and other “futilities".”[8] The second part deals with the presidential race in 2228, which aims to elect the 88th president.

[15] For researcher Emerson Tin, while presenting the interpretations of Marcia Camargos, Vladimir Sacchetta and Marisa Lajolo, says that it would be too superficial and simplistic to focus on decontextualized passages from the novel to accuse it of being a racist work,[16] Dias says that the use of allegories means that, in hasty readings, we end up missing the author's attempt to portray his time and society[17] and Felipe Chamy says that the author is "diluted in various forms in the fictional spheres of this work.

All of this was, is, and will only ever be the aether.Aether, in reference to the element aether, is a way for Dr. Benson to present his view that life in the universe is composed of vibrations, something that, as researcher Santana-Dezmann notes, is similar to the String Theory formulated in 1960.

[72] Ayrton Lobo doesn't even get to witness the "porviroscope", a machine that allows you to see into the future, working, and researcher Emerson Tin speculates whether the equipment's vision is reliable.

", going on to describe him physically as having the "[...] athletic figure of the Senegalese of our times [...]" and that, as a way of presenting the population in general, his appearance was reminiscent of the Native Americans, who in this future were already extinct, as well as having whitish skin.

[h] Lajolo says that the protagonist, Ayrton Lobo, shows a "well-mannered" horror, which, in her view, causes discomfort,[101] and in Carlos Minchillo's vision, Miss Jane reports the events of the future "without astonishment".

This comes to a culmination when President Kerlog visits him, emotionally impacted by his actions, even as he embraces his "role" as a representative of white ethnicity, breaking the ultimate news: Omega rays have the side effect of sterilization.

[102][i] With his re-election, the meaning of the Leland motion was revealed by Kerlog in his speech, which was received by the population with astonishment: the criminalization of artificial whitening and the authorization of the government to enforce the law – which was accomplished through the support of the Omega rays.

[k][106][109] Miss Jane's focus in using the term eugenics, according to Santana-Dezmann's, remains on the personality and character of the people who came to make up the USA, describing it as a kind of "non-Darwinian natural selection" of those who would go on to build the country.

[115] In this fictional context, to avoid overpopulation, we see the return of the ideas of Francis Galton (1822–1911), who formalized Eugenics based on two principles: that the environment does not influence the formation of characteristics (going against the Positivism of Auguste Comte [1798–1857]) and that moral, intellectual and general abilities are hereditary.

[118] In the fictional context, it is only at this point in Chapter XI that the term takes on its popularly recognized meaning and, alongside the other controls, creates the apparent "utopia" that is challenged throughout the narrative – which, in Santana-Dezmann's view, is a critique of these ideas.

[120] At the point where Miss Jane positively reports the euthanasia of disabled children, or the "resurgence of wise Spartan law", the protagonist of the narrative, Ayrton Lobo, is horrified.

[126] In the fictional story, after the novelty of Jim Roy's election diminished in the public's view, the media began to promote the treatment of an "Omega wave", from the Dudley Uncurling Company, which could straighten frizzy hair – something that, according to Santana-Dezmann's analysis, turned out to be very cruel.

[132][133] In another point of contact, the fictional work tells of the "depigmentizer", and in reality, since the end of the 19th century, products that promised to lighten the skin were sold in the United States, as well as being promoted in newspapers aimed at the black population.

[134] In conclusion, according to Santana-Dezmann, the fiction set in 2228 and the USA up to 1926 shared several similarities, including how the narrative reproduces the prejudice against curly hair and its straightening techniques, as observed in the American media between the 19th and 20th centuries.

[138][139] The researcher Santana-Dezmann, in her analysis of the questions in the paragraph above, emphasizes that Miss Jane had attributed certain characteristics to the population of the USA at the beginning of its history and that the plural term Ruined both races [...] excludes any attack on a specific ethnic group.

[153][154] According to researcher Santana Dezmann, Lobato was aware of the ethnic discussions taking place in the United States through reading imported newspapers and contact with Americans and, considering the fame of H.G.

[166][167] In a review published in "A Manhã" on October 19, 1926, Faria Neves Sobrinho [pt] was disappointed with the novel, saying: "...the novel, whose style is almost always loose, colorless and unbalanced, without the vigor that portrays and characterizes the author of “Urupês”, is deplorably unpatriotic and disastrously illogical in certain episodes.” For his turn, Ribeiro Couto [pt], in a review on July 20, 1927, was more positive, noting the "verisimilitude of the fantastic'", the future applications of radio and the possibility of an international audience being interested in the translations.

[168] According to researcher Denise Maria de Paiva Bertolucci, the unprecedented nature of the fiction genre that Lobato chose explains why his colleagues at the newspaper didn't approve of him unanimously.

[169] According to Carlos Minchillo, six reviews consulted in his research were written on the basis of the publisher's promotional material, due to the recurrence of phrases like "as stated by the publishers" and references to passages that do not appear in the printed version, and how the first critical texts saw the work as having an educational quality, with Nestor Vítor [pt] considering the work to be "anticolonialist", because the USA "floods our cinemas [...] that are Americanizing us" and that Lobato's strategy would be a kind of reverse engineering.

[178] A decade later, in 2019, Marisa Lajolo and Lilia Schwarcz, in the work "Reinações de Monteiro Lobato", assuming the author's voice, state that "the novel could provoke and feed prejudice, encourage violence, defend racist values and attitudes.

[41] Lobato, an author who was already published in Syria, Germany, France, Argentina and Spain,[179] already had contact with the translator Aubrey Stuart and an editor in New York, according to Santana Dezmann, probably Alfred A. Knopf, connected to Isaac Goldberg.

[183] In a letter dated December 1926, Lobato said that the translation would take a long time to complete, expecting it to be finished by the end of January 1927, and that the financial results would only come in the second half of the year.

[191][165] Already in New York, living in Jackson Heights, on August 17, 1927, Lobato corresponded again with Rangel and, among other things, presented his plans to leave the post of commercial attaché after two years, when he would focus on Tupy Publishing, as well as reinvesting, with interest, 700 dollars a month of his salary in "iron and oil for Brazil".

[194][195] When analyzing the reason Lobato gives in the fifth paragraph of his letter for the failure of his publication, of "...admitting that after so many centuries of moral progress this people might, collectively, commit[o] in cold blood the beautiful crime I have suggested", Santana-Dezmann has doubts, due to the violence suffered by the black population in the US and how the situation worsened until the 1960s and the protests of Martin Luther King Jr., and that the message of the text in the researcher's view, "we are all vibrations of the Aether", would no longer be relevant according to the editors.

[207][208] Still according to the researcher, Lobato, who at that time had already attacked slavery in Brazil in short stories such as Negrinha from 1920[q] and the 1921 Os Negros, wrote a novel to defend the black population, but arrived in the U.S. within the Harlem Renaissance, resulting in the letter of September 5, 1927, where he acknowledges that he arrived in the U.S. "green, inexperienced, without the context of what was happening in the country and that the "'I should have come in the days when they lynched black people" would be a reference to when the message of his book, according to Santana-Dezmann, to appreciate our natural characteristics, would have been accepted and would not have clashed with commercial interests.

[216] The following year, in a letter dated July 25, 1929, to Anísio Teixeira, Lobato already indicated his suspicion that he would soon have to return to Brazil, which happened in 1931, both because of the damage caused by the Crisis of 1929 and because he lost his position as commercial attaché after the deposition of Washington Luís.

[220][221] In another view, Marisa Lajolo considers the work to be a metaphor for the deculturation of an ethnic group;[101] and Carlos Minchillo believes that Miss Jane "naturalizes" the actions of white leaders and that the author is counting on the "complicity of his reader".

[231] The translator Jean Duriau, in a note for the short story "Le Babouin Boucané", declared that Lobato was "the most original of the young Brazilian writers of today, in a country so different from ours, where the rarity of the means of communication slows down the diffusion of what we call progress".