The author is an ex-premier of New Zealand, and our national science fiction awards are named after him. This is a generally readable utopia, and it's a strongly feminist piece for 1889, in that women not only have the vote but routinely hold high political office, and are prominent in science, diplomacy, law, and any number of other fields. The protagonist is actually a young woman MP, and the Prime Minister of Britain and the President of the United States are also women. They are, notably, white women - for a settler country, for a colonising empire (and this book is uncritically adulatory of empire) there's nothing here that looks at race relations. Indigenous peoples are notably absent, and the one sustained objection to the British Empire being an assimilating juggernaut comes from the Irish, but they are inevitably folded in and made to like it.

The really interesting thing here, though, apart from the treatment of women, is the strong ethical stance against poverty. Vogel clearly finds it disgraceful that anyone, anywhere, is in want of a decent standard of living, and although he doesn't use the phrase, there's the equivalent of universal basic income in Anno Domini that provides every citizen with adequate food, shelter, and clothing no matter the employment choices they make. I side-eye some of the rest of what goes in this book, but UBI sounds like a fantastic idea to me.