Ruskin SF

More inadvertent Victorian sciencefictionalising, this time from Ruskin's 'Work of Iron' essay (1858), which includes this rather splendid description of that worthy genre trope, the Trantor planet:

You think, perhaps, that your iron is
wonderfully useful in a pure form, but how would you like the world, if all your meadows, instead of grass, grew nothing but iron wire--if all your arable ground, instead of being made of sand and clay, were suddenly turned into flat surfaces of steel--if the whole earth, instead of its green and glowing sphere, rich with forest and flower, showed nothing but the image of the vast furnace of a ghastly engine--a globe of black, lifeless, excoriated metal?