People Of The Ruins

Shanks, Edward

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press

Trapped in a London laboratory during a worker uprising, a physicist and war veteran awakens 150 years later--on the eve of a new Dark Age! In The People of the Ruins, Edward Shanks imagines England in the not-so-distant future as a neomedieval society whose inhabitants have forgotten how to build or operate machinery. Jeremy Tuft is a physics instructor and former artillery officer who is cryogenically frozen in his laboratory only to emerge after a century and a half to a disquieting new era. Though at first Tuft is disconcerted by the failure of his own era's smug doctrine of Progress, he eventually decides that he prefers the postcivilized life. But, when the northern English and Welsh tribes invade, Tuft must set about reinventing weapons of mass destruction. One of the most critically acclaimed and popular postwar stories of its day, The People of the Ruins captured a feeling that was common among those who had fought and survived the Great War: haunted by trauma and guilt, its protagonist feels out of time and out of place, unsure of what is real or unreal. Shanks implies in this seminal work, as Paul March-Russell explains in the book's introduction, that the political system was already corrupt before the story began, and that Bolshevism and anarchism--and the resulting civil wars--merely accelerated the world's inevitable decline. A satire of Wellsian techno-utopian novels, The People of the Ruins is a bold, entertaining, and moving postapocalyptic novel contemporary readers won't soon forget. Edward Shanks (1892-1953) was an English author, poet, critic, and journalist. He was the editor of Granta just before serving in World War I and is perhaps best remembered today as a war poet. The People of the Ruins is his only science fiction novel.

The People of the Ruins (MIT Press / Radium Age)

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

The MIT Press

The People of the Ruins

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Science Fiction

Lulu Press, Inc.

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

Poems

Self-Help

Relationships

BiblioLife

The Queen of China and Other Poems

Poetry

History

Asia

Hilaire Belloc: The Man and His Work

CHESTERTON, G.K.

Mandell, C. Creighton

CHESTERTON, GILBERT KEITH

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Shanks, Edward. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Shanks, Edward