J. J. Connington ~6 hr read

A blight destroys the world's crops and civilization collapses into famine and panic, until the ruthless industrialist Nordenholt gathers a chosen million to preserve humanity in a walled enclave.

J. J. Connington's 1923 novel is a gripping and disturbing disaster novel of apocalypse and the hard ethics of survival. Dark, ambitious, prophetic. Read it for a powerful early catastrophe story, where saving the human race demands terrible choices about who lives and who is left to die.

In its time

Published in 1923, during the 1920s, the pulp era proper.

Reading it

~6 hr read (a novel-length work, settle in).