Edward Shanks ~5 hr read

A man wakes from decades of suspended sleep into a far-future England fallen back into barbarism, the machines silent, civilization forgotten, and finds himself caught up in a savage new war.

Edward Shanks's 1920 novel is a landmark post-apocalyptic and dystopian tale. Vivid, sobering, influential. Read it for a pioneering British disaster novel, a sleeper waking to a Britain reverted to feudal ruin, where the last scraps of lost science become weapons, in an early, sombre vision of civilization's collapse that shaped the genre.

In its time

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

Reading it

~5 hr read (a novel-length work, settle in).