Gabriel de Tarde 1 hr 22 min read

When a cooling sun plunges the Earth's surface into deadly cold, the remnant of humanity descends to build a strange, beautiful new civilization in the warmth deep underground.

Gabriel de Tarde's 1905 novel, with a preface by H. G. Wells, is a landmark post-apocalyptic utopian fantasy. Elegant, imaginative, philosophical. Read it for a charming and thoughtful French vision of humanity reborn beneath the earth, a society devoted to art and love after catastrophe, from a great sociologist, in a graceful day-dream of civilization's rebirth that fascinated Wells himself.

In its time

Published in 1905, during the 1900s, the scientific romance.

Reading it

1 hr 22 min read (a novella, a full arc in one sitting or two).