HiLoBooks to publish Shanks!
By:
April 13, 2012
BREAKING NEWS: In October 2012, HiLoBooks will publish The People of the Ruins, a 1920 proto-Idiocracy satire by Edward Shanks, an English novelist, poet, literary critic, and journalist. This will be the fifth in a series of six Radium Age science fiction novels published in 2012 by HiLoBooks. Please help us spread the word!
Before he served in World War I, Shanks was editor of the literary journal Granta. The People of the Ruins, a pessimistic satire on Wellsian techno-utopias, is his only science fiction novel. HiLobrow published one of Shanks’ anti-modernist poems earlier this year.
PLUS: A new Introduction by Tom Hodgkinson, editor of the British journal The Idler, and author of How To Be Idle, How To Be Free, and Brave Old World, among other titles.
Trapped in a London laboratory during a worker uprising in 1924, ex-artillery officer and physics instructor Jeremy Tuft awakens 150 years later — in a neo-medieval society whose inhabitants have forgotten how to build or operate machinery. Not only have his fellow Londoners forgotten most of what humankind used to know, before civilization collapsed, but they don’t particularly care to re-learn any of it. Though he is at first disconcerted by the failure of his own era’s smug doctrine of Progress, Tuft eventually decides that post-civilized life is simpler, more peaceful. That is, until northern English and Welsh tribes threaten London — at which point he sets about reinventing weapons of mass destruction.
“The first of the many British postwar novels that foresee Britain returned to barbarism by the ravages of war.” — Anatomy of Wonder, Neil Barron, ed. (1976)
“One of the most widely read scientific romances of the post-war years.” — Brian Stableford, Scientific Romance in Britain 1890-1950 (1985)
HiLobrow.com will serialize The People of the Ruins from May through September of this year.