THE PEOPLE OF THE RUINS
By:
August 6, 2024
Under the direction of HILOBROW’s Josh Glenn, the MIT Press’s RADIUM AGE series is reissuing notable proto-sf stories from the underappreciated era between 1900–1935.
In these forgotten classics, sf readers will discover the origins of enduring tropes like robots (berserk or benevolent), tyrannical supermen, dystopias and apocalypses, sinister telepaths, and eco-catastrophes.
With new contributions by historians, science journalists, and sf authors, the Radium Age book series will recontextualize the breakthroughs and biases of these proto-sf pioneers, and chart the emergence of a burgeoning literary genre.
Today marks the publication of the following Radium Age series title…
EDWARD SHANKS
Introduction by PAUL MARCH-RUSSELL
(August 6, 2024)
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 ex-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 post-civilized life. But when northern English and Welsh tribes invade, Tuft must set about reinventing weapons of mass destruction.
One of the most critically acclaimed and popular post-war stories of its day, The People of the Ruins captured a feeling that was common among those who had fought and survived the 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 post-apocalyptic novel contemporary readers won’t soon forget.
“An imaginative story of the future, keenly reasoned, exceptionally well told, and true to the great tradition…. At once a fine narrative novel and an inexorably logical picture of the bitter future being prepared by the advocates of class consciousness.” — The Living Age (1920)
“Predicts a cataclysm in our social system — to take place in 1922 — and, instead of depicting an England under reconstruction, with a highly developed system of scientific and mechanical invention, it shows us an England of 2,000, which is living on the remnants of the undeveloped system of the previous century.” — The Bookman (1921)
“A fine, full-blooded story… quaint and inviting.” — Times Literary Supplement (1920)
“This novel has the abandon of a Jules Verne romance, the terror and excitement of a Nick Carter tale, and the ultimate literary claims of a Münchausen invention.” — The Dial (1921)
“A powerfully imagined description of England, as it will be when Communism has attained its full triumph. He handles one of the strangest love stories in the world with masterly skill.” — British Weekly (1921)
“The time could not be riper for Mr. Shanks’ novel of the English Revolution — and after.” — The Athenaeum (1920)
“It is a book that sticks oddly in the memory, and ends by giving a good deal of decidedly uncomfortable food for thought.” — The Spectator (1920)
“The theme is fascinating, and Mr. Shanks has succumbed to its spell in pessimistic mood…. Quite well-managed yarn, with one touch of humour — perhaps unconscious — that the villain of the piece is one ‘Wells.'” — The English Review (1921)
“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.
“One of the most widely read scientific romances of the post-war years.” — Brian Stableford, Scientific Romance in Britain 1890-1950
“A penetrating tale of near-future disillusion that gazes upon a future made by World War I. Shanks, in 1920, is us, now.” — John Clute
PAUL MARCH-RUSSELL is editor of Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction and co-founder of Gold SF, an intersectional feminist imprint published by Goldsmiths Press / MIT Press. His most recent book, co-edited with Andrew M. Butler, is Rendezvous with Arthur C. Clarke: Centenary Essays (Gylphi, 2022).
EDWARD SHANKS (1892–1953) was an English author, 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.
Cover designed by Seth. See this book at The MIT Press.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF FROM THE MIT PRESS: VOICES FROM THE RADIUM AGE, ed. Joshua Glenn | J.D. Beresford’s A WORLD OF WOMEN | E.V. Odle’s THE CLOCKWORK MAN | H.G Wells’s THE WORLD SET FREE | Pauline Hopkins’s OF ONE BLOOD | J.J. Connington’s NORDENHOLT’S MILLION | Rose Macaulay’s WHAT NOT | Cicely Hamilton’s THEODORE SAVAGE | Arthur Conan Doyle’s THE LOST WORLD & THE POISON BELT | G.K. Chesterton’s THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL | MORE VOICES FROM THE RADIUM AGE, ed. Joshua Glenn | William Hope Hodgson’s THE NIGHT LAND | Hemendrakumar Roy’s THE INHUMANS | Charlotte Haldane’s MAN’S WORLD | Francis Stevens’s THE HEADS OF CERBERUS & OTHER STORIES | Edward Shanks’s THE PEOPLE OF THE RUINS | J.D. Beresford’s THE HAMPDENSHIRE WONDER | John Taine’s THE GREATEST ADVENTURE | Marietta Shaginyan’s MESS-MEND | & more to come.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF: “Radium Age” is Josh Glenn’s name for the nascent sf genre’s c. 1900–1935 era, a period which saw the discovery of radioactivity, i.e., the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. More info here.