The People of the Ruins
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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 former 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 postcivilized life. But, when the northern English and Welsh tribes invade, Tuft must set about reinventing weapons of mass destruction. One of the most critically acclaimed and popular postwar stories of its day, The People of the Ruins captured a feeling that was common among those who had fought and survived the Great 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 postapocalyptic novel contemporary readers won’t soon forget. Edward Shanks (1892-1953) was an English author, poet, 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.
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The People of the Ruins by Edward Shanks
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This is an oddball book that reminded me of Jack London's “The Scarlet Plague” and “The Iron Heel” or Milo Hasting's “The City of Night.” This book was written in 1920, shortly after the Great War, during a period when England was facing labor unrest. Shanks hero - Jeremy Tuft - is a scientist, who is bathed in experimental “rays” by a friendly scientist in1920. The rays freeze Tuft for 150 years.
When he escapes stasis, he discovers that the labor unrest he witnessed grew in global scope and disrupted civilization. The world he discovers is feudal and science has been forgotten.
One interesting aspect of the book is that Shanks posits a breakdown of society without nuclear weapons. In two decades, there would be a growth industry in collapse-of-civilization stories caused by nuclear wars. Shanks imagines it happens through labor unrest, which seems unlikely, albeit having gone through the Great War, it must have seemed plausible.
Another interesting aspect is how future history morphs into alternate history. When Shanks wrote this book, he was imaginatively projecting into the future. Now that we are one-hundred years on, it seems more like an alternative history with a point of departure in 1920.
The book itself is engaging. I was curious about how the story would play out. There are problems with the writing. Tuft seemed a lightweight character who was thrust into an important position. The story is ultimately a downer. If you were expecting Tuft to reignite the world of the future with forgotten science, and I was, you will be disappointed.
Nonetheless, it might be worth a read for anyone interested in early 20th century imaginative fiction.
