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Title: The People of the Ruins
Author: Edward Shanks
Narrator: Steven Crossley
Format: Unabridged
Length: 9 hrs and 49 mins
Language: English
Release date: 12-19-13
Publisher: Dreamscape Media, LLC
Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 2 votes
Genres: Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Sci-Fi: Classic
Publisher's Summary:
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.
Members Reviews:
Historical interest for SF fans
In the period before the golden age of science fiction, there were authors who wrote this kind of fiction. I'm an unsure that I would actually categorize it as science fiction but that is how it is marketed. A man in the early 1920's is accidently hit by a ray and finds himself about 150 years in the future.
The writing is clean and moves fast. Knowledge from his time has been lost making him valuable. The Bolshevic revolution colors some of Shanks' vision of the future. This book is mainly important to see what was being written before the golden age of science fiction. It is sometimes funny that Shanks did not envision any changes in more than the technology of the future. After all, suffragists were active and had been for more than 40 years.
Abridged edition, still worth reading
The HiLo Books/Radium Age edition is abridged from the 1920 edition, as noted after the copyright notice: "We have excised a few passages in order to arrive at a more manageable length." The original only runs a little over 300 pp, so I'm not sure why it would be unmanageable. Having said this, I think it is a worthwhile read, but probably better in an uncut Print On Demand version. Shanks is an intelligent observer and a good writer who seems to know what he is doing, although you might not like it much. This book, like most sci fi, is very much a reflection of the time in which it was written. In 1920, 2 years after the end of the horrors and destruction of WWI, Shanks is deeply pessimistic about the future of humanity and the nature of human beings. Like many sci fi writers, even contemporary ones (who shall remain nameless), he was bound by the social attitudes of his time, and he was not able to imagine a world where relations between the sexes have advanced.
British postwar novels foresee Britain returned to barbarism
"General strike in 1924 marks the beginning of the collapse of civilization. 150 years later England is reduced to neolithical barbarism."
- Gerber, Utopian Fantasy, p. 147.
"The first of the many British postwar novels that foresee Britain returned to barbarism by the ravages of war."
- Anatomy of Wonder (1995) 2-107.
"One of the most widely read scientific romances of the post-war years."
- Stableford, Scientific Romance in Britain 1890-1950, p. 239.