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The People of the Ruins

Part of MIT Press / Radium Age

Author Edward Shanks

Introduction by Paul March-Russell

Paperback

$19.95 US

The MIT Press

5.25"W x 7.88"H x 0.96"D | 12 oz | 24 per carton

On sale Aug 06, 2024 | 360 Pages | 9780262549073

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Fantasy & Sci-Fi Prose > Sci-Fi > More Sci-Fi...

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.

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.

Edward Shanks View titles by Edward Shanks

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Series Foreword
Joshua Glenn
Introduction: A Modernist Apocalypse
Paul March-Russell
1. Trouble
2. The Dead Rat
3. A World Grown Strange
4. Discoveries
5. The Speaker
6. The Guns
7. The Lady Eva
8. Declaration of War
9. Marching Out
10. The Battle
11. Triumph
12. New Clouds
13. The Fields of Windsor
14. Chaos
15. Flight
16. The Roman Road

“In 1920, in the aftermath of his time in the British Army during World War I, Edward Shanks published his novel The People of the Ruins. This new edition, complete with an introduction by Paul Marsh-Russell, introduces new readers to Shanks’s tale of a present-day man who finds himself 150 years in the future where technology and society have regressed.”
—Reactor Magazine

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