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The People of the Ruins

Part of MIT Press / Radium Age

Author Edward Shanks
Introduction by Paul March-Russell
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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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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.
“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

“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, author of The Darkening Garden (2006) and Sticking to the End (2022)

“The time could not be riper for Mr. Shanks’ novel of the English Revolution—and after.”
—Athenaeum (1920)

“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 2000, 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.”
—British Weekly (1921)

“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.”
—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
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
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

About

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.

Praise

“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

“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, author of The Darkening Garden (2006) and Sticking to the End (2022)

“The time could not be riper for Mr. Shanks’ novel of the English Revolution—and after.”
—Athenaeum (1920)

“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 2000, 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.”
—British Weekly (1921)

“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.”
—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

Author

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

Table of Contents

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

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