Search Worlds Without End

A post-apocalyptic tale that chronicles man's shedding of his restricting nature and the realization of his perfection through the evolution of group cooperation and herd behavior.

When the sun suddenly dies, the remaining populations on earth are forced to move their societies underground. Like Noah and his ark full of animals and plants, they take with them their most valuable items for rebuilding their new world also: paintings, bronzes, violins, and books of poetry. After a few centuries of subterranean slaughter, somehow the inevitable victors emerge: secular saintly aesthetes who create a romantic neo-troglodytical artistic utopia through the prodigious use of prophylactics and capital punishment. And love.

England's trilogy, Darkness and Dawn (published in 1912, 1913 and 1914 as The Vacant World, Beyond the Great Oblivion and Afterglow) tells the story of 2 modern people who awake a thousand years after the earth was devastated by a meteor. They work to rebuild civilization.

The Vacant World - Beatrice Kendrick, and her boss, engineer Allan Stern, wakes up on an upper floor of a ruined Manhattan skyscraper, thousands of years in the future when civilization has been destroyed. The pair has been in a state of suspended animation for fifteen hundred years. Changes in the earth's features as well as monstrously mutated ""humans"" make it clear they have little hope of survival.

Beyond the Great Oblivion - Allan and Beatrice begin to discover the nature of the catastrophe that has split the Earth open. Rebuilding an airplane, they find a ""bottomless"" chasm near Pittsburgh where a huge portion of the Earth has been torn away to become a second moon. Alan and Beatrice earn the loyalty of the People of this Abyss and lead them from the chasm to New York.

The Afterglow - Allan and Beatrice, with the People of the Abyss, prepare to recolonize the Earth's surface. But first, they must defeat the devolved, cannibalistic survivors who populate Earth's cities.

Written shortly after the guns of World War I fell silent, CITY OF ENDLESS NIGHT presents a strange yet well-conceived vision of the future that might have been, had the Great War ended differently. The premise is that allied bombing in an extended WWI had driven the Germans in Berlin underground into a series of bunkers and subterranean factories. The Germans quickly discovered ways of surviving under these conditions, while the Allies failed to figure out any means of ferreting them out, and the war turned into a frustrating stalemate.

The year is 2041. Since the end of WWI, Berlin has been an enormous subterranean city, home to 300 million citizens who have never seen the sun, and presided over by the autocratic Hohenzollern dynasty. Every aspect of life is regimented; from controlled rations that are issued on the basis of work-for-food, to a press that works exclusively under the auspices of the Information Service. Christianity has been abolished and all breeding is carried out on the basis of strict eugenic principles. Lyman De Forrest, an American chemist, discovers a way of neutralizing Berlin's defenses and, assuming the identity of a dead German man, enters the city to discover its hidden truths. The first outsider for decades to enter the forbidden metropolis, he is horrified to find a society where women are kept in isolation for breeding or the pleasuring of high status men. Can De Forrest escape this living tomb?

Published shortly after the end of WWI, this tremendous example of early dystopian science fiction is thought to have been the inspiration behind Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

In The Second Deluge, filed with scenes of panic and disaster, the entire surface of the earth is submerged when the solar system enters a watery nebula, and only scientist-hero Cosmo Versal, and a small group of friends who believe in him survive by flying above the flood in a newly invented skyship.

In this work written in 1941, at the most frightening point of World War II, Stapledon projects two separate futures for humanity, depending not on the outcome of that particular conflict but on the failure or success of a future "Tibetan Renaissance" to influence the temper and ideology of the militaristic Russian and Chinese empires that threaten it. One of the futures involves worldwide Chinese imperialism and subsequent degeneration and extinction of the human race, unable to defend itself against speedily evolving rats. The other ends in overthrowing the empires and creation of a worldwide socialist utopia.

Set in the Near Future, (from the POV of the 1930ies) a Scientist, so disgusted by what he self-righteously reguards as the decedance of modern civilization, instantaneously transforms the world by means of a Ray which obliterates all memory, all acquired knowledge, including how to talk. Hoping that in this tabula-rasa setting men, starting from instinct, will be able to create a just society; but only the smartest and toughest re-educate themselves in technology. The rest must die.