After London Or Wild England

Author: Richard Jefferies

One of Mary Shelley's late novels, The Last Man, envisaged a world ravaged by plague in which humanity is wiped out. Although not well received at the time, the romantic notion of a world stripped bare of people set in train a strand of science fiction that would grow into the distinctive catastrophe stories of British scientific romance. One of the earliest and finest of these was After London by Richard Jeffries. Jeffries was a nature writer, and some of the finest passages in the novel occur when he is describing landscape turning wild, domestic animals becoming feral and London being taken over by swampland. Against this vividly described background he tells a story that would become all too familiar from later post-apocalyptic works but that was startlingly original here. As society collapses, so the world reverts to barbarism before settling into a pseudo-medieval state. Why it's on the list: Post-apocalyptic fiction has been a commonplace of science fiction for decades, but this is where it started. Here is where we first encounter the loss of civilisation and the way that humanity reacts in the face of catastrophe.