From one of the earliest feminist science fiction writers a novel that envisions the fall of
civilization—and the plight of the modern woman in a post-apocalyptic wilderness. When war
breaks out in Europe British civilization collapses overnight. The ironically named
protagonist must learn to survive by his wits in a new Britain. When we first meet Savage he
is a complacent civil servant primarily concerned with romancing his girlfriend. During the
brief war in which both sides use population displacement as a terrible strategic weapon
Savage must battle his fellow countrymen. He shacks up with an ignorant young woman in a forest
hut—a kind of inverse Garden of Eden where no one is happy. Eventually he sets off in search
of other survivors . . . only to discover a primitive society where science and technology have
come to be regarded with superstitious awe and terror. A pioneering feminist Hamilton offers a
warning about the degraded state of modern women who—being unhandy unresourceful
superficial”—would suffer a particularly sad fate in a postapocalyptic social order.
