After London: Or, Wild England - A Victorian Classic of Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction

After London, first published in 1885, starts off with tons of information of England after the fall of advanced civilization. Chapters on the animals, plants, people and the landscape is then followed by the story of Felix. The middle son of a Baron, he is neither good with a sword nor has an income. He is smart, sometimes too smart, an armchair intelligence, he seems to find fault with everybody and everything. In the Dark Age society in which he lives in he is an uncommon boy. He sees the filth of the cities, the unorganized governments and the untamed wilderness as things that can be improved on. Yet he is in no position to do anything about it. The character of Felix seems childish, paranoid, pushy and sometimes downright whiny. In other words, very realistic and the kind of boy you sometimes see on the Internet making blogs that give advice to everybody else on how to fix everything. Coming of age, in other words. And he is doing it all for love. The book has heavily influenced later works. You can see it in the settings and backgrounds of many of today's books, movies and even TV series. For example, in the book A Scientific Romance by Ronald Wright the author acknowledges this work as one of the many that helped shape the story. Many sci-fi books about the future of man or the fall of man try to copy the flavor and broad scope of After London, using it sometimes without giving credit. Such as Legacy of The Daleks by John Peel, set in the 22nd Century, in which the Earth is recovering from the Dalek invasion of the planet. In this Dr. WHO book Knights and Lords fight over the remains London (and Southern England) with a mixture of technology. Guns and cars are used along side horses and lances. Wonderful, needed in any library, new or used.

It would probably be accurate to call "After London" a botanist's delight. Richard Jefferies describes in great detail a world of the far future in which the wonders of our own civilization are mostly forgotten, or seen as fables. (Until Heinrich Schliemann dug up the ruins, the city of Troy was a legend also. Can we be certain that Atlantis was a legend?) Much of England is covered in forests, the relics of our own civilization buried under thickets and shrubbery. London, once a centre of culture and trade, is long gone. Society has become medieval once more. Skills like reading and writing have been preserved, but these are forbidden to all but the nobles. Slavery is common and wars between cities are frequent. It is almost certain that John Christopher has read this book. If you read the "Tripods" trilogy and the "Prince in Waiting" trilogy, you will see certain similarities. In many of the post-technological stories I've read the one invention of ours that gets mentioned the most is the railroad, possibly because it helped us conquer the tyranny of distance, and made the world more accessible. In the early pages of "After London" the railroad is mentioned, though not by name, and references are made regarding our ability to communicate over a great distance with wires.The main character in "After London" is 25-year old Felix, a sensitive character living in a world that has no place for sensitivity. Often ridiculed for his interest in learning rather than war and hunting, Felix carries out a plan to strike out on his own by embarking on a journey of discovery. Eventually Felix does make something of himself and greatness is thrust upon him. A barbarous future is often imagined for us after a nuclear war or some other cataclysm, but in "After London" the cause of our decline is obscure and hazy. We can't be certain that the society in "After London" will eventually reach the heights from which it had fallen. Most of our inventions, like the light bulb and penicillin, were accidents. There was an ancient civilization that could produce metal of a better quality than we can produce now, but the skill is lost."After London" is a very descriptive novel with minimal dialogue. It is more concerned with the world it portrays than the characters who inhabit it. This is a pivotal work in the post-holocaust genre.

This 19th-century science fiction novel by Richard Jefferies (1848-1887), an English writer and naturalist, depicts an England of the distant future in which most of the human populace has either died from some cataclysmic event or plague or they have been removed to some other place. The people still living in England have no record of what happened, the event occurring centuries earlier. Most of the central part of the British Isle is now covered by a giant lake. A poisonous swamp covers the site of old London. Much of the novel is a description of this future England. The people live in a feudal-like environment and the hero of the story, Felix, sets out on a quest in a canoe to find fame and fortune so that he may win the hand of the daughter of a neighboring baron. This is probably one of the earliest novels (if not the earliest) depicting a future Earth following some cataclysmic event. This "sub-genre" or sub-category will form a significant portion of the science fiction literature. Any serious student of science fiction literature should read it.

After London is variously a phoenix-like rebirth of civilization, a critique of Victorian mediaevalism, a paradigm of fin de siecle fears of regression and atavism, a frontier adventure story, and an exploration of the fragility of historicism. Take your pick. Or don't. But read it.