[Hadrien]

You can try "After London": http://www.feedbooks.com/discover/view_book/1986

ichard Jefferies fits right in with writers like Wordsworth and William Morris in their distrust of, if not outright disdain for, civilization and how “progress” was steadily destroying and perverting everything England once represented. In After London, Jefferies depicts an England 100 years on from a great cataclysm (never specified) that utterly devastated London and rooted what society was left back into a Medieval way of life, foreshadowing Morris’ News from Nowhere, which also would see the post-apocalyptic future as a return to the pastoral. After London is divided into two sections, the first of which is a sort of taxonomy of the eventual plants, animals, tribes, and landscape that emerged over the first generation or two “after London.” Jefferies shows a gift for this type of cataloguing, especially when recounting how relentless nature was in sweeping away all the remains of “progress” left after the destruction—roads, bridges, cities—and when describing the new order of human society. Bushmen and Gipsies live nomadic and larcenous lives, while a new nobility based on literacy emerges to reestablish the feudal system. Jefferies’ hatred of all things progressive really comes out in his account of the fate of London; once the Thames clogged with debris and reduced the site to marsh, centuries of trash, waste, and the dead—“the rottenness of 1000 years”—combine to create what could be called a Victorian Superfund site—the ground becomes sludgy and a poisonous mist overhangs the area. No one can hazard a visit unless he has a death wish. The second section of the book is a more pedestrian fantasy of a young nobleman named Felix Aquila who makes a name for himself by exploring the wild lands of England and uniting shepherd tribes under his kingship; this section is quite readable however, and chapters 22-24 give an account of his journey into the area that once was London—these passages portray a land as strange and unfamiliar as anything out of William Hope Hodgson.

"The Last Man" from Mary Shelley: http://www.feedbooks.com/discover/view_book/1347

"The Star" from HG Wells: http://www.feedbooks.com/discover/view_book/607

“The Star” is the first story I know of that treats the subject of a heavenly object wreaking destruction on the earth. A planet beyond Neptune (Pluto being unknown at this time) collides with that planet, jolting both out of orbit and on a course toward the sun. An astronomer labors over some calculations and comes to a devastating conclusion: the conjoined planets will come so close to the earth that life will be wiped out: “Man has lived in vain.” As the object gets closer, brighter, and hotter, people embrace religion, head for high ground, or scoff at the idea of the end of the world. More primitive peoples have had the right idea all along though—new bright “stars” in the heavens portend disaster. Wells, as he invariably does, predicts disater with uncanny accuracy: “Earthquakes, volcanic outbreaks, cyclones, sea waves, floods, and a steady rise in temperature to I know not what limit”—sounds like the environmental holocausts predicted for us today, does it not? Wells spares humanity in the end, or at least a small remnant of it, and those left attempt to slowly rebuild civilization. In a foreshadowing of the next year’s War of the Worlds however, the last paragraph of the story informs us that Martian astronomers watched the event with the keenest interest but with no sympathy: “how small the vastest human catastrophes may seem, at a distance of a few million miles.”