1184. AFTER LONDON OR WILD ENGLAND. Cassell; London and New York, 1885. Ecology, romance, and a Bildungsroman set in the twenty-first century, exact date not specified. 

*  Background: About one hundred and thirty years before the story begins, something happened to Great Britain. Exactly what is not clear, but most of the population fled the land, leaving only a handful of agricultural people, Gypsies, derelicts, and scattered gentlefolk. Some men who have speculated about the past believe that a dark celestial body passed near earth, tilting the earth's axis, disrupting the climate, changing land levels in different places and also creating (via the earth's magnetic currents) some sort of fatal lemming-like migratory instinct in mankind. But the answer is not really known. 

*  At narrative present, England has reverted to a prehuman ecology, as it may (largely) have been before the Neolithic period. Much of it is covered by vast forests in which roam various kinds of feral cattle, hogs, and dog packs. The cities of the past are all gone, having been burned generations ago. Something, too, has happened to the river drainage system, for the waters of the various rivers— Thames, Severn, etc.— have backed up to form a huge central lake extending up into the Midlands. As for London, it is a marshlike area, so filled with pollution that no life can survive in it; even winds carrying its vapors and gases bring death. A foul black liquid covers most of it; phosphorescence is widely spread; and deadly gases poison mind and body of anyone who ventures into the area. 

*  England is gradually being repopulated after the mysterious cataclysm. There are socalled Bushmen, wild, vicious, totally uncivilized savages who lurk in the woods and murder occasional travellers, and there are also Gypsies, who maintain, as far as is possible, ancient Gypsy culture and occasionally raid the settled communities. 

*  Around the shores of the great central lake various small communities have spring up, all culturally on an impoverished medieval level, with prized scraps of loot from the past— an occasional glass pane in a window, a few leaves out of a book, etc. Some are republics; others are feudal states with knights, barons, and kings. Most live in a guarded truce with one another, although war is common enough. To the west are the Welsh, to the northwest the Irish, and to the north, the Scots, all of whom raid the land. 

*  The story is concerned with Sir Felix, son of the Baron Aquila, a landed nobleman who has fallen into disfavor with his king and lives in exile away from court. The baron, once a mighty warrior, has settled into life as a farmer and is more concerned with improving husbandry than with acting as a courtier. In some ways this is praiseworthy, since the baron's work is raising the level of civilization, but it is also destroying his sons' opportunities and may eventually cost the family its lands. 

*  Felix, the oldest son, would like to marry the Lady Aurora, the daughter of a neighboring noble, but her father, though a hearth-friend to the Aquilas, is averse to the match and wants to further his own interests by marrying Aurora off to a powerful courtier. 

*  Felix, who is of a nervous, energetic, impatient temperament, resents this exclusion bitterly. Deciding to seek his fortune elsewhere, he builds himself a dugout canoe, equips it with sail and outrigger, and sets out to explore the inland sea and perhaps take service at the court of one of the kings. 

*  Navigation is difficult, for he is no sailor, but he reaches the promising town of Aisi, ruled by the renowned King Isombard, the foremost general of the day, who is currently going off to war against a neighboring state. 

*  Felix finds that his troubles are just beginning, for it is almost impossible to enter the guarded town. He runs the further danger of being picked up as a masterless man and enslaved. His best course, he learns from friendly folk, is to try to join the king's levy. Moving on to the battlefield, he attaches himself irregularly to the company of a merchant who has gone to the wars with the king. He watches small engagements, but with his usual forthrightness and intellectual arrogance, criticizes the king's conduct of the war and is lucky only to be beaten out of the camp. Thus, his first venture, service in war, has been a failure, even though he knows more about field engines than the king's engineers. 

*  On his second adventure he wanders unwittingly into the black death area of the ancient city of London. He almost dies from the incredible foulness of the decay, but manages to sail out and around, reaching what must be the future equivalent of the downlands of the south. Here he has the good fortune to fall in with a shepherd culture that appreciates his abilities. (Up until this final episode Felix's adventures have been conducted on an realistic level, with full description of the barbarities of the time, the mad etiquettes, the cruelty of those in power, and the abject misery of those below; but now Felix's adventures take the form of a Horatio Alger story

* ) 

*  The fact that he has survived the black London area makes him an object of awe to the simple shepherds, and when he single-handedly destroys a band of Gypsies with his superlative marksmanship with bow and arrow, he is considered almost superhuman. The simple, peaceloving shepherds, valuing his superior knowledge, adopt him as a semi-sacred king. As the novel ends, Felix, accepting his new role, has slipped away from the shepherds to fetch the Lady Aurora back as his wife. 

*  The ecological description of future primitive England, which occupies almost the first quarter of the book, is a remarkable work. This is followed by a fine descriptions of niceties of life in a neo-medieval society. After this, the adventures of Felix are almost anticlimactic. 

*  Still, in toto, a remarkable work that deserves reading.