Beyond Thirty

It is the year 2137. Two hundred years after a war so ruinous that it consumed the whole Eastern Hemisphere, the nations of the West have gathered into the great Pan-American Federation and turned their backs on the Old World. No ship and no citizen may cross longitude 30° West or 175° West; beyond the dead lines lies only the great unknown, unmapped and unremembered.

Jefferson Turck, a young lieutenant in the Pan-American Navy, commands an aero-submarine on patrol near the western line when storm and failure carry him helpless across the forbidden meridian. To cross thirty is a capital disgrace; to be marooned beyond it is to vanish from the known world. Making for the coast of England, Turck finds not the England of history but a green wilderness reclaimed by the wild — its cities sunk into forest, lions and tigers hunting where London stood, its few people reverted to a half-savage life with no memory of the nations that once ruled here.

As Turck pushes inland and across to the continent, the shape of the ruined world reveals itself: into the vacuum left by Europe's self-destruction, new empires have risen from the East and the South to carve up the wreckage, and the hemisphere that once called itself the center of the earth has become the lost continent.

Written in 1916, as the real Europe tore itself apart in the trenches of the First World War, Beyond Thirty is one of the earliest post-apocalyptic adventures in English — a future-history of catastrophe, isolation, and reversal from the era's great popular storyteller. It is presented here complete, to be read for its headlong adventure and its eerie vision of a civilization grown over, and read, in places, as very much a product of its time.