Theodore Savage
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- US$15.99
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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 Theodore Savage, he is a complacent civil servant, primarily concerned with romancing his girlfriend. During a 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British suffragette Hamilton (1873–1952) first published this scalding feminist dystopian novel in 1922. Susan R. Grayzel's illuminating introduction contextualizes the story in the aftermath of WWI and the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. Indeed, this tale is all about the devastation of war. Life for the eponymous hero, once an art-admiring upper-middle-class clerk, is upended by scientifically advanced warfare, poison gas, and firebombs. Theodore weathers the aftermath with a naive and helpless woman, until their situation becomes untenable, and he leaves their isolated shelter to find civilization irrevocably changed: in the midst of mass hysteria and deep-rooted distrust of technology, humanity has formed into primitive hunter-gatherer tribes, with women treated especially abominably (and, in one dark scene, even begging for death). Theodore reluctantly joins but remembers his life before all too well. His thirst for the knowledge that destroyed his world earns him the fear and respect of his tribe and a reputation as a kind of amalgam of "Merlin, Frankenstein, and Adam." Prescient both to Hamilton's time and to the current moment of war, plague, and refugee crises, this novel deserves to be rediscovered. Readers will have much to chew on.
