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Fantascience Digest, v. 2, issue 5, July-September, 1939

Page 19

Page 19                          FANTASCIENCE DIGEST

RETELLING THE OLD-TIMERS
--Reviews of the Classics--

DARKNESS AND DAWN, By George Allan England. 

This long and satisfying novel was originally published serially in the old CAVALIER, a Munsey publication. It appeared as a trilogy of tales from about 1912 to 1914, the separation sections each being published serially under the titles: "THE VACANT WORLD", "BEYOND THE GREAT OBLIVION", and "THE AFTERGLOW," if we may accept the section headings as given in the book presented by Small, Maynard and Company in 1914 -- a rather bulky volume of 672 pages, with illustrations by P. Monahan and G.W. Gage. It is probable that the first part of the trilogy was titled "DARKNESS AND DAWN' in the original serial, rather than "THE VACANT WORLD".

The story itself represented the first of what might be termed "modern" scientifiction stories to present a plot concerning itself with the end of the world, and a subsequent rehabilitation.

In the modern survival stories, a group of scientists are enabled to preserve their lives because they have predicted a cataclysm and have taken adequate precautions to insure their own safety. When the time has arrived to rebuild civilization they usually confront the task fully equipped with marvelous mechanical devices, and by the pooling of their super-intelligences are able in a remarkably short time to bring order out of chaos and restore the world to what is generally an improved and rather Utopian state.

"DARKNESS AND DAWN", however, gives to two ordinary people, an engineer and his secretary, the vast task of survival and reconstruction. Allan Stern and the inevitable heroine, Beatrice Kendrick, are not gifted with foresight, and do not therefore escape a mophitic gas which envelopes the earth in the wake of a tremendous explosion which tears from its very vitals a huge area which is hurled into the heavens to become a second satellite. They survive the wholesale annihilation besetting the majority of the human race, and after a sleep of several thousand years they recover consciousness not through their own cleverness, but rather because kind providence had found them busily at work on the top floor of the highest building in the world at a time when the entire atmosphere was being instantaneously and effectively polluted. The altitude permitted their survival because the gas was deadliest and densest close to the ground.

Thus, unequipped with any modern devices and surrounded by the ruins of a 'former metropolis (New York) now overgrown with rank vegetation, these two people are revived. Stern establishes a temporary shelter at the site of the resurrection and from here ventures forth on exploratory trips from which he returns bearing metallic implements which have resisted the ravaging verdigris of time. He makes a home for himself and Beatrice -- a precarious home constantly threatened by a pack of menacing atavistic monstrosities inhabiting the vicinity -- things once human but now reverted back almost to unreasoning brutes.

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Page 19 FANTASCIENCE DIGEST RETELLING THE OLD-TIMERS --Reviews of the Classics-- DARKNESS AND DAWN, By George Allan England. This long and satisfying novel was originally published serially in the old CAVALIER, a Munsey publication. It appeared as a trilogy of tales from about 1912 to 1914, the separation sections each being published serially under the titles: "THE VACANT WORLD", "BEYOND THE GREAT OBLIVION", and "THE AFTERGLOW," if we may accept the section headings as given in the book presented by Small, Maynard and Company in 1914 -- a rather bulky volume of 672 pages, with illustrations by P. Monahan and G.W. Gage. It is probable that the first part of the trilogy was titled "DARKNESS AND DAWN' in the original serial, rather than "THE VACANT WORLD". The story itself represented the first of what might be termed "modern" scientifiction stories to present a plot concerning itself with the end of the world, and a subsequent rehabilitation. In the modern survival stories, a group of scientists are enabled to preserve their lives because they have predicted a cataclysm and have taken adequate precautions to insure their own safety. When the time has arrived to rebuild civilization they usually confront the task fully equipped with marvelous mechanical devices, and by the pooling of their super-intelligences are able in a remarkably short time to bring order out of chaos and restore the world to what is generally an improved and rather Utopian state. "DARKNESS AND DAWN", however, gives to two ordinary people, an engineer and his secretary, the vast task of survival and reconstruction. Allan Stern and the inevitable heroine, Beatrice Kendrick, are not gifted with foresight, and do not therefore escape a mophitic gas which envelopes the earth in the wake of a tremendous explosion which tears from its very vitals a huge area which is hurled into the heavens to become a second satellite. They survive the wholesale annihilation besetting the majority of the human race, and after a sleep of several thousand years they recover consciousness not through their own cleverness, but rather because kind providence had found them busily at work on the top floor of the highest building in the world at a time when the entire atmosphere was being instantaneously and effectively polluted. The altitude permitted their survival because the gas was deadliest and densest close to the ground. Thus, unequipped with any modern devices and surrounded by the ruins of a 'former metropolis (New York) now overgrown with rank vegetation, these two people are revived. Stern establishes a temporary shelter at the site of the resurrection and from here ventures forth on exploratory trips from which he returns bearing metallic implements which have resisted the ravaging verdigris of time. He makes a home for himself and Beatrice -- a precarious home constantly threatened by a pack of menacing atavistic monstrosities inhabiting the vicinity -- things once human but now reverted back almost to unreasoning brutes.