Description
As a bacteria threatens to wipe out humankind, a plutocrat sets himself up as the benignant dictator of a survivalist colony.
In this novel originally published in 1923, as denitrifying bacteria inimical to plant growth spreads around the world, toppling civilizations and threatening to wipe out humankind, the British plutocrat Nordenholt sets himself up as the benignant dictator of a ruthlessly efficient, entirely undemocratic, survivalist colony established in Scotland’s Clyde Valley. Discovering just how far their employer is willing to go in his effort to spare one million lives, Jack Flint, the colony’s director of operations, and Elsa Huntingtower, Nordenholt’s personal assistant, are forced to grapple with the question of whether a noble end justifies dastardly means.
Table of Contents
Series Foreword vii
Introduction: Benignant Fascism xiii
Matthew Battles
I Genesis 1
II The Coming of "The Blight" 19
III B. Diazotans 31
IV Panic 41
V Nordenholt 49
VI The Psychology of the Breaking-strain 75
VII Nordenholt's Million 103
VIII The Clyde Valley 121
IX Intermezzo 147
X The Death of the Leviathan 165
XI Fata Morgana 175
XII Nuit Blanche 183
XIII Reconstruction 221
XIV Winter in the Outer World 243
XV Document B. 53. X. 15 263
XVI In the Nitrogen Area 281
XVII Per Iter Tenebricosum 301
XVIII The Eleventh Hour 319
XIX The Breaking-strain 339
XX Asgard 349
Afterword: Alfred Walter Stewart 357
Evan Hepler-Smith
