Paul Tabori's Demons of Sandorra

Demons of Sandorra is a 1970 science fiction novel by Paul Tabori.

Paul Tabori (1908- 1974) was a prolific Hungarian-born British writer who also occasionally used the pseudonym Peter Stafford.

There’s quite a bit of sexual content in Demons of Sandorra but this is definitely not a sci-fi sleaze novel. It’s a dystopian novel with some post-apocalyptic overtones. The setting is one of those utopias that is really a dystopia (of course all utopias inevitably become dystopias) but no-one will admit that their society is dystopian.

The setting is Sandorra, a tiny independent country only it isn’t really independent because there’s a single global government, but nobody admits that. Everybody pretends that independent nations still exist.

This is the story of an attractive young woman named Yolanda Vernon who seems to have a bright future in front of her. She has however started to display disturbing and distressing signs of sanity. Sanity is of course a disorder that usually responds well to therapy. The important thing is to spot the symptoms early and seek treatment immediately.

This is a world that, in the wake of a nuclear war, proceeded to build a perfect new society. The basis of this society would be Synthetism, a psychological theory which rejects reason entirely. Instinct rather than reason should be the guiding principle of both individual and group behaviour. This is also a society that has rejected normality. In this society sanity and normality are regarded as serious mental illnesses.

Marriage and monogamy are also regarded as dangerous deviations. Heterosexuality is tolerated although exclusive heterosexuality is considered dangerously eccentric.

The Synthetists have created a society in which all sexual pleasures can be indulged. Even sexual predation is permitted although you do have to buy a licence. The Synthetist have found ways in which all citizens can open the Gates, the Gates being the pathway to fulfilment. This includes the ultimate Gate.

The end result is a soft totalitarian society in which non-conformism has become compulsory, so non-conformism is now conformism. Sanity is insanity and insanity is sanity. Normality is abnormal and abnormality is normal.

This is a world of therapy, but the therapy is intended to keep people insane.

Privacy has been abolished. It’s considered undemocratic.

Yolanda has a good job at the Lethe Institute. It’s very satisfying being able to help people. Her job is to open the ultimate Gate to those who have passed the appropriate tests and have waited patiently for their turn. The ultimate Gate is of course Death.

This is clearly satire. It’s meant to be amusing and it is. But there’s a serious purpose as well. It does raise all kinds of questions about conformity and authoritarianism and social engineering, and sexual indulgence versus sexual repression. And what it means to be sane or insane, and the conflict between the overwhelming human desires for both freedom and conformity. Also the ticklish problem that there is a need for order but order always leads to repression.

And it develops these ideas in surprisingly complex and nuanced ways. It doesn’t present the various opposing concepts in a simplistic black-and-white manner. Readers are left to make up their own minds. Life is messy and every attempt to reduce the messiness of life just creates new problems. And revolutions don’t always turn out they way you’d hoped, and you can’t predict where they’ll lead.

As the story progresses it becomes crazier, but in interesting ways.

This future society does of course have some unsettling resemblances to the world of today.

Demons of Sandorra is wild stuff but it’s inspired wildness and I was sufficiently impressed to order several more of Tabori’s books. Highly recommended.

The author’s witchcraft potboiler, The Wild White Witch (written as Peter Stafford), has a similar deceptive feel - it seems trashy on the surface but has more substance to it than you’re expecting. I recommend it as well.

Jack Bechdolt’s The Torch

Jack Bechdolt’s novel The Torch was serialised in Argosy in 1920. The Torch has some claims to being a post-apocalyptic novel.

Jack Bechdolt (1884-1954) was an American who wrote a handful of science fiction novels and short stories.

The novel is purportedly written in the 32nd century and tells of the Dark Ages that followed the Great Disaster of the 1980s. Civilisation collapsed completely and the world sank into barbarism. The story takes place in the late 21st century.

The setting is Manhattan, Manhattan being a feudal kingdom surrounded by the hostile and savage Wild Folk. Manhattan is ruled by a ruthless elite served by a slave class. Traces of a once great civilisation still survive on the island but the current level of technology is distinctly mediæval. There is no electricity. There are no cars or railways. There do not even seem to be firearms.

Captain Fortune is an ambitious young officer in the service of the Towerman of Manhattan. The current Towerman is Wolff, well-meaning but weak. On his death his daughter Alda will succeed him but of course it is a certainty that the real power will be in the hands of her husband. She does not yet have a husband but there are powerful men anxious to step into that role.

There is much intrigue and treachery afoot.

Fortune is very ambitious indeed and his ethics are decidedly flexible. He is aiming for power. It seems likely that Alda will be the key to that power. He might perhaps aspire to be the power behind the throne. He might even aspire to be her husband and consort and effective ruler. There are no limits to the dreams of a man who is both ambitious and young. And Alda certainly seems to be taking a close interest in him.

In the meantime he has another woman on his mind. A young woman he met just once, on a tiny island. It’s the island where the half-ruined statue of the Great Woman stands. The young woman is Mary and Fortune soon discovers some disturbing things but her. The most disturbing is that she is one of the leaders of a dangerous bands of revolutionaries aiming to overthrow the Towerman’s regime.

Fortune is soon deeply enmeshed in intrigue and dealing with all manner of divided loyalties. Whichever way he jumps he will be guilty of betrayal. He has become quite skilled in the art of treachery but he has also made the disquieting discovery that he has a conscience. He becomes increasingly troubled and confused.

Much of the action takes place in the mysterious network of tunnels underneath Manhattan. No-one knows what mysterious purpose they once served.They are of course the remains of the subways.

There’s lots of symbolic significance to that statue of the Great Woman. Her arm has long since gone. It is believed she once held something in that arm. Some say it was a sword but most people think it was a torch. The torch serves throughout the book as a heavy-handed symbol of freedom and revolution.

There’s a reasonable allowance of action scenes.

The plot is fairly standard - a ruthless elite lording it over the oppressed masses who are planning rebellion and a hero faced with difficult choices. It’s perhaps just too standard and therefore too predictable.

Do you have to remember that this novel was written in 1920. Some of the things in this tale that now seem like clichés had not yet become clichés. The idea of an elite class and a slave under-class does go back to at least 1895, to the H.G. Wells novel The Time Machine.

Fortune is at least a moderately interesting hero with a very definite dark side. The leaders of the revolution, Mary and Zorn, are a bit too idealised. Alda is a reasonable beautiful but evil queen type of figure.

The Torch is mostly interesting as an early example of the post-apocalyptic genre that was just starting to become popular. It’s reasonable entertainment and it’s worth a look if that genre interests you.

I’ve reviewed several other early post-apocalyptic and end-of-the-world novels, such as The Sixth Glacier by Marius from 1929 and J. J. Connington’s provocative Nordenholt’s Million from 1923.

J.D. Masters' Cold Steele

Cold Steele, published in 1989, is the second of the Steele books by J.D. Masters.

I went into Cold Steele expecting a violent but fun pulp action thriller in the men’s adventure mode. It is in fact a very successful adrenalin-rush pulp action thriller but it’s also a surprisingly smart and interesting and somewhat complex cyberpunk science fiction novel.

The hero is a cyborg, but he’s not a robot with a human brain. He’s a partially robotically enhanced flesh-and-blood man but the twist is that he doesn’t have a human brain. He has a computer brain. Well, it’s sort of a computer brain and sort of a human brain.

Donovan Steele was (and maybe is) a cop who got badly shot up. His body survived. It was badly mangled but with bionic enhancements it was made fully functional. His brain however did not survive. Not on organic form. His personality was however uploaded and used as the basis for the software that drives his electronic brain.

This personality uploading idea was very fashionable in the cyberpunk sci-fi of the 80s. It’s an idea that always struck me as very unconvincing. Masters however handles it rather deftly and in a genuinely provocative and interesting way. Donovan Steele doesn’t know if he’s human or not. He has his human memories. He experiences human emotions. Or at least he thinks he does. But he knows he’s not human in the way other people are human.

And he has some problems, which psychiatrist Dev Cooper is supposed to be helping him work through. Steele has nightmares. These seem to be memories. Very vivid memories. He is convinced that they are real memories. The trouble is that they’re not his memories.

Dev Cooper has problems as well. Ethical problems. He’s been working with a digital copy of Donovan Steele’s personality. This is a Donovan Steele who exists only in digital form, with no physical existence. Dev’s problem is that he has to decide if this digital copy is alive. Does it have rights?

This is also a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel. The world has been devastated by viruses and nuclear war. Large parts of the United States are nothing but radioactive wastelands. Significant parts of the country are controlled by crime gangs who are essentially warlords. Texas has declared its independence. Nobody knows if anybody is still alive in California because nobody has dared to investigate. The federal government wants to reassert its authority and sees cyborgs like Donovan Steele as a way to do this. One cyborg is as effective as a whole squad of cops, and much cheaper. The government doesn’t care about the ethical issues. It just wants power and control.

Donovan Steele’s assignment in this novel is to take down the Borodini crime family which controls much of New York. It would take a small army to deal with the Borodini family. They live in a fortress. Steele figures he can do the job himself.

He has some help. Ice is a black former gang leader who has agreed to help in return for immunity from prosecution. Steele and Ice don’t trust each other but they both have something to gain from working together, and Ice can certainly handle himself in a tough spot. Steele’s other ally is Raven, a young hooker whom he rescued. She can be trusted insofar as she has a personal grudge against the Borodinis.

A weird emotional bond develops between Steele and Raven. Steele doesn’t care that she’s a hooker. Raven doesn’t care that he’s a robot. They’re both broken inside but they find, to their own mutual surprise, that they’ve started to care for each other.

Of course this book is part of a series so some issues are left only partially resolved, presumably to be dealt with further in later books.

There’s as much action and mayhem as you could possibly desire, combined with a strange love story and some surprisingly deep emotional, moral and intellectual speculation. Some of these issues would also be dealt with a few years later in the excellent Japanese sci-fi anime movie Ghost in the Shell.

I enjoyed this novel enough to leave me quite open to the idea of buying the next book in the series.

Cold Steele is highly recommended.

Roy Norton’s The Land of the Lost

Roy Norton’s The Land of the Lost is a lost civilisation novel originally published in 1909.

The two main characters are a US Navy captain named Jimmy Tipton and his adoptive brother Billy Pape. They’re both around 40 and although they do not appear to have much in common there’s a fierce bond of friendship between them. Jimmy is well-educated and successful. Billy is a broken-down cowpuncher and failed prospector.

The novel starts off seeming like more of an “end of the world” story than a lost world tale. A brilliant scientist named Martinez has predicted catastrophe. There will be earthquakes on an unprecedented scale. They will happen in mid-ocean, triggering massive tidal waves. All coastal cities will be destroyed. Massive loss of life can only be avoided if governments undertake mass evacuations. Martinez is dismissed as a crank, until it becomes apparent that his predictions are about to come true.

This all happens early in the story and does not play out as you might expect. It is not the end of civilisation. Not by a long way. The cataclysm does however alter the planet’s geography significantly. This will become important.

And Dr Martinez mysteriously vanishes.

Some time later, as the nations of the world adjust to a somewhat altered world geography, ships start to disappear. Jimmy Tipton, in command of the cruiser USS Seattle, is despatched to search for the missing ships. It should be noted that this is 1909 when radio was in its infancy. The difficulty of long-range communication with ships at sea will play a vital role in the story.

The Seattle discovers a huge island, almost a mini-continent, where no island was known to exist. It was presumably created by the massive underwater earthquakes. And very strange things start happening to the American cruiser and its crew.

It’s impossible that this island could be inhabited but it is. The inhabitants are human but they represent a culture like no other on the planet. They have access to strange advanced technologies. Their outlook is very different.

The Seattle’s crew members find themselves either prisoners or guests. They’re not sure which. They are not mistreated in any way. The inhabitants of the island seem friendly but suspicious. A man named Manco, clearly a very important man in this lost civilisation, acts as either their gaoler or their host depending on how you want to look at it. It’s obvious to Jimmy and Billy that there are things that Manco is not telling them. They want to trust him but they’re uneasy. They get the impression that Manco feels the same way.

Of course there really are things happening on the island that they should be worried about but this is a story with quite a bit of moral ambiguity. There are no villains in the usual sense but misunderstandings can lead to violence and even war.

In some ways it’s a standard lost world tale but the moral ambiguity makes it a bit more interesting.

And the islanders’ high technology is interesting. They have unlocked the power of light, and of the atom. They have nuclear power of a sort although it’s based on the state of scientific knowledge of the world of 1909. This was an era in which electricity, magnetism and radio were ultra high technology. Overall the technobabble is very enjoyable. You could even see it is as having just a slight steampunk flavour.

There is some action. There are divided loyalties and friendships are put to the test. And there is a lot at stake. Jimmy is uncomfortably aware that a mistake on his part could have dire consequences not just for this lost civilisation but for his own.

A rather entertaining tale. Recommended, and if you’re a lost world fan I’d bump that up to highly recommended.

The Land of the Lost has been reissued by Armchair Fiction in their wonderful lost World/Lost Race paperback series.

The Sixth Glacier by Marius

The Sixth Glacier is a 1929 end-of-the-world science fiction novel written by an author who called himself Marius. Marius was a pseudonym used by Steve Benedict, about whom I know nothing. The novel was originally published, in two instalments, in Amazing Stories.

A young reporter from Science News is sent to interview a transportation tycoon named Dunraven. It seems that Dunraven has zero interest in transportation. He’s a rich old man and he can devote himself to his hobby. His hobby is palaeontology. He believes he has discovered the ruins of an ancient city in Mexico. A city 100,000 years old, dating from before the last Ice Age. And in this city he has found evidence to believe that another Ice Age is imminent.

The old man is right. The new Ice Age is on its way. Dunraven dismisses the various theories that were current at the time regarding the causes of the succession of ice ages. He has a theory of his own, and within a short time there is evidence which appears to confirm his theory. The solar system is about to drift through a vast frigid nebula, something that happens every hundred thousand years or so. Soon much of the world will be covered by vast ice sheets.

Most of the book is taken up by descriptions of the devastation that ensues. Marius is not one of those starry-eyed types who thinks that disasters bring out the best in people. In this novel the collapse of civilisation leads to wars, to lawlessness, mass murder and cannibalism.

Civilisation doesn’t quite end. The tropics are still habitable. The tropical zones are now filled with refugees from more northern latitudes.

It all seems hopeless until Dunraven hits on an idea. In the finest tradition of pulp fiction his idea sounds crazy but it just might work.

The reporter has some personal dramas to worry about as well. He’s in love with Dunraven’s daughter Clara. He knows he has a rival for her affections. He will discover that in fact he has two rivals.

Mostly the book is a kind of fairly dry documentary-style account of the disaster but Marius does throw in a few dramatic scenes as the reporter finds himself first at the mercy of the savage new tribes of igloo-dwellers and then a huge pack of wolves.

More interesting are Dunraven’s theories about the history of life on Earth. They are of course scientific nonsense but in 1929 they might have seemed more convincing. And they are entertaining. Dunraven believes that intelligent life has arisen on Earth many times, often in peculiar forms. Such as the spider-people.

The science might all be very dubious, basically silly pseudoscience, but it’s fun silly pseudoscience.

Apocalyptic novels had started to become a thing in the 1920s, presumably partly because of scientific and technological advances which made people more aware of the possibility of a civilisation-ending disaster. Mostly however it was undoubtedly due to the trauma of the First World War which made optimism seem like an increasingly unrealistic outlook. The most notable of 1920s post-apocalyptic science fiction novels was Nordenholt’s Million by Alfred Walter Stewart (who wrote under the name J.J. Connington and became a very successful detective fiction writer). Nordenholt’s Million was published in 1923 and deals in a remarkably detached and scientific way with the consequences of ecological catastrophe.

This was of course before nuclear weapons were even thought of but as both Connington and Marius demonstrated there were still plenty of plausible end-of-the-world scenarios. And the scenario described in The Sixth Glacier is certainly plausible even if the detailed scientific explanations he gives are mere pseudoscience.

Armchair Fiction have released this novel paired with Harl Vincent’s Before the Asteroids in a double-header paperback edition.

The Sixth Glacier is no masterpiece. Structurally it’s a bit clunky, the prose is less than exciting and there are no memorable characters with whom to empathise. Having said that, if you’re a fan of post-apocalyptic science fiction it does have historical interest.

The City of the Living Dead

The City of the Living Dead, a short story by Laurence Manning and Fletcher Pratt originally published in Science Wonder Stories in 1930, has sometimes been claimed as an influence on The Matrix. In fact the story incorporates a number of concepts that would later be hailed as revolutionary when the cyberpunk writers rediscovered them half a century later.

The world of Alvrosdale is a very small world. It is a close-knit agricultural community, presumably somewhere in northern Europe. Alvrosdale is entirely cut off from the rest of the world and has been for a couple of thousand years. It was cut off suddenly and completely by a geological cataclysm that raised an impassable mountain barrier.

The people live what might seem to be a primitive life, without machines of any kind. In fact they hate and fear the very idea of the Machine. They are aware, in a vague way, of the existence of Machines and have an even vague awareness that elsewhere in the world the Machine has reached an extraordinary degree of sophistication, fueled by a demon the people of the dale fear above all else - the Demon Power.

Each year a number of young people set off in their gliders (gliders are allowed since they have no connection with the Demon Power) to cross the mountain barrier. Before they leave the wise old Hal Hallstrom tells them his story. It is an incredibly story of what he found in the lands beyond the mountain.

He found a world dominated by the Machine, but a dead world. Not quite dead though. Something worse than dead. A living death. And he discovers that the people of Alvrosdale have good reason to fear the Machines. The Machines are not evil in themselves but they lead to evil results.

One of the many ideas that Manning and Pratt anticipated in this tale is virtual reality. It is not just a vague approximation to the idea - it is the idea fully developed, in some ways perhaps even more fully developed that anything to be found in the cyberpunk writers. This is not virtual reality that mimics life - it replaces life. Cyborgs are also anticipated in this story and again the idea is impressively well thought through.

Science fiction authors are sometimes good at predicting technologies but not so good at predicting the social consequences of those technologies. Very few science fiction authors have been successfully able to imagine just how trivial and futile would be the uses to which human beings would put advanced technologies. In this instance the authors cannot be accused of this failing - the self-destructiveness of technology used purely for pleasure and amusement is vividly described. Manning and Pratt would not have been the slightest bit surprised by the tragic misuse of the internet.

This is very much ideas-based science fiction with absolutely zero interest in characterisation. I was going to say that it displays zero interest in emotion but that’s not quite true - it displays no interest in individual emotions but it does deal in at least general terms with the emotional and psychological consequences of unlimited access to unlimited power and technology.

The City of the Living Dead would have been an impressive enough achievement had it been published thirty years later, but appearing as it did in 1930 it’s breathtakingly prescient and a truly remarkable work of speculative science fiction. Highly recommended.

John Wyndham's The Kraken Wakes

John Wyndham (1903-1969) had been writing professionally since 1925 and had a couple of science fiction novels published in the 1930s (including Stowaway to Mars) but it was not until  The Day of the Triffids was published in 1951 that he achieved real success. He followed The Day of the Triffids with another post-apocalyptic novel, The Kraken Wakes, in 1953.

In fact all four of Wyndham’s best known novels (The Day of the Triffids, The Kraken Wakes, The Chrysalids and The Midwich Cuckoos) are either post-apocalyptic or at least deal with deadly threats to the survival of civilisation. All four approach these themes in slightly different ways. In The Kraken Wakes the menace comes from beneath the sea.

Or at least it might come from beneath the sea. And then again, it might come from the stars. This novel relies for its terror on the sheer alienness of the threat - an unseen enemy whose motivations remain horrifyingly inexplicable. Wyndham understands that it is best not to try to explain the nature of the threat. If the danger is comprehensible it can be faced but in this case the danger remains stubbornly beyond the powers of anyone to understand.

It starts in a very low-key way. Radio documentary broadcasters Michael and Phyllis Watson are on their honeymoon, on board the ocean liner Guinevere. A strange red light appears in the sky, followed by several more. It’s decidedly odd and rather mysterious but intriguing rather than frightening. They learn that these red lights have been seen a number of times in various places, but always at sea. It at least provides them with material for a radio spot.

Then ships start to disappear. They are steaming in calm seas and there are no explosions. They simply sink, and do so within a matter of a couple of minutes. It gradually becomes apparent that the sinkings only occur in very very deep water. There is no obvious connection between the strange red lights in the sky and these unexplained maritime disasters although it does vaguely occur to Michael Watson that two sets of odd unexplained incidents, one following not long after the other, might be too much of a coincidence.

There is worse to come. Much worse. It takes a long while for the public (and even longer for the government) to accept that humanity is at war. At war with mysterious forces from the depths of the deepest ocean, implacable and inscrutable. And it increasingly appears to be a war that humanity is likely to lose, with a very real danger of civilisational collapse.

Wyndham is usually regarded as being a writer very concerned with the likelihood of the disappearance of a traditional English way of life that he loved very much. Certainly his heroes tend to be rather ordinary Englishmen and the action is usually set in a rather idyllic part of the countryside (in The Kraken Wakes the hero and his wife spend most of their time living in a cottage in Cornwall). 

There are however a couple of things that stand out very clearly in this novel that are often overlooked in discussions of Wyndham’s writing. It’s extraordinary the extent to which Wyndham anticipated the survivalist movement. In both The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes those who survive the initial disasters form themselves into tight-knit self-sufficient communities and they must defend those communities from those less provident individuals who threaten to swamp them. And they defend those communities with guns. In the post-apocalyptic worlds of John Wyndham anyone not prepared to arm themselves with guns has no chance of long-term survival. In The Kraken Wakes Phyllis Watson even makes an impassioned speech on the rights of the people to have guns with which to defend themselves, and the wickedness of the government in trying to restrict gun ownership. It’s a point of view one doesn’t quite expect from an English author writing in 1953.

The novel is also absolutely scathing in its condemnation of the incompetence, short-sightedness, stupidity and outright malevolence of British government. It’s interesting to compare this novel to an earlier British post-apocalyptic science fiction novel, J. J. Connington’s 1923 best-seller Nordenholt’s Million. Connington sees the government as having the role of preserving civilisation in the face of disaster. Wyndham on the other hand portrays government as not merely useless in such a crisis, but as a positive hindrance. So it is quite possible to interpret The Kraken Wakes as a pro-gun libertarian novel. Perhaps it’s the fact that Wyndham’s style is so English and so cosy that has led people to overlook the novel’s more startling features.

In this novel Wyndham also displays an extraordinary cynicism towards democracy in general, another feature of his fiction that is generally overlooked.

The Kraken Wakes is a story in which the apocalypse creeps up on civilisation very slowly. At first, and for several years, there seems to be no real danger at all. Then the danger becomes more real, but still strictly limited, nothing to panic about. It goes from there to being a considerable menace but it still seems very unlikely that civilisation itself could be threatened in any way. Years pass before the threat becomes existential. This is an unusual approach for a post-apocalyptic novel but it’s highly effective.

Wyndham also, thankfully, avoids the dreary cliché of having humanity responsible for its own demise. 

The Kraken Wakes has been somewhat overshadowed by The Day of the Triffids and The Midwich Cuckoos and oddly enough (given Wyndham’s immense popularity as a science fiction writer) has never been adapted for either film or television. Its low-key slow-burn approach makes it an interestingly different kind of post-apocalyptic novel but it’s one that is well worth seeking out. Highly recommended.

Nordenholt’s Million

Alfred Walter Stewart (1880-1947) was a distiguished British chemist who wrote very successful golden age detective stories under the pseudonym J. J. Connington. He also wrote one science fiction novel which became a classic of its type.

Nordenholt’s Million, published in 1923, belongs to the post-apocalyptic sub-genre of science fiction. An accident produces a particularly virulent strain of denitrifying bacteria. These bacteria have the effect of removing nitrogen from the soil. In normal circumstance they do no harm but this virulent strain proves to be catastrophic in its effects. It transforms rich farmlands into wastelands.

The novel was clearly set in the near future, an age in which large-scale air transportation has made communication and travel over long distances safe, convenient and rapid. This proves to be humanity’s undoing as it allows the devastating bacteria to colonise one part of the Earth after another. Britain’s grainlands are the first to be affected but soon the food-producing areas of the United States, Canada, Argentina and Australia are similarly ravaged. Humanity faces famine on a scale never before imagined. In fact the famine will be on such a gigantic scale that the survival of civilisation, and even of the human race, seems to be in the gravest peril.

The British government does what all democratic governments do in a crisis. It calls meetings. It arranges conferences. It begins talks. It discuses option. It sets up committees. But in fact none of the options considered has the slightest chance of success, or of preventing the deaths of countless millions.

In this crisis one man emerges who sees clearly what has to be done. His plan seems brutal but it is the only way in which something can be salvaged from the wreckage. Nordenholt is a fabulously wealthy financier who has little interest in finance. His interest is in people, and in what makes them tick, and in the ways that people can be persuaded to do things. He is not interested in power as such, but he is keenly interested in the workings of power. And he is the one man who not only sees what has to be done; he has the energy to carry out his mission.

Some readers have seen Nordenholt as a monster or even a fascist. This is rather unfair. Connington is at pains to explain Nordenholt’s character to us, and Nordenholt is a man of exceptional humanity. He is simply clear-sighted enough to realise that the choice is between saving part of humanity or in letting all of humanity perish. Nordenholt is a man who likes humanity too much to stand by and see it destroyed completely. The steps which need to be taken involve serious ethical dilemmas but Nordenholt’s plans at least offer some hope.

Nordenholt’s plans encounter countless obstacles. The denitrifying bacteria leaves the soil useless. The nitrogen can be replaced but the process requires enormous amounts of power. It is doubtful if enough power can be produced over a long enough period to produce enough of the precious nitrogenous mixture that offers the only hope that there will be a harvest the following year. There is a faint ray of hope though - the brilliant physicist Henley-Davenport has been working on a project to unleash the practically unlimited power of the atom. If he can succeed then atomic power might produce the power that is needed.

While it’s a gripping story of survival the core of the book lies in the moral dilemmas faced by the leaders of the survivors. Survival can only be achieved by making decisions that seem impossibly brutal. And is survival worth the cost if the cost is the end of civilisation as we know it? This is a story of hope but also a story of tragedy. The tragedy is not limited to the deaths of millions; it also embraces the death of a whole way of life.

If he is to save the remnant of humanity Nordenholt will need to assume a degree of power that will make him a dictator. A democratic government simply will not and could not make the decisions that are necessary. This assumption of dictatorial, powers is necessary but there is a price to pay, and Nordenholt will have to pay the price as well. Can a man achieve unlimited power without being corrupted, and without losing his own humanity? In 1923, with the horrors of the First World War still a vivid memory and with the age of the dictators already beginning in Italy and Russia these questions assumed immense importance. Many intellectuals persuaded themselves that totalitarianism was both necessary and desirable (and many intellectual today still seem to share those beliefs). Connington was at least able to see the inevitable consequences and to understand the price that would have to be paid. Connington understood the realities of power and he understood that leaders sometimes have to accept a necessary evil if it is the lesser of two evils. Connington could see the advantages of totalitarianism but he could also see the costs.

Nordenholt’s Million is one of the more interesting early post-apocalyptic science fiction stories, offering a more thorough examination of the social, cultural and political consequences of disaster. Recommended.