Darkness And Dawn [Paperback]

George Allan England (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 17, 2004

The islands in the harbor, too, were thickly overgrown. On Ellis, no sign of the immigrant station remained. Castle William was quite gone. And with a gasp of dismay and pain, Beatrice pointed out the fact that no longer Liberty held her bronze torch aloft. Save for a black, misshapen mass protruding through the tree-tops, the huge gift of France was no more.

Product Details

• Paperback: 616 pages
• Publisher: Kessinger Publishing, LLC (June 17, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1419115073
• ISBN-13: 978-1419115073
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,754,585 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Downloadable for free at Project Gutenberg, January 14, 2005

By 

T. bailey - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Darkness and dawn (Paperback)

Downloadable for free at Project Gutenberg

Trilogy By George Allan England

"The Vacant World, the first novel, begins when a secretary, Beatrice Kendrick, and her boss, a young engineer named Allan Stern, awaken on an upper floor of a ruined Manhattan skyscraper, thousands of years in the future when civilization has been destroyed. The pair has been in a state of suspended animation for fifteen hundred years. Changes in the earth's features as well as monstrously mutated "humans" make it clear they have little hope of survival. The pair organize their resources to face the savage alternatives about them and the closeness created by their mutual interdependency inevitably kindles romance between Allan and Beatrice.

In Book Two, Beyond the Great Oblivion, Allan and Beatrice begin to discover the nature of the catastrophe that has split the Earth open. Rebuilding an airplane, they find a "bottomless" chasm near Pittsburgh where a huge portion of the Earth has been torn away to become a second moon. Alan and Beatrice earn the loyalty of the People of this Abyss and lead them from the chasm to New York.

In Book Three, The Afterglow, Allan and Beatrice, with the People of the Abyss, prepare to recolonize the Earth's surface. But first, they must defeat the devolved, cannibalistic survivors who populate Earth's cities.

Analog calls Darkness and Dawn "a classic trilogy," while historian/critic Sam Moskowitz terms it "a masterpiece."

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars One of the Earliest Versions of post-Catastrophe Earth, January 1, 2007

By 

Grey Wolffe "Zeb Kantrowitz" (North Waltham, MA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Darkness and Dawn (Classics of Science Fiction) (Hardcover)

Written in 1912,13 and 14 by George Allan England, this is actually a trilogy that follows the fortunes of Allan Stern and his secretary Beatrice Kendricks after they awake in New York City, one thousand years after an asteroid destroys most life on earth. Just his luck, Allan is a master engineer and can make explosives, build bridges, fly bi-planes, etc. Beatrice is the gorgeous, spunky blond along for the ride (she even gets kidnapped by a giant gorilla at one point!).

In the first part the discussion is of what happened, and how they will save themselves and rebuild civilization (but in a utopian manner without private wealth). In the second they find a bi-plane, that Allan can make run on alcohol and begin the search for other survivors. They encounter a great rent in the earth (west of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi) which they are unable to fly across. They end up in the Abyss and meet up with a tribe of white haired albinos who still speak a type of English (the are called Meruccans...some one call Mr.Spock).

In the third book, Allan marries Beatrice (they finally have sex after two years running around half-naked) and with the people of the Abyss set off to build a new civilization on the surface. Yes they run into a few problems along the way (mostly a tribe of semi-human flesh eaters), but Allan is always able to work things out, with Beatrice by his side. (He calls her 'little girl' and she calls him 'boy'.) The story actually ends with the two of them much older, sitting on their porch watching the sun go down!

If you don't keep in mind that this was written before every bad sci-fi movie/book you have seen/read; it's an amazing accomplishment, though a little juvenile. But it reads much like Jules Verne, so this must have been the style at the time. Interesting perspective, being pre-WWI.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Rather Odd Tale of Pulp Fiction, April 9, 2009

By 

Craig Alan Loewen "Craig Alan Loewen" (Pennsylvania, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Darkness and Dawn (Hardcover)

The Darkness and Dawn trilogy is composed of three separate novellas included together in this book:

1. The Last New Yorkers
2. Beyond the Great Oblivion
3, The Afterglow

Written by George Allan England (1877-1937), an American writer and explorer, the story introduces us to Allan Stern and Beatrice Kendrick who have miraculously survived an Earth-destroying cataclysm by going into suspended animation at the same time, in the same office, and waking up a millennium later at the exact same time for no definite reason ever explained.

They then wander through the rest of the story having incredible adventures to rival the pulps of the classic age, express their love for each other (for pages and pages and pages), have more incredible adventures they survive by the skin of their teeth, express their love for each other for many more pages, express their disdain for religion and capitalism, face death square in the chops, express more of their love for each other, express how the new world they are going to rebuild will be a socialist paradise, fight to the death with a monster or two, express their love for each other, and ... well, you get the picture.

Along the way we learn that concrete and steel are eternal, that 1,000-year-old food in the tin still tastes good, that Allan can rebuild a pre-WWI plane from deer hides, that fur coats stored carefully for a millennium can still be worn, that people can go into suspended animation and wake up with the clothes rotting off their bodies without any harm to themselves (or even feeling hungry), that a ten-century-old bullet can still fire without any problem, that air pressure does not change to any serious degree if you go to the bottom of a canyon that is well over 50 miles deep, and did I mention that concrete will outlast the heat death of the universe?

And along the way, you'll probably read that Allan and Beatrice are rather fond of each other.

And saints preserve us, but writing this review, I just realized that the author and the main character share the same name which means this story is a type of Mary Sue tale!

Regardless, if you like pulp adventures with lots of action and high body counts, then you have just found paradise.

Just don't analyze the tale too closely.