Cataclysm by R.C. Sherriff

Vintage paperback in very good used condition. Some mild fading of pages edge. Rare item today, after some 59 years and with a wonderfully lurid 1950's Sci-Fi cover... Published by Pan Books (1958). 256pp. We will combine multiple purchases for post.

In Cataclysm originally published as "The Hopkins Manuscript" we watch through the eyes of the narrator as the moon veers off course, draws slowly closer to the earth, and finally crashes into it on May 3rd 1946. Because it falls into the Atlantic much of humanity survives – only to generate new disasters. But this is not science fiction in the mode of H G Wells's The War of the Worlds; it is a novel about human nature. The 'manuscript' was named after its 'author', a retired Hampshire schoolmaster whose greatest interest in life is his Bantam hens; rather self-important and lacking much sense of humour, Edgar Hopkins nevertheless emerges as an increasingly sympathetic and credible character. An ordinary man with whom we very much identify as Sherriff describes the small Hampshire village trying to prepare itself in its last days. In Sherriff's play: Journey's End he evoked vividly the trench experience as he had lived it; in this work he describes the catastrophe as he might have lived it.