The Second Sleep
by Robert Harris
In 1468, a young priest rides his old horse through the rain to a remote parish church, tasked by the Bishop of Exeter with burying a recently-deceased priest. He sees a brilliant flash of emerald in the rain, but it’s just a common parakeet.
This is our familiar medieval England, but it’s not quite right. For starters, our young priest conducts the burial service from the Book of Common Prayer, after the Lesson is read from the King James Bible: this is not the 1468 we once knew. We soon learn that, eight centuries ago, the Apocalypse destroyed the world, and all about us our clues to what happened to The Ancients.
This is a desperately sad book, speculative fiction for an age in which there’s no longer much reason to speculate. We know what’s coming. In Intertwingled, I wrote that “the future is not what it was.” And here we are.