England's Darkness - Softcover

Stephen Barber is a noted cultural historian and novelist, and the author of over 20 published and highly acclaimed books.

A bad era came down on England... Soon, after a few years of civil warfare, England was transformed into a destroyed land, and what remained of its memory - nothing at all, beyond a few fragments - was deposited in the archive of destroyed lands, in the city of Linz, a resilient global site for the perpetual preservation of all that survived, of lands that had fallen.

That land brought down its own destruction, as though compelled, as with a beast that cannot resist its set-down poison, knowing that it will kill it. Following England's long-foretold economic collapse, every other disintegration followed fast behind: first, and as though in unstoppable ecstasy, the collapse of all digital infrastructures, networks, transmissions, storage systems, together with the rendering obsolete of all systems of digital communication, telepresence and computing, both virtual and actual. Since the transferral of all of England's knowledge to those systems had only just been achieved - with the now-anachronistic media that had previously stored that knowledge all comprehensively erased, wiped and obliterated - that land became one of oblivion, with its knowledge, visions and sensations now instilled solely in the immediate corporeal presence and eyes of its inhabitants, at the exact moment that all knowledge, vision and sensation had been negated, blinded and numbed, within those bodies and those eyes.

The final lapsing of fossil-fuel reserves, especially oil and benzine, followed on near-simultaneously from the collapse of England's digital infrastructures, as though an unseen conflagration had incinerated those data-networks, and combusted the medium of conflagration along with its target. All that remained were immense reservoirs of petroleum, in reinforced tanks underneath the financial and corporate heart of London, located there to enable the resistance or flight of its governmental, administrative, military and corporate elites, in case of emergency, but inadvertently allowing, too - for any maleficent presence that chose to inflict such a fate - the instantaneous razing by fire of that city's heart.

Following the extinguishment of digital and fossil-based resources, England plummeted fast, as though its vertiginous fall impelled wildly flailing hands in descent to tear apart what remained, of the glory of that land. The cities had already fallen apart, and what had resisted, was shredded by those hands. ......