
In a world of silent, crumbling skyscrapers, a lone wanderer clings to a stubborn hope of rebirth. Trained as a scholar and sharpshooter, he believes the only way to raise a new civilization—his phoenix—from the ashes is to find a partner who can bear its children and the forgotten books that will shape their future.
His quest changes when he encounters a disheveled girl crying for help amid the ruins. Their brief exchange reveals a shared desperation, and he offers a bargain: together they will retrieve the library’s remaining volumes, the seed of knowledge he needs. She accepts, and the pair set off through the wreckage, chasing the promise of surviving stories.
The journey leads them deeper into a landscape littered with broken homes and rusted machines, where every step feels haunted by the echo of what once was. Approaching the abandoned library, the silence grows heavier, hinting at the challenges awaiting anyone brave enough to rebuild a world from its own ruins.
Language
en
Duration
~54 minutes (52K characters)
Publisher of text edition
Project Gutenberg
Original publisher
New York, NY: Royal Publications, Inc., 1958.
Credits
Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Release date
2023-10-15
Rights
Public domain in the USA.
1918–2011
A mid-20th-century science fiction writer whose surviving work has a distinctly pulpy, imaginative feel, with stories that appeared in popular genre magazines of the 1950s. Very little biographical information is widely documented, which gives his small body of fiction an added air of mystery.
View all books
by John Bernard Daley

by Vinceslas-Eugène Dick

by Philippe Aubert de Gaspé

by Abraham Cahan

by Eliza Fowler Haywood

by Pauline E. (Pauline Elizabeth) Hopkins

by Laure Conan