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A priest investigates a vicar’s untimely death in a future Britain where reason is banished by dogma
One of the ways you know a good novel is by the other books you reach for as comparisons. Robert Harris’s latest, The Second Sleep, is a work of speculative fiction set in Britain 800 years into the future, after a “systemic collapse of technical civilisation” known as the Apocalypse. Into the void of the “Dark Age” steps a rejuvenated and dogmatic church, whose authoritarian rule and obsessive suppression of heretical “scientism” ensure that people live in brutal and backward conditions.
Harris’s book kept calling me back to a neglected classic of alternative history, Keith Roberts’s Pavane. That collection of linked stories imagines the assassination of Elizabeth I, the continued primacy of the Catholic Church and the failure of the Enlightenment. Under the pope in Pavane, the world exists in a feudal state with an interdiction on innovation. Continue reading...