Christopher: Alright, Lucas. We’re diving into a heavy one today. A book from 1922 that feels like it could have been written yesterday. I asked you to give it a read. If you had to review it in just five words, what would they be? Lucas: Oh, that's easy. My five-word review is: "Progress is a terrible idea." Christopher: Wow, straight to the point. I like it. Mine would be: "Civilization's thin veneer cracks wide." Lucas: I think our reviews are telling the same story, just from different angles. It’s a bleak one. What is this book? Christopher: This is Theodore Savage by Cicely Hamilton. And what makes it so fascinating is who she was. This isn't just any sci-fi writer. Cicely Hamilton was a major Anglo-Irish actress, a fierce feminist campaigner, and a suffragette. She wrote this, her only science fiction novel, right after serving in a nursing unit in France during World War I. She saw the devastation of modern, mechanized warfare firsthand, and this book is her direct response. Lucas: That context changes everything. A suffragette, someone fighting for progress and women's rights, writes a novel that basically says progress is a trap. That’s a powerful contradiction to start with. Where does she even begin with that argument? Christopher: She begins with the very engine of progress itself: science. The book opens in a world that feels a lot like ours—complacent, comfortable, with political tensions simmering in the background but largely ignored by the main character, Theodore Savage. He's a typical civil servant, more concerned with his budding romance than with global affairs. Lucas: Sounds familiar. Doomscrolling past headlines to get to the dating app. Christopher: Exactly. But then, on the very eve of war, he has a conversation that becomes the philosophical core of the entire novel. He meets a chemist named Markham, who delivers this absolutely chilling prophecy.

Lucas: A prophecy? What does he say? Christopher: Markham basically lays it all out. He tells Theodore, "You can’t combine the practice of science and the art of war; in the end, it’s one or the other." He argues that humanity, when it acts as a crowd, isn't rational. It’s a "jelly of impulse and emotion." He calls it the 'herding instinct.' This mass emotion isn't afraid of destruction; in fact, it craves it. Lucas: Okay, but that feels a little too cynical. We have education, we have history. We know what modern weapons can do. Surely that's a deterrent? Holt, another character in that scene, makes that exact point. Christopher: And Markham’s response is devastatingly simple. He asks, what proportion of a literate population can accept a statement on a printed page as if it were a personal experience? In other words, reading about a fire doesn't feel like being burned. Intellectual knowledge is no match for the raw, emotional pull of the herd. And he says politicians, fearing their own restless democracies more than they fear war, will always end up giving the crowd what it wants: something to break. Lucas: And in the book, they get it. What does that collapse look like? Christopher: It's terrifyingly fast. Hamilton describes it as a "red wicked night." Bombs fall, but the real horror is a new weapon—a poisonous fire that destroys crops and makes the land uninhabitable. This triggers a mass "displacement of population." The description is so vivid. Refugees appear "in their thousands—a horde of human rats driven out of their holes by terror, by fire and by gas." Lucas: Wow. "Human rats." That’s brutal. So it’s not an invasion, it’s a refugee crisis that breaks everything. Christopher: Precisely. All the systems we rely on—transport, food distribution, government, law—they just evaporate. Theodore, the civil servant, finds his office is useless. He watches society crumble, leaving "nothing but animal fear and the animal need to be fed." And this is where the central idea of the book really takes root. The survivors, traumatized by a disaster caused by advanced science, develop a deep, superstitious fear of it. Lucas: So they blame the tools, not the people who used them. Christopher: Exactly. They start calling it "devil's knowledge." Theodore eventually finds a surviving community, and his entry exam is an interrogation. They don't care if he's a good man; they want to know what he was before the Ruin. He says he was a clerk, and they're suspicious. But when he mentions he went to university, they get excited. Lucas: Ah, they think he's a scientist! They think he can fix things. Christopher: They see him as a potential savior who can bring back the lost world. And Theodore is tempted to lie, to say he's an engineer. But he realizes the "brute impossibility" of faking it. He can't build a machine or separate gases with his bare hands. So he tells the truth: he's ignorant. And that is what saves his life. The community accepts him on one condition: he must swear an oath to renounce all "devil's knowledge" for himself and his descendants. His ignorance is his ticket to survival. Lucas: That is an incredible twist. The very thing that made their world advanced—knowledge—is now the ultimate sin. It’s a society actively choosing to be primitive to save itself. Christopher: It's a deliberate, organized regression. They believe the only way to prevent another Ruin is to stamp out the "pride of the intellect" that caused it. And this leads to the second, and arguably more disturbing, part of Hamilton's warning.

Lucas: Okay, so society collapses and they blame science. That's a powerful idea, and I've seen it in other sci-fi. But you said Hamilton was a feminist. How does that perspective shape this new, primitive world? Christopher: This is where the novel becomes truly unique and, for many modern readers, very challenging. Hamilton shows that when civilization collapses, the first and most brutal casualty is women's rights. Her main case study for this is the character of Ada, an ex-factory hand Theodore reluctantly takes responsibility for after he flees his destroyed camp. Lucas: What's she like? Is she a resourceful survivor? Christopher: The exact opposite. She's a product of a mechanized, urban world. She's described as "unhandy, unresourceful, superficial." She can't cook, she can't build a fire, she's utterly helpless. Theodore sees her as a pure burden, an "encumbrance." For months, she's in a "cowed stupor" from terror and starvation. Lucas: That’s a pretty bleak portrayal. Christopher: It is, but then there's this fascinating moment of psychological re-awakening. Theodore finds some old blankets and makes a crude cloak for her. He expects her to be grateful for the warmth. Instead, she bursts into tears. Lucas: Why? Because it's ugly? Christopher: Precisely. She wails that she'll never have anything "nice to wear" again. She remembers her "taiste" in clothes, her "departed chiffon," and how she used to have a small foot. In the middle of this apocalypse, her vanity returns. And Theodore has this epiphany: he realizes she's not just a creature to be fed, she's a woman with a sense of self and dignity tied to these things. It's the first sign she's becoming human again. Lucas: That's a really insightful psychological detail. But let's get to the part that I know is controversial, the part that makes readers question the "feminist" label. The book describes Theodore physically beating Ada to "train" her into obedience. Christopher: It does. And it's a deeply uncomfortable scene. He grows frustrated with her helplessness and one day "cuffed her soundly." The book notes that this establishes a brutal, primitive power dynamic. And this is where we have to remember Hamilton's purpose. She isn't endorsing this. She's issuing a stark warning. Lucas: A warning about what? That men will become violent? Christopher: A warning that in a world stripped of law, social structures, and economic independence, women's status regresses horrifically. Before the war, Hamilton wrote a famous feminist treatise called Marriage as a Trade, where she argued that for many women, marriage was already a transaction: "the exchange of her person for the means of subsistence." Lucas: Right, a woman's economic survival was tied to a man. Christopher: In her dystopia, that transaction becomes terrifyingly literal and physical. The veneer of politeness is gone. The novel states it plainly: for women without a male protector, the price for survival is paid in "a hunk of bread or meat." They are forced to trade their bodies. Theodore's relationship with Ada becomes a microcosm of this new reality. He is the provider and protector, and she is his property. His violence is the ultimate expression of that ownership. It's not a prescription for how men should act; it's a horrifying depiction of how they might act when all civilized restraints are gone. Lucas: So it's a feminist dystopia not because it shows women rising up, but because it shows how quickly and completely their rights can be annihilated. It's the ultimate "what if" scenario for a suffragette. What if everything we fought for was just... erased? Christopher: Exactly. The fate of women in the book is Hamilton's greatest fear made manifest. After Ada dies, Theodore quickly remarries, and his new wife is described as "a sturdy young woman who had been broken to the duties required of her." The word "broken" is key. It's the complete destruction of the independent female spirit Hamilton championed her whole life.

Lucas: Wow. So the book is really a double warning. It's not just that our technology can destroy us, which is a familiar theme. It’s that the social progress we take for granted—equality, rights, decency—is just as fragile. The first thing to go isn't the power grid; it's our humanity, and specifically, our respect for one another. Christopher: That's the heart of it. Hamilton is forcing us to look at our own world and ask a deeply uncomfortable question. What are our own "civilized habits"? Are they truly part of our nature, or are they just a thin layer we've learned, a performance we put on because society expects it? And what happens when the pressure gets too high? Lucas: It's a chilling thought, and it feels more relevant than ever. This was written a hundred years ago, in the wake of World War I, but the fear of our own creations getting out of control and the fragility of our social order feels incredibly immediate. Christopher: It really does. The book leaves you wondering if we're all just one "red wicked night" away from becoming Theodore Savage. Lucas: It’s a powerful and unsettling idea. We'd love to hear what you think. Does progress make us more resilient, or just more vulnerable to a bigger collapse? Find us on our social channels and let us know your thoughts. Christopher: This is Aibrary, signing off.