Ashes, Ashes

Paris, 2052. A technologically advanced France collapses overnight when electricity vanishes. City-dwellers — stripped of every manual skill by a lifetime of total automation — descend into chaos and violence. Only the farmers who retained direct, embodied knowledge of the land survive. Barjavel's fierce indictment of 'the machine that thinks and feels for man' is the foundational French warning about cognitive atrophy through technological dependency. Published 1943 under the Occupation. English translation by Damon Knight (Doubleday, 1967) — currently out of print. No current English reprint edition available.

René Barjavel born in Nyons, France, the son of a baker. In 1914, while his father served in World War I, his mother ran the bakery, and he was left alone much of the time to discover the world through exploration and reading. His his mother died of sleeping sickness in 1922, when he was just 11 years old, and he was sent to boarding school in Nyons. In 1923, when his father was unable to pay the …