The Lost Continent

In the year 2137, America stands as humanity's last beacon of civilization. For two centuries, the Pan-American Federation has enforced absolute isolation from the ruined East, where Europe lies abandoned and forgotten after the war to end all wars. No American has ventured beyond the thirtieth parallel. Lieutenant Jefferson Turck knows only the orderly world of the Pan-American Navy, where the past is a closed book and the East is merely a forbidden slogan: 'East for the East, the West for the West.' Then a storm shatters his ship and throws him across the line into a nightmare. England is no longer a nation but a savage wilderness populated by primitive tribes and prowling beasts, its great cities returned to rubble, its people reverted to brutality. Turck must survive in a land where the remnants of a once-mighty civilization serve only as tools for survival. Burroughs wrote this in 1915, imagining a future where the West inherits the earth and the East becomes legend, and the result crackles with the energy of a writer imagining what comes after the old world dies.