The Doomsman

Written in 1906, this early scientific romance imagines New York a century into a ruined future. A half-remembered catastrophe has erased the old republic, and the broken towers of Manhattan rise across the water while scattered tribes scratch out a half-medieval existence in the wreckage. The story follows Constans, son of a small settlement’s ruler, as he tries to understand how the marvelous vanished world fell apart and comes up against the Doomsmen, a predatory clan that holds a fortified keep at the city’s heart, where a half-mad priest tends a dangerous engine left by the ancients. Sutphen reaches for a form that would not have a name for decades: the post-apocalyptic quest, its restless hero piecing a lost civilization back together. For readers of early dystopian and survival fiction, it reads as an ancestor of the genre.