Horace Coon (1897–1961)

This short book concerns three scientists from a distant civilisation in the far future visiting the destroyed remains of the Earth, and from archaeological clues trying to determine how the human race came to vanish from the face of the planet. In the earlier chapters this comes across very effectively and amusingly, with the scientists from Great Galaxy reaching both some very accurate conclusions and some totally inaccurate ones, illustrating neatly the potentialities and limitations of archaeology. Later on, the level of detail is such that one wonders how archaeologists could have ascertained so much, and the book becomes a vehicle for the author's concern about the cold war stand off between East and West (the book was published in 1958) and his very real fears of the danger of nuclear holocaust. An interesting curiosity of a novel.… (meer)