A Note from the Editor

The original manuscript of this work was discovered five years ago in the ruins of an ancient church in the Great Windsor Forest, immediately west of the London Desert. The church stood in the middle of what appears to have been a ring barrier. Though it was unclear at the time what the original construction of the ring might have been, it consists now of no more than low banks of reddish brown earth overgrown with brambles and wildflowers. A river defines the western edge of what is little more than a faint clearing. If the ring’s original purpose was to form a defensive stockade, as the manuscript suggests, then we can assume that originally it must have stood much higher than it does now.

While the ruined buildings within the circular earthworks are a mixture of pre-millennial architectures, the stockade itself, and the community which lived within it, appears to date from the immediate post-millennial period. This contention is supported by analysis of artifacts brought back by Captain Andrew I. F. Balasubramanian, who commanded the third British Isles Exploratory Expedition in 2137. As Captain of the naval research vessel H.M.M.S. David V.K. Ghandi, Captain Balasubramanian led an exploratory team of biologists, anthropologists and geographers overland, from their beachhead near the tiny native village of Port Smaff, to within ten miles of the Great London Desert, the closest approach yet attempted. Extracts from his log are appended.

The manuscript itself, though badly yellowed and faded, remains legible; preserved by the dry air in the metal container into which it had been sealed. The text consists of exactly five hundred lined pages of closely spaced text, all clearly in the same handwriting, though executed using a variety of different writing implements. We have reproduced as faithfully as possible the original text, titles, quotes and spelling, in the same five block format as the original, but we have significantly decompressed the text for greater legibility and ease of analysis.

The manuscript purports to date from the year 2020. If the document is genuine, as most analysts now believe, then this is the earliest known written account of the collapse of the Old West, and provides a fascinating, though inevitably incomplete, and idiosyncratic, view of the causes and effects of what the unnamed author calls The End. This is the only text so far discovered which gives us a first hand account of the events surrounding the failure of Western civilisation in January 2000.

As we now know, it was the West’s over-reliance on computer based technologies that at last brought an end to their thousand-year dominion. Though we suffered greatly during the post-millennial period, and during the plague years which followed, we probably lost no more than 50% of our total population. Even the years of war, as we fought to re-established the rule of law in our ancient territories, did not cause the same degree of devastation and collapse as we have now seen in Europe. Captain Balasubramanian has estimated that the total population of the British Isles is now less than one million, at least a 98% loss rate.

Our other missionaries and explorers are only now returning with accounts of how widespread and complete the collapse has been. While we have managed to rebuild our industrial and technical capabilities almost to pre-millennial levels, and one day soon will once again be a nuclear power, the West remains silent. In Europe, as in Korea and Japan, the once proud and disdainful cities stand burned and shattered and empty, their populations reduced to a few scattered farming and fishing communities. China too is silent. We can expect more of the same when we finally mount the long planned expedition to the land of the Great Satan, from which no insult has come since December 31st 1999.

This book is dedicated to those brave explorers who are rediscovering the old New World.

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