After the Crash (1923)

In November 2012 (Muriel ... and After the Crash) I posted a brief critique of Maxwell Gray's short story After the Crash, "written about 1908 or 1910" but not published until her final book, the 1923 story collection A Bit of Blue Stone.

After the Crash, while I think it has weaknesses, is an interesting story, both as an example of the "Where London Stood" genre, and as a personal milestone for Maxwell Gray. She'd spent her whole career writing mainstream fiction - chiefly melodramatic romances with a certain amount of social commentary - but in her 60s broke out of that frame and wrote a single post-apocalyptic SF story that powerfully crystallises her own fears (expressed in earlier works) of disastrous consequences of the social changes brought by the 20th century.

As MG died in the year of publication, it's well out of copyright, so I thought I'd post a scan I did in 2012. I'll run it through OCR when I have a moment.
























- Gray, Maxwell, After the Crash, from A Bit of Blue Stone, 1923.

See Muriel ... and After the Crash for critique and previous discussion.

- Ray