Henri Allorge's The Great Cataclysm (1927) takes place in the Age of Science in the year 9978 when Earth has cooled down and a population of scientists and artists live in a handful of great cities scattered across the globe. They spend their time studying the ruins of the great cities of the past and are served by a population of advanced apes. But the stability of this utopia is threatened when all their electricity suddenly vanishes... "The Great Cataclysm might well owe the fact that it won a literary award to the stridency of its pacifism, but the more interesting aspect of its...