The great before : a satire

England, 2051. Matthew Gonne, Professor of Old Lessons at the University of cambridge, has been mortally exhausted by his journmey to London to attend an exhibition which purports to demonstrate the imminent revival of lost industrial civilisation. Before he dies, he has one last ambition: to write a letter to the people who inhabited the world of his youth. Little by little he reveals how the achievements of that world have been reduced to myth and legend, and how its legacy is being erased by an ascetic belief system which rejects all technology and blames all ills upon the preceding, industrial age.