British Literature Classics Dystopia Fiction Historical Fiction Science Fiction Speculative Fiction

The Hopkins Manuscript

Name: The Hopkins Manuscript
Rating: 4.09 (1800 reviews)
Author: R.C. Sherriff

R.C. Sherriff January 1, 1939

4.09 1.8k Ratings

Ongoing Status

20 Views

Start Reading

Synopsis

For fans of the popular and award-winning Netflix movie Don’t Look Up, a prescient, rediscovered speculative novel about how a small English village prepares for the end of the world.

Edgar Hopkins is a retired math teacher in his mid-fifties with a strong sense of self-importance, whose greatest pride in life is winning poultry breeding contests. When not meticulously caring for his Bantam, Edgar is an active member of the British Lunar Society. Thanks to that affiliation, Edgar becomes one of the first people to learn the moon is on a collision course, headed towards Earth.

Members of the society are sworn to secrecy but eventually the moon looms so large in the sky that the government can no longer deny the truth. It’s during these final days that Edgar befriends two young siblings and writes what he calls The Hopkins Manuscript—a testimony juxtaposing the ordinary and extraordinary as Edgar and the villagers dig trenches and play cricket before the end of days.

First published in 1939, as the world was teetering on the brink of global war, R.C. Sherriff’s classic speculative novel is a timely and powerful warning from the past that captures the breadth of human nature in all its complexity.

Books similar to The Hopkins Manuscript

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

★ 4.01

Philip K. Dick

In the overcrowded world and cramped space colonies of the late 21st century, tedium can be endured through the drug Can-D, which enables users to inhabit a shared illusory world. When industrialist Palmer Eldritch returns from an interstellar trip, he brings with him a new drug, Chew-Z. It is far more potent than Can-D, but threatens to plunge the world into a permanent state of drugged illusion controlled by the mysterious Eldritch.

Cover illustration: Chris Moore

Time Out of Joint

★ 3.87

Philip K. Dick

Ragle Gumm is an ordinary man leading an ordinary life, except that he makes his living by entering a newspaper contest every day - and winning, every day.

But he gradually begins to suspect that his life - indeed his whole world - is an illusion, constructed around him for the express purpose of keeping him docile and happy. But if that is the case, what is his real world like, and what is he actually doing every day when he thinks he is guessing 'Where Will The Little Green Man Be Next?'

The Space Merchants

★ 3.83

Frederik Pohl

An alternate cover edition can be found here.

It is the 22nd Century, an advertisement-drenched world in which the big ad agencies dominate governments and everything else. Now Schoken Associates, one of the big players, has a new challenge for star copywriter Mitch Courtenay. Volunteers are needed to colonise Venus. It's a hellhole, and nobody who knew anything about it would dream of signing up. But by the time Mitch has finished, they will be queuing to get on board the spaceships.

Biographical Notes

Pohl and Kornbluth started writing together as early as 1940, although both authors produced a wide variety of stories separately, under their own names and pseudonyms.

Each wrote sections, starting where the other left off, and through long experience they developed an almost telepathic awareness of each other's intentions.

The Penultimate Truth

★ 3.78

Philip K. Dick

World War III is raging - or so the millions of people crammed in their underground tanks believe. For fifteen years, subterranean humanity has been fed on daily broadcasts of a never-ending nuclear destruction, sustained by a belief in the all powerful Protector. But up on Earth's surface, a different kind of reality reigns. East and West are at peace. Across the planet, an elite corps of expert hoaxers preserve the lie.

Cover Illustration: Chris Moore

The Man in the High Castle

★ 3.59

Philip K. Dick

It's America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco, the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some twenty years earlier the United States lost a war — and is now occupied by Nazi Germany and Japan.

This harrowing, Hugo Award-winning novel is the work that established Philip K. Dick as an innovator in science fiction while breaking the barrier between science fiction and the serious novel of ideas. In it Dick offers a haunting vision of history as a nightmare from which it may just be possible to wake.

Against the Fall of Night

★ 3.96

Arthur C. Clarke

ONE BILLION YEARS FROM NOW . . .

Mankind has reached the heights of civilization. Men live thousands of years in perfect freedom and leisure—their wants are attended to by ingenious machines—peace and culture flourish in ways undreamed of in our time. And yet ... mankind is dying. The price of peace has been the loss of the needed human qualities of curiosity and drive—they have been bred out of the human race. So when young Alvin of Diaspar began asking questions, he was looked on as a dangerous freak, a throwback. But Alvin kept asking, kept looking, kept seeking out the truth ...

... and what he found offered his people a dreadful choice—battle and destruction, or a new and richer destiny!

Earth Abides

★ 3.94

George R. Stewart

A disease of unparalleled destructive force has sprung up almost simultaneously in every corner of the globe, all but destroying the human race. One survivor, strangely immune to the effects of the epidemic, ventures forward to experience a world without man. What he ultimately discovers will prove far more astonishing than anything he'd either dreaded or hoped for.

Dayworld

★ 3.65

Philip José Farmer

Dayworld leads a sf trilogy by Philip José Farmer set in a dystopian future in which an overpopulated world allocates people only one day a week. The other six days they're in suspended animation. The focus is on Jeff Caird, a daybreaker living more than a day a week. He's not like most daybreakers. He belongs to the radical Immer group working to create a better government. Not all Immers are daybreakers, but send information from one day to the next they've daybreakers like Jeff. Immer daybreakers assume seven different personalities & jobs, slipping from culture to culture in seven different worlds. While Jeff & the other six go day to day, they run into problems while working as Immer daybreakers. They must cover their tracks while trying to keep up with seven different lives, families & jobs. It could drive a man crazy. It does & the Immers must dispose of Jeff to keep the rest safe. Jeff, wanting to live, tries to escape, but they have undercover Immers in every job & government level. Jeff is caught & put in an asylum, classified with multiple personality disorder. If considered incurable he'll be killed. But Jeff has an escape plan.
The sequels are Dayworld Rebel, '87 & Dayworld Breakup, '90.

The Hopkins Manuscript

Books similar to The Hopkins Manuscript

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Time Out of Joint

The Space Merchants

The Penultimate Truth

The Man in the High Castle

Against the Fall of Night

Earth Abides

Dayworld

Welcome Back!