After some sudden and unspecified catastrophe has depopulated England, the countryside reverts to nature, and the few survivors to a quasi-medieval way of life. The first part, The Relapse into Barbarism, is the account by some later historian of the fall of civilisation and its consequences, with a loving description of nature reclaiming England. The second part, Wild England, is an adventure set many years later in the wild landscape and society.
Consider the poor mailman of the future. To "sleet and snow and dead of night"--things that must not keep him from his appointed rounds--will be added, sub-zero void, meteors, and planets that won't stay put. Maybe he'll decide that for six cents an ounce it just ain't worth it.
Allan Stern and his secretary Beatrice Kendricks awake in New York City, one thousand years after an asteroid destroys most life on earth. Now they find a bi-plane, that Allan can make run on alcohol and begin the search for other survivors. They encounter a great rent in the earth which they are unable to fly across. They end up in the Abyss and meet up with a tribe of white haired albinos who still speak a type of English.
The starways' Lone Watcher had expected some odd developments in his singular, nerve-fraught job on the asteroid. But nothing like the weird twenty-one-day liquid test devised by the invading Steel-Blues.