Three Go Back

By James Leslie Mitchell and Lewis Grassic Gibbon

Book Overview

The three are Claire, aged thirty-three, born in Battersea, writer of spicy novels;Sir John, head of a armament combine;Keith, an American, president of the league of Militaristic Pacifists. When the air-ship on which they are traveling breaks in half after a submarine earthquake, they find themselves on a beach near basalt mountains, intensely cold, Clair and Keith in pajamas, Sir John in evening clothes. Gradually in their wandering south, it is revealed to them that they have gone back twenty-five thousand years, that they are on the lost continent Atlantis, that the great beasts they glimpse are mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers, that the Cro-Magnards who take them in are not savages but clean and kindly children, whose unspoiled ways are worth adoption. The Cro-Magnards live in painted caves, wear no clothing, know the uses of fire but possess no vessels, are blissfully ignorant of agriculture. At the annual mating, lovers choose each other for the winter.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0359487963
• ISBN13: 9780359487967
• Release Date: March 2019
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Length: 124 Pages
• Weight: 0.42 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A Surprisingly Intelligent Book

Considering the rubbish that was being churned out novel wise in the 1930's, I was surprised at the quality of the writing, especially as it was dealing with science fiction. The story line follows a time travel theme in which three survivors from an airship disaster find themselves trapped in a world some 25,000 years in the past. But this is no ordinary time-travel novel, because the travellers in question are in fact living a kind of racial memory in which they are players rather than participants. The writing is rich in description, and you can almost feel the heat from the many volcanoes that litter a changing land. The book can be hard going, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, the author has written a complex story around what could be a pulp fiction story-line and has managed to give it considerable literary merit. His three travellers are surprisingly believable, and totally in tune with their own time, and its many "civilised" intrigues. Their descent into the past shows them that little has changed in 25,000 years, only the technology has got better, but the mind is still untamed. If this young writer had lived past his 35th birthday he might well have given H.G.Wells a run for his money. This book is worth reading simply because it is very hard to find an intelligent 1930s science fiction that reads like literature.