The Eternal Adam

The Eternal Adam (French: L'Éternel Adam) is a short novelette by Jules Verne recounting the progressive fall of a group of survivors into barbarism following an apocalypse. Although the story was drafted by Verne in the last years of his life, it was greatly expanded by his son, Michel Verne.[1]

Illustration by Léon Bennett

Plot summary

The story is set in a far future in which Zartog Sofr-Aï-Sran, an archaeologist, deciphers the preserved journal of a survivor to the total destruction of civilisation. The discovery comes in the midst of philosophical controversies on the Origin of Man, between those that believe in the existence of a unique ancestor and those that do not.

The journal describes the struggle for survival of a small group and the futility of the accumulated knowledge in the group.

The conclusion of the novel implies that the unique ancestor is the survivor whose journal was discovered, and that civilisation is doomed to eternal fall and rebirth.

gollark: The 80% of power back thing pretends the grid is a large battery, when it's *not*, and you'll just be using fossil fuels probably.
gollark: Well, sure. But I don't think it's a good general solution.
gollark: Nuclear is much better, but people go "OH NO NUCLEAR SCARY" and yet seemingly do not care about the alternative effectively being fossil fuels?
gollark: Or batteries, which have their own problems.
gollark: The panels are really energy-intensive to produce anyway, degrade after 20 years, and you need uncool fossil-fuel plants to cover for the solar panels when they don't produce, which is often.

References
  1. della Riva, Piero Gondolo. "A propos des oeuvres posthumes de Jules Verne" (595–96). Europe: 73–88. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)

See also
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