Signed
The Gas War of 1940
Signed first edition, 1931
The Gas War of 1940 (1931) by "Miles" (the pseudonym of Stephen Southwold, best known as Neil Bell) is a bleak interwar catastrophe novel and a prequel of sorts to The Seventh Bowl (1930), offering a documentary-style account of the civilizational collapse that precedes the technocratic dystopia of the earlier book. The first edition was limited to 500 copies, of which ten were specially bound and signed.
As with The Seventh Bowl, George Locke describes the signed copies as bound in blue cloth with gilt lettering and top edge gilt, a binding distinctly different from the regular issue. Locke did not record having examined a signed copy of The Gas War of 1940. The regular issue is bound in blue cloth with gilt lettering on the spine and a dark blue stained top edge. This copy is signed on the colophon page as "Miles" and differs from the regular issue in having a gilt top edge rather than the usual dark blue stain. In this respect the binding conforms to the specially bound signed copies of The Seventh Bowl described by Locke, suggesting this may represent one of the ten specially bound and signed copies of The Gas War, though it is not numbered. Whether the signed copies were numbered, or whether this represents an overrun of the special binding, is unknown. Either way, this is an incredibly rare copy signed by the author.
Hardcover. First Edition. Octavo, blue cloth with gilt lettering on the spine. London: Eric Partridge, 1931. Locke, A Spectrum of Fantasy, p.157. #11413.
Bumped corner with a slight spine lean, otherwise very good or better copy.
As with The Seventh Bowl, George Locke describes the signed copies as bound in blue cloth with gilt lettering and top edge gilt, a binding distinctly different from the regular issue. Locke did not record having examined a signed copy of The Gas War of 1940. The regular issue is bound in blue cloth with gilt lettering on the spine and a dark blue stained top edge. This copy is signed on the colophon page as "Miles" and differs from the regular issue in having a gilt top edge rather than the usual dark blue stain. In this respect the binding conforms to the specially bound signed copies of The Seventh Bowl described by Locke, suggesting this may represent one of the ten specially bound and signed copies of The Gas War, though it is not numbered. Whether the signed copies were numbered, or whether this represents an overrun of the special binding, is unknown. Either way, this is an incredibly rare copy signed by the author.
Hardcover. First Edition. Octavo, blue cloth with gilt lettering on the spine. London: Eric Partridge, 1931. Locke, A Spectrum of Fantasy, p.157. #11413.
Bumped corner with a slight spine lean, otherwise very good or better copy.
Additional Details
The Gas War of 1940 was written by Stephen Southwold, who published fiction under the pen name Neil Bell and used the separate pseudonym "Miles" for his dystopian and future-war writing. The Gas War is structured as a found manuscript, the memoir of Raymond Denning, who rose from bookseller to publisher to statesman and became the first Director, effectively Dictator, of Great Britain during the war. He writes from a military hospital in Walberswick, Suffolk, knowing he will not survive the month, addressing the account to a son who will read it decades later in a world that he hopes is unrecognizable from his own.
The war begins with a child throwing a stone at a window in Puebla City, Mexico. From that provocation, diplomatic miscalculation does the rest. Bell establishes early that the world of 1940 needed very little to tip it over. A riot at the Tokyo Olympics kills twelve thousand, a factory explosion east of London releases chemical agents across a populated area, a gangland raid on a government gas facility in Chicago does the same. The technology to end civilization was already widely in play before the first act of war.
When war breaks out it bypasses traditional battlefields entirely. Fleets of high-altitude aircraft deliver lethal chemical agents directly onto civilian populations. The three agents used are Phosgon which desiccates the lungs, Halgene which blinds, and Calmite which explodes on contact. No known gas mask offers protection against any of them.
Bell's account is relentless in its focus on civilian annihilation. The great cities of London, Paris, Rome, and New York are erased in rapid succession. Social order collapses almost immediately, giving way to panic, mob violence, and summary justice. Denning attempts to govern through radio broadcasts and emergency decrees, but his authority proves hopeless. His own arc mirrors that of the state, as administrative competence gives way to exhaustion and despair, and he is ultimately beaten by a crowd of his own citizens, surviving only long enough to die of his injuries in the military hospital where the manuscript is written.
Published in 1931, The Gas War of 1940 belongs to a distinct interwar genre of future-war fiction driven by genuine public fear of aerial chemical warfare and the potential destruction of civilization. This is not a novel about armies or strategy but about what happens to cities and the people in them. In the end, Denning himself dissolves into the same ruin as everything else.
The war begins with a child throwing a stone at a window in Puebla City, Mexico. From that provocation, diplomatic miscalculation does the rest. Bell establishes early that the world of 1940 needed very little to tip it over. A riot at the Tokyo Olympics kills twelve thousand, a factory explosion east of London releases chemical agents across a populated area, a gangland raid on a government gas facility in Chicago does the same. The technology to end civilization was already widely in play before the first act of war.
When war breaks out it bypasses traditional battlefields entirely. Fleets of high-altitude aircraft deliver lethal chemical agents directly onto civilian populations. The three agents used are Phosgon which desiccates the lungs, Halgene which blinds, and Calmite which explodes on contact. No known gas mask offers protection against any of them.
Bell's account is relentless in its focus on civilian annihilation. The great cities of London, Paris, Rome, and New York are erased in rapid succession. Social order collapses almost immediately, giving way to panic, mob violence, and summary justice. Denning attempts to govern through radio broadcasts and emergency decrees, but his authority proves hopeless. His own arc mirrors that of the state, as administrative competence gives way to exhaustion and despair, and he is ultimately beaten by a crowd of his own citizens, surviving only long enough to die of his injuries in the military hospital where the manuscript is written.
Published in 1931, The Gas War of 1940 belongs to a distinct interwar genre of future-war fiction driven by genuine public fear of aerial chemical warfare and the potential destruction of civilization. This is not a novel about armies or strategy but about what happens to cities and the people in them. In the end, Denning himself dissolves into the same ruin as everything else.
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