Search Worlds Without End

England's trilogy, Darkness and Dawn (published in 1912, 1913 and 1914 as The Vacant World, Beyond the Great Oblivion and Afterglow) tells the story of 2 modern people who awake a thousand years after the earth was devastated by a meteor. They work to rebuild civilization.

The Vacant World - Beatrice Kendrick, and her boss, engineer Allan Stern, wakes up on an upper floor of a ruined Manhattan skyscraper, thousands of years in the future when civilization has been destroyed. The pair has been in a state of suspended animation for fifteen hundred years. Changes in the earth's features as well as monstrously mutated ""humans"" make it clear they have little hope of survival.

Beyond the Great Oblivion - Allan and Beatrice begin to discover the nature of the catastrophe that has split the Earth open. Rebuilding an airplane, they find a ""bottomless"" chasm near Pittsburgh where a huge portion of the Earth has been torn away to become a second moon. Alan and Beatrice earn the loyalty of the People of this Abyss and lead them from the chasm to New York.

The Afterglow - Allan and Beatrice, with the People of the Abyss, prepare to recolonize the Earth's surface. But first, they must defeat the devolved, cannibalistic survivors who populate Earth's cities.

From the foreword to the 1915 edition: This book is the result of an attempt to carry the monopolistic principle to its logical conclusion.

Isaac Flint, a greedy billionaire businessman, plots to extract oxygen from the air and then sell it back to people if they want to live. Through bribes, blackmail and threats, he forces a group of scientists to develop a means of extracting the oxygen and forces politicians to cooperate with his plan. Soon, surrounded by a private army of guards to prevent the outraged populace from stopping him, Flint has "cornered" the oxygen market, and people everywhere have no choice but to pay for the air they breathe--or see themselves and their families die for lack of oxygen.