Millennial Review VI: The Judgment of Eve by Edgar Pangborn (1966)
Judgment of Eve
By Edgar Pangborn
20 Jan, 2000
Millennial Reviews
0 comments
The Judgment of Eve
Edgar Pangborn
Dell, 1966
159 pageI’m cheating: depending on how you take the evidence, The Judgment of Eve could be set anywhere from around 2000 to 2020 and the narrator is living centuries in the future.
Synopsis: Eve lives with her mother and an idiot named Caleb in the New England woods twenty years after a small nuclear war and a plague have destroyed civilization and reduced the human population to the bare edge of sustainability. Eve is 28 when the first visitors arrive: Kenneth, who is near-blind, old Claudius, whose arm was crippled when a building fell on him and Ethan, friend of Kenneth. There is some friction over Eve. The solution, arrived at by her mother reading fairy tales, is that Eve will set a quest. She tells the three to leave and return in the fall to tell her what love is.