2101. A comet will annihilate life on Earth. Humanity has had 75 years to prepare for it. The ruling classes have together built stellar Arks capable of colonizing a new planet. A damning truth quickly emerges: we cannot save everyone. Only select few elites will soar into space. One by one, the Arches took off. Humanity was going to be able to leave the Earth. Humanity yes, but not all humans. 4 days before impact. One of the gigantic Arches has not yet taken off. Outside its fortified base, civilization has already collapsed for fifty years. Aelys is one of the elites. She was born inside the base, 23 years ago. Convinced that she must help the survivors after the impact, she flees. Her family has only 72 hours to find her before the final departure. The last Ark will not wait for them. IMAGINARY PRIZE discovery "The Little Words of Booksellers" 2020

« ELON » is a short story, prequel to the series AFTER THE COLLAPSE A seven-year-old boy follows his parents into the mountains in search of refuge. He was born during the collapse of civilization in France. His family was denied boarding the Ark which will leave Earth for good in seven days, hours before the impact of the killer comet. Hope is stronger than fear, but until when?

Year 817. After an unexpected jump in time, the stellar Ark Magonia orbits the Earth of our ancestors. Damaged, it lost a graviton tank, which crashed in the Alps... A first mission is organized to recover the precious fuel. Indispensable to the intergalactic journey of the Ark, it is the only chance to reach their new planet. Enzo and his family then discover that their return to the past is not an accident, but a willful diversion, and the plotters have just left for Earth. Enzo and his family decide to go find the lost tank themselves. How will our ancestors, and the prelate Agobard of Lyon, react to these beings from Magonia?

Indochina Monographs. An account of the last two years of the Vietnamese Conflict. L.C. card 81-607989.

From the Euphrates Valley to the southern Peruvian Andes, early complex societies have risen and fallen, but in some cases they have also been reborn. Prior archaeological investigation of these societies has focused primarily on emergence and collapse. This is the first book-length work to examine the question of how and why early complex urban societies have reappeared after periods of decentralization and collapse. Ranging widely across the Near East, the Aegean, East Asia, Mesoamerica, and the Andes, these cross-cultural studies expand our understanding of social evolution by examining how societies were transformed during the period of radical change now termed “collapse.” They seek to discover how societal complexity reemerged, how second-generation states formed, and how these re-emergent states resembled or differed from the complex societies that preceded them. The contributors draw on material culture as well as textual and ethnohistoric data to consider such factors as preexistent institutions, structures, and ideologies that are influential in regeneration; economic and political resilience; the role of social mobility, marginal groups, and peripheries; and ethnic change. In addition to presenting a number of theoretical viewpoints, the contributors also propose reasons why regeneration sometimes does not occur after collapse. A concluding contribution by Norman Yoffee provides a critical exegesis of “collapse” and highlights important patterns found in the case histories related to peripheral regions and secondary elites, and to the ideology of statecraft. After Collapse blazes new research trails in both archaeology and the study of social change, demonstrating that the archaeological record often offers more clues to the “dark ages” that precede regeneration than do text-based studies. It opens up a new window on the past by shifting the focus away from the rise and fall of ancient civilizations to their often more telling fall and rise. CONTRIBUTORS Bennet Bronson Arlen F. Chase Diane Z. Chase Christina A. Conlee Lisa Cooper Timothy S. Hare Alan L. Kolata Marilyn A. Masson Gordon F. McEwan Ellen Morris Ian Morris Carlos Peraza Lope Kenny Sims Miriam T. Stark Jill A. Weber Norman Yoffee

DIVA critical and comparative reexamination of the East German revolution of 1989 and its aftermath, suggesting which causal mechanisms account for the collapse of the East German state and German reunification./div

General Cao Van Vien describes the final collapse of the South Vietnamese forces in 1975 following the military U.S. withdrawl. “General Cao Van Vien was the last chairman of the South Vietnamese Joint General Staff. For almost ten years he worked closely with other senior Vietnamese officers and civilian leaders and dealt with U.S. military and civilian representatives in Saigon. General Vien is therefore particularly well qualified to give an account of the final years from a South Vietnamese standpoint. “This is one of a series of monographs written by officers who held responsible positions in the Cambodian, Laotian, and South Vietnamese armed forces.” Includes over 20 maps, tables and illustrations.