Forward and Chapter 1 Summary

In the Forward to the Everhard Manuscript, a twenty-seventh century academic, Anthony Meredith, introduces the manuscript by suggesting it cannot be taken entirely seriously since the heroic portrayal of its hero, Ernest Everhard, has been colored by the love and reverence of the manuscript's author, Everhard's wife Avis. Meredith suggests, however, that as a chronicle of the early stages of the worker's revolution, the manuscript does give a sense of the times in which it was written. He comments on the origins of the Oligarchy and of its nickname The Iron Heel, and the idealism that gave rise to both the socialist uprising and the creation of the Manuscript, idealism that he suggests was severely damaged following the failure of the Second Revolt. Finally, he writes that Avis created the manuscript after the First Revolt as a tribute to...