The End Of The World
Page 1
THE END
—— OF THE ——
WORLD
THE END
—— OF THE ——
WORLD
Stories of the Apocalypse
EDITED BY
MARTIN H. GREENBERG
Copyright © 2010 by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The end of the world : stories of the apocalypse / edited by
Martin H. Greenberg.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-60239-967-9 (alk. paper)
1. End of the world--Fiction. 2. Science fiction, American.
3. Science fiction, English. I. Greenberg, Martin Harry.
PS648.S3E56 2010
823’.087608372--dc22
2010006101
Printed in TK
CONTENTS
Copyrights
Dancing Through the Apocalypse by Robert Silverberg
Bang or Whimper
The Hum by Rick Hautala
Salvador by Lucius Shepard
We Can Get Them for You Wholesale by Neil Gaiman
The Big Flash by Norman Spinrad
The Last Man
Kindness by Lester del Rey
The Underdweller by William F. Nolan
Lucifer by Roger Zelazny
Life After the End
To the Storming Gulf by Gregory Benford
The Feast of Saint Janis by Michael Swanwick
The Wheel by John Wyndham
Jody After the War by Edward Bryant
Salvage by Orson Scott Card
By Fools Like Me by Nancy Kress
Dark, Distant Futures
The Store of the Worlds by Robert Sheckley
Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels by George R. R. Martin
“If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth …” by Arthur C. Clarke
Afterward by John Helfers
Witnesses to the End of the World
When We Went to See the End of The World by Robert Silverberg
Flight to Forever by Poul Anderson
About the Authors
COPYRIGHTS
“Dancing through the Apocalypse,” copyright © 2010 by Robert Silverberg.
“The Hum,” copyright © 2007 by Rick Hautala. First published in Man vs. Machine. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Salvador,” by Lucius Shepard. Copyright © 1984 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1984. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“We Can Get Them for You Wholesale,” copyright © 1989 by Neil Gaiman. First published in Knave, vol. 16, No. 7. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Big Flash,” copyright © 1969 by Damon Knight. First published in Orbit 5. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Kindness,” copyright © 1944 by Street & Smith Publications. First published in Astounding, October 1944. Reprinted by permission of the agent for the author's estate, the Scott Meredith Literary Agency.
“The Underdweller,” copyright © 1957 by King-Size Publications, renewed by William F. Nolan. First published in Fantastic Universe, August 1957. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Lucifer,” copyright © 1964 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. First published in Worlds of Tomorrow, June 1964. Reprinted by permission of the agent for the author's estate, the Pimlico Agency.
“Knock,” copyright © 1948 by Standard Magazines. First published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1948. Reprinted by permission of the agent for the author's estate, the Scott Meredith Literary Agency.
“To the Storming Gulf,” copyright © 1985 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1985. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Feast of Saint Janis,” copyright © 1980 by Michael Swanwick. First published in New Dimensions 11. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Wheel,” copyright © 1952 by Standard Magazines, Inc., renewed copyright © 1980 by John Wyndham. First published in Startling Stories, January 1952. Reprinted by permission of the agent for the author's estate, the Scott Meredith Literary Agency.
“Jody After the War,” copyright © 1972 by Edward Bryant. First published in Orbit 10. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Salvage,” copyright © 1986 by Orson Scott Card. First published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, February 1986. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“By Fools Like Me,” copyright © 2007 by Nancy Kress. First published in Asimov's Science Fiction, September 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Store of the Worlds,” copyright © 1959 by Robert Sheckley. First published in Playboy, September 1959. Reprinted by permission of the executor for the author's estate, Gail Dana Sheckley.
“Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels,” copyright © 1973 by George R. R. Martin. First published in Vertex, December 1973. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“‘If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth… ’,” copyright © 1951, renewed © 1979 by Arthur C. Clarke. First published in Future, September 1951. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agents, Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency, Inc.
“Afterward,” copyright © 2006 by John Helfers. First published in Millennium 3001. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“When We Went to See the End of the World,” copyright © 1972 by Robert Silverberg. First published in Universe 2. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Flight to Forever,” copyright © 1950 by Poul Anderson. First published in Super Science Stories, November 1950. Reprinted by permission of the agent for the author's estate, Ralph M. Vicinanza, Ltd.
DANCING THROUGH THE
APOCALYPSE
Robert Silverberg
HUMANKIND SEEMS TO take a certain grisly delight in stories about the end of the world, since the market in apocalyptic prophecy has been a bullish one for thousands or, more likely, millions of years. Even the most primitive of protohuman creatures, back there in the Africa of Ardipithecus and her descendants, must have come eventually to the realization that each of us must die; and from there to the concept that the world itself must perish in the fullness of time was probably not an enormous intellectual leap for those hairy bipedal creatures of long ago. Around their prehistoric campfires our remote hominid ancestors surely would have told each other tales of how the great fire in the sky would become even greater one day and consume the universe, or, once our less distant forebears had moved along out of the African plains to chillier Europe, how the glaciers of the north would someday move implacably down to crush them all. Even an eclipse of the sun was likely to stir brief apocalyptic excitement.
I suppose there is a kind of strange comfort in thoughts such as: “If I must die, how good that all of you must die also!” But the chi
ef value of apocalyptic visions, I think, lies elsewhere than in that sort of we-will-all-go-together-when-we-go spitefulness, for as we examine the great apocalyptic myths we see that not only death but resurrection is usually involved in the story—a bit of eschatological comfort, of philosophical reassurance that existence, though finite and relatively brief for each individual, is not totally pointless. Yes, the tale would run, we have done evil things and the gods are angry and the world is going to perish, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, but then will come a reprieve, a second creation, a rebirth of life, a better world than the one that has just been purged.
What sort of end-of-the-world stories our primordial preliterate ancestors told is something we will never know, but the oldest such tale that has come down to us, which is found in the 5,000-year-old Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, is an account of a great deluge that drowns the whole Earth, save only one man, Ziusudra by name, who manages to save his family and set things going again. Very probably the deluge story had its origins in memories of some great flood that devastated Sumer and its Mesopotamian neighbors in prehistoric times, but that is only speculation. What is certain is that the theme can be found again in many later versions: the Babylonian version gives the intrepid survivor the name of Utnapishtim, the Hebrews called him Noah, to the ancient Greeks he was Deucalion, and in the Vedic texts of India he is Manu. The details differ, but the essence is always the same: the gods, displeased with the world, resolve to destroy it, but then bring mankind forth for a second try.
Floods are not the only apocalypses that religious texts offer us. The Norse myths give us a terrible frost, and in the Fimbulwinter, all living things die except a man and a woman who survive by hiding in a tree. The myths follow the usual redemptionist course and repeople the world, but then comes an even greater cataclysm, Ragnarok, the doom of the gods themselves, in which the stars fall, the Earth sinks into the sea, and fire consumes everything—only to be followed by yet another rebirth and an era of peace and plenty. And the Christian tradition provides the spectacular final book of the Bible, the Revelation of St. John the Divine, in which the wrath of God is visited upon the Earth in a host of ways (fire, plague, hail, drought, earthquakes, flood, and much more), leading to the final judgment and the redemption of the righteous. The Aztecs, too, had myths of the destruction of the world by fire—several times over, in fact—and so did the Mayas. Even as I write this, much popular excitement is being stirred by an alleged Mayan prediction that the next apocalypse is due in 2012, which has engendered at least three books and a movie so far.
Since apocalyptic visions are nearly universal in the religious literature of the world, and apparently always have been, it is not surprising that they should figure largely in the fantasies of imaginative storytellers. Even before the term “science fiction” had been coined, stories of universal or near-universal extinction brought about not by the anger of the deities but by the innate hazards of existence were being written and achieving wide popularity. Nineteenth-century writers were particularly fond of them. Thus we find such books as Jean-Baptiste de Grainville's The Last Man, or Omegarus and Syderia (1806) and Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826), which was written under the shadow of a worldwide epidemic of cholera that raged from 1818 to 1822. Edgar Allan Poe sent a comet into the Earth in “The Conversation of Eros and Charmion” (1839). The French astronomer Camille Flammarion's astonishing novel of 1893, La Fin du Monde, or Omega in its English translation, brought the world to the edge of doom—but only to the edge—as another giant comet crosses our path. H. G. Wells told a similar story of near-destruction, almost surely inspired by Flammarion's, in “The Star” (1897). In his classic novel The Time Machine (1895), Wells had already taken his time traveler to the end of life on Earth and beyond (“All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives—all that was over”).
Another who must certainly have read Flammarion is his compatriot Jules Verne, who very likely drew on the latter sections of Omega for his novella, “The Eternal Adam” (1905). Here Verne espouses a cyclical view of the world: Earth is destroyed by a calamitous earthquake and flood, but the continent of Atlantis wondrously emerges from the depths to provide a new home for the human race, which after thousands of years of toil rebuilds civilization; and we are given a glimpse, finally, of a venerable scholar of the far future looking back through the archives of humanity, “bloodied by the innumerable hardships suffered by those who had gone before him,” and coming, “slowly, reluctantly, to an intimate conviction of the eternal return of all things.”
The eternal return! It is the theme of so much of this apocalyptic literature. That phrase of Verne's links his story to the core of Flammarion's own belief that our own little epoch is “an imperceptible wave on the immense ocean of the ages” and that mankind's destiny is, as we see in his closing pages, to be born again and again into universe after universe, each to pass on in its turn and be replaced, for time goes on forever and there can be neither end nor beginning.
Rebirth after catastrophe is to be found, also, in M. P. Shiel's magnifi-cent novel The Purple Cloud (1901), in which we are overwhelmed by a mass of poisonous gas, leaving only one man—Adam is his name, of course—as the ostensible survivor, until he finds his Eve and life begins anew. No such renewal is offered in Frank Lillie Pollock's terminally apocalyptic short story “Finis” (1906), though, which postulates a gigantic central star in the galaxy whose light has been heading toward us for an immense span of time and now finally arrives, so that “there, in crimson and orange, flamed the last dawn that human eyes would ever see.”
There is ever so much more. Few readers turn to apocalyptic tales these days for reassurance that once the sins of mankind have been properly punished, a glorious new age will open; but, even so, the little frisson that a good end-of-the-world story supplies is irresistible to writers, and the bibliography of apocalyptic fantasy is an immense one. Garrett P. Serviss's The Second Deluge (1912) drowns us within a watery nebula. G. Peyton Wertenbaker's “The Coming of the Ice” (1926) brings the glaciers back with a thoroughness that makes the Norse Fimbulwinter seem like a light snowstorm. (I had a go at the same theme myself in my 1964 novel, Time of the Great Freeze, but, unlike Wertenbaker, I opted for a thaw at the end.) Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer's When Worlds Collide (1933) tells us of an awkward astrophysical event with very unpleasant consequences for our planet. Edmond Hamilton's “In the World's Dusk” (1936) affords a moody vision of the end of days, millions of years hence, when one lone man survives and “a white salt desert now covered the whole of Earth. A cruel glaring plain that stretched eye-achingly to the horizons….” Robert A. Heinlein's story “The Year of the Jackpot” (1952) puts the end much closer—1962, in fact—when bad things begin to happen in droves all around the world, floods and typhoons and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions worthy of the Book of Revelation, culminating in a lethal solar catastrophe. J. T. McIntosh's One in Three Hundred (1954) also has the sun going nova, at novel length. And, of course, the arrival of atomic weapons in 1945 set loose such a proliferation of nuclear-holocaust stories that it would take many pages to list them all.
Modern-day writers continue to find literary rewards in dancing through the apocalypse. Twenty such jolly visions of ultimate disaster are presented here: Fredric Brown's sardonic, unforgettable “Knock”; Lucius Shepard's bleak and all-too-realistic “Salvador”; Poul Anderson's Wellsian “Flight to Forever”; Michael Swanwick's eloquent, ferocious “The Feast of St. Janis”; Edward Bryant's neatly understated “Jody After the War”; Lester del Rey's sly “Kindness”; and more than a dozen more.
The possible variations on the theme are endless. In a poem written nearly a century ago, Robert Frost speculated on whether the world will end in fire or in ice. Though he asserted that he himself held with “those who favor fire,” he added that “for destruction ice is also great” and would suffice to do t
he task.
Fire or ice, one or the other—who knows? The final word on finality is yet to be written. But what is certain is that we will go on speculating about it … right until the end.
BANG OR
WHIMPER
THE HUM
Rick Hautala
“CAN YOU HEAR that?”
“Hear what?”
“That …”
Dave Marshall rolled over in bed and struggled to come awake. He blinked, trying to focus his eyes in the darkness as he listened intently.
“I don't hear anything, sweetie,” he said as he slid his hand up the length of his wife's thigh, feeling the roundness of her hip and wondering for a moment if she was interested in a little midnight tumble. He felt himself stirring.
“Don't tell me you can't hear that,” Beth said irritably.
Dave realized she was serious about this although he'd be damned if he could hear anything. It didn't matter, though, because the romantic mood had already evaporated.
“Honest to God, honey, I don't hear anything. Maybe it was a siren or—”
“It wasn't a siren. It's … I can just barely hear it. It's like this low, steady vibration.” Beth held her breath, concentrating hard on the sound that had disturbed her.