by Drew Ford
DOOMSDAY CLASSICS
GRAVE
Tales of Mankind's Post-Apocalyptic, Dystopian and Disastrous Destiny
PREDICTIONS
Edited by Drew Ford
Introduction by Harlan Ellison®
DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.
Mineola, New York
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: See page vi.
For mature readers only.
This work includes some violent and sexual content that may be
objectionable to some readers.
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 by Dover Publications, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Bibliographical Note
Grave Predictions: Tales of Mankind’s Post-Apocalyptic, Dystopian and Disastrous Destiny, first published by Dover Publications, Inc., in 2016, is a new compilation of short stories reprinted from standard editions. Illustrations that originally appeared in a story have not been reproduced for this edition.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ford, Drew (Andrew), editor. | Ellison, Harlan, writer of introduction.
Title: Grave predictions : tales of mankind’s post-apocalyptic, dystopian and disastrous destiny / edited by Drew Ford; introduction by Harlan Ellison.
Description: Mineola, New York : Dover Publications, 2016. | Series: Dover doomsday classics | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016014993| ISBN 9780486802312 (paperback) | ISBN 0486802310
Subjects: LCSH: Science fiction, American. | American fiction—21st century. | Dystopias—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Science Fiction / Short Stories. | FICTION / Science Fiction / Adventure. | FICTION / Science Fiction / Military. | FICTION / Science Fiction / General. | GSAFD: Apocalyptic fiction. | Dystopian fiction.
Classification: LCC PS648.S3 G693 2016 | DDC 813/.0876208—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016014993
Manufactured in the United States by RR Donnelley
80231001 2016
www.doverpublications.com
FINAL BLACKOUTS
Introduction by
HARLAN ELLISON
THAT ominous cloud descending on you is not the sun scurrying over the hill. It is the clawed hand of destruction. And this is a book of stories intended to describe that hand of mortal destruction in sixteen utterly different, yet all apocalyptically stunning ways!
Stop staring around like that . . . like a deer caught in the headlights. No cavalry is gonna be charging in to save you at the last moment. No fantasy troll or dungeonmaster will appear in a nanosecond and remove the threat. You’re on your own; captain of your ship, master of your Fate. Warnings of impending doom are not new: the Mayan calendar posited the End of Times centuries ago—and yet that date has come, gone, and we’re still sucking air; Those Who Believe made book on the prediction of the Reverend Bishop James Ussher that “God created the world on October 27, 4004 BC, at 6:00 PM”—and we would be gone by now. Happy 6029th birthday, suckers.
The Y2K “bug” was supposed to finish us off—and that was 15+ years ago. The Black Plague decimated humanity, World Wars 1, 2, 2.3 and yet we go on. Like rats and crocodiles, we are a stick-to-it species of cognitive lice on this green&blue body we call the Earth. Until we pave it over for parking lots and mini-malls. We are our own worst enemies . . . and even the most dire of the stories here isn’t one-millionth as morbid as what Man or Woman has done to others.
These are stories of “what-if?” . . . stories of pulse and perspiration . . . the name for it is extrapolation. Alien invaders from space—time-travelling winged blue monkeys from the center of the Earth—Global Warming, Nuclear Holocaust, attacks by werewolves—yeah, fantasists since before Jules Verne have had all these frights for you. And written them intriguingly. Whimsies and worrisome wishes, perhaps—yet they all hear at their core the constant yearning of the Kind Heart, the Calm Intelligence, that commends to us always: Tomorrow Will Come.
You, I, all of us stand atop a towering hillside of History, the Past replete with warnings as clear as those in this book. The remnants of human overreach, greed, churlishnous, hatred, prejudice. How many moments are left to us, to get our heads straight? These tales predict the clock is ticking down to total blackout: time runs thin. You are not alone. You have power in you; use it.
Feigned helplessness and adolescent distraction are the twin killers of Attempt; they cloud the mind, paralyze the limbs, drain your courage, and put you in the pen with the sheep awaiting the shearing. It takes balls and/or eggs to face the oncoming night, no matter what shape the specter takes. The end may well be nigh, but you can face it with your whimpering face in the bloody mud—or with your fangs bared and a cleverly worded challenge on your forked tongue. Your choice: lying down, or standing straight. The Lone Ranger or Sojourner Truth—or the kid who gets bullied in third grade.
Writing an introduction to a book of stories as well-edited as Drew Ford selected these, is so much a silliness, it’s as if one had a hysterical puppy-dog running a shadow’s length ahead of you, yapping, “The moon and your shadow are following you!”
Yeah; that, and an extra set of elbows will make you a star on America’s Got Tweekers! But having made my insincere apologies for having staved-in between you and what follows, allow me to attempt a few cleverisms to soften the beachhead:
I have gone before you; with the exception of only one of the forthcoming sixteen, I have read every and each of them—some of them I’ve edited or anthologized myself (as Dorothy Parker used to say, “You could look it up.” You could even look her up, if you don’t want to be standing there looking stupid when the curtain falls). They are all quite good and encapturing yarns. I knew or know all but three of the authors and personally vouch for the quality of the product being offered here. The three I didn’t know were sent to me by your good editor, Mr. Drew Ford . . . and I smiled lovingly at two of them; one of them I thought was silly.
Fifty-three million cold cash dollars to the first one of you who buys this book, tracks me down, and correctly names the one story herein that was to my taste “silly.” Now, that ought to be worth the price of admission! (Did I ever tell you that when I was a runaway kid, pre-teen, I worked on the road in the carny?) (Look it up. The end is nigh.)
HARLAN ELLISON
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Bear, Greg. “Judgment Engine.” Copyright © 1995 by Greg Bear. Reprinted with permission by the author.
Bradbury, Ray. “The Pedestrian.” Reprinted by permission of Don Congdon Associates, Inc. Copyright © 1951 by the Fortnightly Publishing Company.
Campbell, Ramsey. “The Pretence.” Copyright © 2013 by Ramsey Campbell. Reprinted with permission by the author.
Clarke, Arthur C. “No Morning After.” Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agents, Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency, Inc.
Ellison, Harlan. “Final Blackouts.” Copyright © 2015 by the Kilimanjaro Corporation. Reprinted with permission by the author.
Ellison, Harlan. “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.” Copyright © 2015 by the Kilimanjaro Corporation. Reprinted with permission by the author.
King, Stephen. “The End of the Whole Mess.” Copyright © 1993 by Stephen King. Reproduced by permission of Hodder and Stoughton Limited.
King, Stephen. “The End of the Whole Mess.” Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from NIGHTMARES & DREAMSCAPES BY Stephen King. Copyright © 1993 by Stephen King. All rig
hts reserved.
Lansdale, Joe R. “Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back.” Copyright © 1992 by Joe R. Lansdale. Reprinted with permission by the author.
Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” Copyright © 1973 by Ursula K. Le Guin. First appeared in “New Dimension 3” in 1973, and then in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, published by HarperCollins in 1975. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
Machado, Carmen Maria. “Inventory.” Copyright © 2013 by Carmen Maria Machado. Reprinted with permission by the author.
Samuels, Mark. “The Black Mould.” Copyright © 2011 by Mark Samuels. Reprinted with permission by the author.
Satifka, Erica L. “Automatic.” Copyright © 2007 by Erica L. Satifka. Reprinted with permission by the author.
Stableford, Brian. “The Engineer and the Executioner.” Copyright © 1976 by Brian Stableford. Reprinted with permission by the author.
CONTENTS
Harlan Ellison
“Final Blackouts,” an Introduction
Eugene Mouton
The End of the World (1872)
W. E. B. Du Bois
The Comet (1920)
Ray Bradbury
The Pedestrian (1951)
Arthur C. Clarke
No Morning After (1954)
Philip K. Dick
Upon the Dull Earth (1954)
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
2 B R 0 2 B (1962)
Harlan Ellison
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (1967)
Ursula K. Le Guin
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (1973)
Brian M. Stableford
The Engineer and the Executioner (1976)
Stephen King
The End of the Whole Mess (1986)
Joe R. Lansdale
Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back (1992)
Greg Bear
Judgment Engine (1995)
Erica L. Satifka
Automatic (2007)
Mark Samuels
The Black Mould (2011)
Ramsey Campbell
The Pretence (2013)
Carmen Maria Machado
Inventory (2013)
THE END OF THE WORLD
EUGENE MOUTON
And the world will end by fire.
OF all the questions that interest humankind, none is more worthy of research than that of the destiny of the planet we inhabit. Geology and history have taught us many things about the Earth’s past; we know the age of our world, within a few hundred million years or so; we know the order of development in which life progressively manifested itself and propagated over its surface; we know in which epoch humans finally arrived to sit down at the banquet that life had prepared for them, and for which it had taken several thousand years to set the table.
We know all that, or at least think we know it, which comes down to exactly the same thing—but if we are sure of our past, we are not of our future.
Humankind scarcely knows any more about the probable duration of its existence than each one of us knows about the number of years that he has yet to live:
The table is laid,
The exquisite parade,
That gives us cheer!
A toast, my dear!
All well and good—but are we on the soup, or the dessert? Who can tell us, alas, that the coffee will not be served very soon?
We go on and on, heedless of the future of the world, without ever asking ourselves whether, by chance, this frail boat that is carrying us across the ocean of infinity is not at risk of capsizing suddenly, or whether its old hull, worn away by time and impaired by the agitations of the voyage, does not have some leak though which death is filtering into its carcass—which is, of course, the very carcass of humankind—one drop at a time.
The world—which is to say, our terrestrial globe—has not always existed. It had begun, so it will end. The question is, when?
First of all, let us ask ourselves whether the world might end by virtue of an accident, a perturbation of present laws.
We cannot admit that. Such a hypothesis would, in fact, be in absolute contradiction with the opinion that we intend to sustain in this work. It is obvious, therefore, that we cannot adopt it. Any discussion is impossible if one admits the opinion that one is setting out to combat.
Thus, one point is definitely established: the Earth will not be destroyed by accident; it will end as a consequence of the continued action of the laws of its present existence. It will die, as they say, its appropriate death.
But will it die of old age? Will it die of a disease?
I have no hesitation in replying: no, it will not die of old age; yes, it will die of a disease—in consequence of excess.
I have said that the world will end as a consequence of the continued action of the laws of its present existence. It is now a matter of figuring out which, of all the agents functioning for the maintenance of the life of the terraqueous globe, is the one that will have the responsibility of destroying it some day.
I say this without hesitation: that agent is the same one to which the Earth owed its existence in the first place: heat. Heat will drink the sea; heat will eat the Earth—and this is how it will happen.
One day, with regard to the functioning of locomotives, the illustrious Stephenson asked a great English chemist what the force was that moved such machines. The chemist replied: “It’s the sun.”
And, indeed, all the heat that we liberate when we burn combustible vegetable matter—wood or coal—has been stored there by the sun; a piece of wood or coal is therefore, fundamentally, nothing but a preserve of solar radiation. The more vegetable life develops, the greater the accumulation of these preserves becomes. If a great deal is burned and a great deal created—that is to say, if cultivation and industry evolve, the storage the solar radiation absorbed by the Earth on the one hand and its liberation on the other will increase incessantly, and the Earth will become warmer in a continuous manner.
What would happen if the animal population, and the human population in its turn, followed the same progress? What would happen if considerable transformations, born of the very development of animal life on the surface of the globe, were to modify the structure of terrains, displace the basins of the seas, and reassemble humankind on continents that are both more fertile and more permeable to solar heat?
Now, that is exactly what will happen.
When one compares the world with what it once was, one is immediately struck by one fact that leaps to the eyes: the worldwide evolution of organic life. From the most elevated summits of mountains to the most profound gulfs of the sea, millions of billions of animalcules, animals, cryptogams and superior plants, have been working day and night for centuries, as have the foraminifera on which half our continents are built.
That work was going rapidly enough before the epoch when humans appeared on the Earth, but since the appearance of man it has developed with a rapidity that is accelerating every day. As long as humankind remained restricted to two or three parts of Asia, Europe and Africa, it was not noticeable, because, save for a few focal points of concentration, life in general still found it easy to pour into empty space the surplus accumulated at certain points of the civilized world; it was thus that colonization increasingly populated previously uninhabited countries innocent of all cultivation. Then commenced the first phase of the progress of life by human action: the agricultural phase.
Things moved in this direction for about six centuries, but large deposits of oil were developed, and, almost at the same time, chemistry and steam-power. The Earth then entered its industrial phase—which is only just beginning, since that was not much more than sixty years ago. But where this movement will lead us, and with what velocity we shall arrive, it is easy to presume, given that which has already happened before our eyes.
It is evident, for anyone with eyes to see, that for half a century, animals and people alike have tended to multiply, to prolifer
ate, to pullulate in a truly disquieting proportion. More is eaten, more is drunk, silkworms are cultivated, poultry fed and cattle fattened. At the same time, planning is going on everywhere; ground has been cleared; fecund crop rotations and intensive cultures have been invented, which double the soil’s yields; not content with what the earth produces, salmon at five francs a side have been sown in our rivers, and oysters at twenty-four sous a dozen in our gulfs.
In the meantime, enormous quantities of wine, beer and cider have been fermented; veritable rivers of eau-de-vie have been distilled, and millions of tonnes of oil burned—not to mention that heating equipment is improving incessantly, that more and more houses are being rendered draught-proof, and that the linen and cotton fabrics that humans employ to keep themselves warm are being fabricated more cheaply with every passing day.
To this already-sufficiently-somber picture it is necessary to add the insane developments of public education, which one can consider as a source of light and heat, for, if it does not emit them itself, it multiplies their production by giving humans the means of improving and extending their impact on nature.
This is where we are now; this is where a mere half-century of industrialism has brought us; obviously, there are, in all of this, manifest symptoms of an imminent exuberance, and one can conclude that within a hundred years from now, the Earth will have developed a paunch.
Then will commence the redoubtable period in which the excess of production will lead to an excess of consumption, the excess of consumption to an excess of heat, and the excess of heat to the spontaneous combustion of the Earth and all its inhabitants.
It is not difficult to anticipate the series of phenomena that will lead the globe, by degrees, to that final catastrophe. Distressing as the depiction of these phenomena might be, I shall not hesitate to map them out, because the prevision of these facts, by enlightening future generations as to the dangers of the excesses of civilization, might perhaps serve to moderate the abuse of life and postpone the fatal final accounting by a few thousand years, or at least a few months.
