The End of the World

446 Pages·1983·1.12 MB·English

by  Eric S. Rabkin

title: The End of the World Alternatives
Rabkin, Eric S.; Greenberg, Martin Harry.;
author:
Olander, Joseph D.
publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
isbn10 | asin: 0809310333
print isbn13: 9780809310333
ebook isbn13: 9780585186405
language: English
Science fiction--History and criticism, End
subject
of the world in literature.
publication date: 1983
lcc: PN3433.6.E6 1983eb
ddc: 809.3/876
Science fiction--History and criticism, End
subject:
of the world in literature.
Page ii
is a series under the general editorship of Eric S. Rabkin, Martin H.
Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander which has been established to
serve the growing critical audience of science fiction, fantastic fiction,
and speculative fiction.
Other titles in this series are:
Bridges to Science Fiction, edited by George E. Slusser, George R.
Guffey, and Mark Rose, 1980
The Science Fiction of Mark Clifton, edited by Barry N. Malzberg and
Martin H. Greenberg, 1980
Fantastic Lives: Autobiographical Essays by Notable Science Fiction
Writers, edited by Martin H. Greenberg, 1981
Astounding Science Fiction: July 1939, edited by Martin H.
Greenberg, 1981
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction: April 1965, edited by
Edward L. Ferman, 1981
The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich, edited by Charles G.
Waugh and Martin H. Greenberg, 1981
The Best Science Fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle, edited by Charles G.
Waugh and Martin H. Greenberg, 1981
Bridges to Fantasy, edited by George E. Slusser, Eric S. Rabkin, and
Robert Scholes, 1982
Coordinates: Placing Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by George
E. Slusser, Eric S. Rabkin, and Robert Scholes, 1983.
No Place Else: Explorations in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction, edited
by Eric S. Rabkin, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander,
1983.
Page iii
The End of the World
Edited by
Eric S. Rabkin
Martin H. Greenberg
Joseph D. Olander
Southern Illinois University Press
Carbondale and Edwardsville
Page iv
Copyright © 1983 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois
University
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Production supervised by John DeBacher
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Main entry under title:
The End of the world.
(Alternatives)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
Contents: Introduction / Eric S. RabkinThe
remaking of zero / Gray K. WolfeThe lone survivor /
Robert Plank[etc.]
1. Science fictionHistory and criticism
Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. End of the world in
literatureAddresses, essays, lectures. I. Rabkin,
Eric S. II. Greenberg, Martin Harry. III. Olander, Joseph D.
IV. Series.
PN3433.6.E6 1983 809.3'876 82-19365
ISBN 0-8093-1033-3
86 85 84 83 4 3 2 1
Page v
Contents
Introduction: Why Destroy the World? vii
Eric S. Rabkin
1. The Remaking of Zero: Beginning at the End 1
Gary K. Wolfe
2. The Lone Survivor 20
Robert Plank
3. Ambiguous Apocalypse: Transcendental Versions of the 53
End
Robert Galbreath
4. Round Trips to Doomsday 73
W. Warren Wagar
5. Man-Made Catastrophes 97
Brian Stableford
6. The Rebellion of Nature 139
W. Warren Wagar
Notes 175
Selected Bibliography 187
Index 191
Page vii
Introduction: Why Destroy the World?
Eric S. Rabkin
"This is the way the world ends," T. S. Eliot wrote in "The Hollow
Men" (1925), "not with a bang but a whimper." But modern science
fiction has it both ways: in one story worlds collide, in the next the
degenerate remnants of humanity huddle in a cave. We are driven
from our world by our exploding sun or killed upon our world by
mutated monsters of both the gigantic and microscopic sorts. Aliens
intervene to wipe us out or transform us into their livestock. Even in
the blessed cases in which the real estate is neither disinfected nor
thoroughly atomized, "the world as we know it'' seems doomed. This
is, of course, no better than we deserve: we who have sown the world
with technologies that fairly seduce us into Armageddon should
expect to reap the worldwind. The modern popular literature of the
end of the world continues humanity's permanent questioning of its
place and its permanent quest for a reason to exist. We forever
reimagine the pilgrimage in and out of history, seeking the well at the
world's end, to drink the knowledge the gods withheld from Adam.
Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now,
lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live
forever: Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden . .
. and . . . placed . . . a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the
way of the tree of life. (Gen. 3:2224)
One way or another, we have always wanted to know too much, have
made our Father-Gods jealous, have risked changing the world and
thereby, inevitably, changed it. Ending our world, we simultaneously
create a new one, one sometimes fearful and one sometimes hopeful,
but one that always depends for its emergence upon the destruction of
the world that preceded it. No matter how indirectly, we always call
destruction an act we regret and yet somehow cherish as our own. If
Page viii
paradise is lost by us, we who have scared the gods have it in us to
create a paradise anew. The end of the world is a consequence of our
Original Sin.
In the written tale of Noah (probably about 850 ), God himself
B.C.E.
recognizes the inevitability of the sins for which He destroyed the
world: "the Lord said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground
any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil
from his youth" (Gen. 8:21). Instead, having purged the world, he
urges the remaining people and animals to be "fruitful and multiply"
(Gen. 9:7) and promises a new world stability the sign of which is the
rainbow, "a covenant between me and the earth" (Gen. 9:13). At
Ragnarok, the ''destruction of the powers" of Norse mythology, when
the monsters slay the gods and our world is destroyed, Yggdrasil, the
"world-tree" that is the universe, persists and, after fire and flood
subside, opens to bear Líf and Lífthrasir, a new and perfect man and
woman to found the next human race. Forever the world has ended
and each time, in fact, it has in some way gone on. In Milton's telling,
even when Adam and Eve's garden world ends, they have a new world
before them and His concern:
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.
(Paradise Lost, 1667)
When the world ends, what really ends is not all of creation
butonlythe world as we know it.
By understanding precisely how the world ends, or nearly ends, and
by understanding the consequences of that ending, we come to
understand the values inherent in the tales. In science fiction, the
world ends by earthly plague or cosmic accident or nuclear war, and
yet it goes on. Despite its often inhuman elements, it is still a very
human literature, just what one might expect human beings to write.
The last man on earth typically finds other survivors (George R.
Stewart's Earth Abides, 1949) or a better world elsewhere (Ray
Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, 1950) or a successor race of
nonhumans on earth (Clifford D. Simak's City, 1952) or in heaven
(Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, 1953). Rare is the case in this
romantic literature of the last man facing eternal damnation, though
such cases do occur (Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth And I Must
Scream," 1967). Of somewhat more frequent occurrence and
somewhat more