The End of the World: Classic Tales of Apocalyptic Science Fiction (anthology, 2010)

This is an anthology from Fall River Press (the publishing arm of Barnes & Noble, I think) collecting "classic" (i.e., public domain) stories of the apocalypse, ranging from Lord Byron's poem "Darkness" (1816) to H. P. Lovecraft's short story "Nyarlathotep" (1920). I picked it up because I wanted to read the Robert Cromie novel The Crack of Doom (1895), and this was its most accessible contemporary reprinting. Several years later, I've finally gotten around to reading the rest of the book. I reread short stories I'd previously read, but not novels: this means I skipped rereading Crack of Doom as well as Arthur Conan Doyle's The Poison Belt (1913).

I taught a class on apocalyptic fiction many years ago; an idea that I discussed in that class in the context of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine is that the concept of an apocalypse (in the nonreligious sense) is dependent on a certain understanding of time, one that didn't really emerge until the 1800s. I think in our present moment, apocalyptic narratives usually emerge from an awareness of how societies change: we know we might destroy it, be it from bombs or medicine gone wrong or environmental collapse or whatever. (Isaac Asimov discusses this in his essay "Social Science Fiction," arguing you can only get science fiction once it's clear that societies can evolve and change in fundamental ways quite quickly; he blames the double whammy of the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution.)  

The End of the World: Classic Tales of Apocalyptic Science Fiction
compiled by Michael Kelahan

Collection published: 2010
Contents originally published: 1816-1920
Acquired: January 2019
Read: June 2025

But before the idea that we could destroy society emerged, there was a different one that runs across the stories presented in this book: the idea of deep time, that human existence is only a very recent thing across the span of the Earth and the universe, and thus we have no reason to think it will last. We have a lot of natural disasters here: humanity undone by comets, or the sun going dark, or the sun expanding, or what have you. Once you understand how small humanity is on the scale of all time, then you also have no reason to think it will last.

Many of the stories here are good examples of what Isaac Asimov could call technology-dominant (or gadget) stories: they're not concerned with character or even society (as later apocalyptic fiction usually is), but more the mechanics of it. What would happen if the sun overheated the Earth? How could a comet wipe everything out? This means that many of the stories are technically interesting, noteworthy for what they represent in a shift in how humans understand time... but not actually all that good. This is definitely the space that George Griffith's "A Corner in Lightning" (1898) is in, for example. (Which is a little disappointing, in that while Griffith wasn't a great writer, he was usually a more interesting one than he is here.)

That said, even some of these are good to read: Robert Duncan Milne's "Into the Sun" (1882) is kind of technical, but visceral, chronicling the Earth growing so hot no one will live. His sequel story, "Plucked from the Burning" (1882), reminded me a bit of On the Beach in its tour through a destroyed familiar landscape. I don't think "The Star" (1897) is H. G. Wells's best work, but you know of course it's well thought out; similarly, Grant Allen's talent for landscape description serves him well in "The Thames Valley Catastrophe" (1897).

Still, there are some highlights, particularly where you see the way science fiction will go coming into existence. In what's kind of a side comment in Rhetorics of Fantasy, Farah Mendlesohn discusses how initially, sf has what she calls "the incredible invention story" (Asimov's gadget story), but that it "permits only one level of emotional response, that of ritualized amazement or ritualized horror." Later, sf moves into what she calls "the completed future," where instead of showing the transition from the present moment, the reader is immersed in a world unfamiliar to them (p. xiv). The best stories here are of this type, placing the reader in the postapocalyptic future and letting them build the picture themselves. 

These ones feel particularly modern, and I suppose it's not a coincidence that they're all written by authors who have significance outside of proto-sf. For example, I really enjoyed Ambrose Bierce's "For the Ahkoond" (1888, I think; Kelahan doesn't give an original publication date for it), told as a report from a forty-sixth-century archaeologist exploring a North America devastated by a New Ice Age. Along similar lines, Jack London's "The Scarlet Plague" (1912) is evocative, and inventive in how it has someone who did live through the apocalypse try to tell its story to someone born after it, who thus has no frame of reference for what the world used to be like. (It reminded me a lot of Wells's The War in the Air [1908]; surely London read it, though he was doing similar work already in The Iron Heel [1908].)

I also really like E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" (1909). I'd read it before of course, but I'd forgotten how clever it was, Forster showing us the darkness of this future by telling the story from the perspective of someone who doesn't see how dark it all is. A lot of his contemporaries would have done a lot worse; it's probably not a coincidence that he was a king of modernism. I think a lot of ink has been spilled about the relationship between sf and realism (including by me, in my never-finished book), but I wonder if there's more to be done about modernism and sf. (It's probably been done; I should ask my colleague Cari Hovanec.)

Anyway, some duds—it would be hard to imagine a collection of pre-1900 sf that wouldn't have at least a few—but a good sampling of what was going on in the genre we know so well today before it was the genre we know so well today.

Review: A Plunge into Space by Robert Cromie

Hardcover, 240 pages
Published 1976 (originally 1891)
Borrowed from the library
Read June 2018

A Plunge into Space by Robert Cromie

Alas! that it is always thus with the brilliant, god-like science begotten of organic life. The touch of a baby's finger, the falling weight of a hair, and it bites the dust before the demon wrath of inorganic force. (238-9)

It's hard to read this book and not conclude that H. G. Wells was inspired by it when he wrote The First Men in the Moon (1900-01): a wacky, abstracted scientist builds a sphere-shaped spaceship because he's figured out something about gravity, and uses it to travel to another world where he interacts with the inhabitants, and the whole story ends with the spaceship destroyed (as the above quotation refers to). But apparently Wells's Moon story was not inspired by Cromie's Mars one. In any case, as always, Wells's is the much better book, and as always, Cromie blandly operates in the subgenre that Wells questions the assumptions of.

The plot of A Plunge into Space is pretty straightforward. Henry Barnett works out the secret of gravity; his explorer pal Alexander MacGregor recruits a group of people to go on a mission to Mars with them, consisting of a financier, a literary man, an artist, a politician, and a reporter. They go there and spend the middle of the book learning a lot of boring stuff about the supposed utopian society of Mars (Cromie clearly thought that attempts to restructure the Earth's political system were doomed to failure); also one of the group's members falls in love with a Martian woman. Then they go home, but the Martian woman story away so she has to be jettisoned into space so the oxygen doesn't run out. Her lover is so overcome by grief that he destroys the ship, killing Barnett.

This makes the whole thing sound more exciting than it is. I liked Cromie's future-war novel, The Next Crusade (1896), a decent amount because it had actual character stories, but A Plunge into Space is characteristic of mediocre early sf, filled with flat characters (each member of the expedition has exactly one personality trait corresponding to their occupation; the financier is greedy, the politician is self-aggrandizing, and so on) and boring descriptions of a boring utopia. Whether Wells read Plunge or not, his reworking of it was vastly superior and much more delightful. Thank God he came along and upset the genre to its everlasting betterment. Plunge is an interesting historical curiosity but little more; it didn't even give me very much new material for thinking about scientists in Victorian literature.

Early SF Tales from the Eaton Collection: The Next Crusade by Robert Cromie

Brief prelude to point out that my attempt to catch up on audio reviewing continues, with the second meeting of the Eighth Doctor and River Song this month, in the second volume of DOOOOOOOOOOOM COALITION.

Hardcover, 240 pages
Published 1896

Borrowed from the Eaton Collection

Read January 2015

The Next Crusade by Robert Cromie

This is, without a doubt, the best of the books I read at the Eaton Collection. It's apparently a sequel to an 1889 novel called For England's Sake, but stands alone from it, as I never was confused. I don't know if they share any characters, or just a future history. I did like what Cromie says of his project in the preface: "I make no apology for taking upon myself to write the history of the future. This method already has many students; and certainly some advantages over that of writing the history of the past. It can hardly be so full of errors" (v). Basically, it's Turkey and Russia and Germany vs. England and Austria, which isn't quite the way the next war lined up, but whatever.

Cromie's story doesn't have the fantastic inventions that George Griffith would bring to the future war genre the next year, but Cromie groks what few of his contemporaries did: that he could have actual character stories playing out against his future-history backdrop. The Next Crusade isn't really the tale of the Anglo-Turkish War, but of the poor gentleman Charlie Cameron, his friend John Jackson, and the delightfully crotchety sergeant-major Joe Huggins. In some ways it's a very pessimistic story, in other ways it's very jingoistic (Cromie really hates on the Turks*), but on the whole, it's a rollicking war story of one of the better kinds: good characters and great naval battles!

* "The purpose of this enterprise was intrinsically barbaric and brutal, but, alas! necessary. Absolutely it was wrong. Relatively it was right. It was the least wrong possible, for it would displace a greater wrong. It was a New Crusade, the grandest that had ever sailed from the West unto the East" (72-3).