Inner artwork depicting cities in flaming ruins, by an uncredited artist, for the short story "Regeneration" by Charles Dye and Katherine MacLean fromFuture Combined with Science Fiction Stories, September 1951.
The Dying Earth genre differs from theapocalyptic subgenre in that it deals not with catastrophic destruction, but with entropic exhaustion of Earth. It is therefore described as more "melancholic".[2] The genre was prefigured by the works of theRomantic movement.Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville'sLe Dernier Homme (1805) narrates the tale of Omegarus, the Last Man on Earth. It is a bleak vision of the future when Earth has become totally sterile.Lord Byron's poem "Darkness" (1816) shows Earth after the Sun has died.Mary Shelley'sThe Last Man (1826) details a future in which humanity is slowly but inexorably wiped from the face of the planet by an unstoppable outbreak of theGreat Plague, killing almost everyone but the protagonist, immune to the disease's effects.
Another early example isLa Fin du Monde (The End of the World, akaOmega: the last days of the world), written byCamille Flammarion and published in France in 1893. The first half of the novel deals with a comet on a collision course with Earth in the 25th century. The last half focuses on Earth's future history, where civilizations rise and fall, humans evolve, and finally Earth ends as an old, dying, and barren planet.
H. G. Wells's 1895novellaThe Time Machine utilizes Dying Earth imagery. At the end of the novel, the unnamed time traveller travels thirty million years into the far future, where only gigantic crabs, butterflies and lichens exist on a barren Earth, then travels even further into the future to see the Sun go out and Earth freezing over.[2]
Two brooding works byWilliam Hope Hodgson would elaborate on Wells's vision.The House on the Borderland (1908) takes place in a house besieged by unearthly forces. The narrator then travels into a distant future in which humanity has died and then even further, past the death of Earth. Hodgson'sThe Night Land (1912) describes a time, millions of years in the future, when the Sun has gone dark. The last few millions of the human race are gathered together in a gigantic metal pyramid, the Last Redoubt, under siege from unknown forces and Powers outside in the dark.[2]
A work by the early French science fiction authorJ.-H. Rosny aîné,La Mort de la Terre (1910), deals with the last, scattered generation of an evolved humankind on an exhausted, desert Earth and their encounter with a new type of mineral-metallic life. In some ways it reads like the inversion of his earlierLes Xipéhuz (1887), in which early humans encounter and battle an utterly alien and incomprehensible form of life.
From the 1930s onwards,Clark Ashton Smith wrote a series of stories situated inZothique, the last continent of Earth, where its inhabitants live out their lives in a similar manner to the civilisations of theClassical era. Smith said in a letter to L. Sprague de Camp, dated November 3, 1953:
Zothique, vaguely suggested byTheosophic theories about past and future continents, is the last inhabited continent of earth. The continents of our present cycle have sunken, perhaps several times. Some have remained submerged; others have re-risen, partially, and re-arranged themselves.The science and machinery of our present civilization have long been forgotten, together with our present religions. But many gods are worshipped; and sorcery and demonism prevail again as in ancient days. Oars and sails alone are used by mariners. There are no fire-arms—only the bows, arrows, swords, javelins, etc. of antiquity.
H. P. Lovecraft andRobert H. Barlow – "Till A' the Seas" (1935) is a tale of the slow fading of human civilization and the extinction of all life on Earth as it draws closer to the Sun and its radiance on the surface becomes more intense. The story centers on a male protagonist named Ull, the last of his tribe, and his journey across lands and abandoned cities in hopes of finding water, shelter and other survivors.
Don A. Stuart – Night (1935). Short story. As an unexpected side effect from an experimentalanti-gravity device, a test pilot is sent countless billions of years into the future. TheMilky Way has been reduced to less than alight-year in diameter, and the dead Earth istidally locked to a much larger and colder red Sun. All the gas in the atmosphere, except forneon andhelium, is frozen solid. A huge city contains the frozen remains of humans, and the machines humanity had perfected are dead due to thesuperconductivity caused by the cold.
J. R. R. Tolkien -The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) is set in the world ofMiddle-earth a landmass that was once part of the larger world of Arda, and which would eventually evolve into present-day Europe and surrounding continents. Many of the fantastical elements within the setting are fading away, dying out and/or generally goingextinct with the world itself being reshaped into something unrecognisable to its original inhabitants.
John Brunner – Catch a Falling Star, an extended version ofThe 100th Millennium, first published as "Earth is But a Star" (1958) which features in the Broderick anthology, (2001, below). An early example of a far future tale influenced by Vance.
Brian Aldiss – Hothouse (1962, also known asThe Long Afternoon of Earth). The Earth haslocked rotation with the Sun that has increased output, and plants are engaged in a constant frenzy of growth and decay, like a tropical forest enhanced a thousandfold; a few small groups of humans still live, on the edge of extinction, beneath the giantbanyan tree that covers the entire day side of Earth.
Poul Anderson – Epilogue (1962). A novella about a starship from Earth on its way to a newplanetary system, but which due to malfunction returns to its origin planetary system again three billion years into the future. Earth has drawn closer to the Sun which itself has grown "a little bigger and hotter", and life on Earth has been replaced by cybernetic organisms, descendants of human technology.
M. John Harrison – a series of short stories and novels set inViriconium from 1971 onwards. Viriconium is the capital city in which much of the action takes place. Viriconium lies on a dying Earth littered with thedetritus of the millennia, seemingly now its own hermetic universe wherechronology no longer applies.[4]
C. J. Cherryh – Sunfall (1977-2004), a collection of short stories set in various locations on Earth in the far future. The tone, themes and fantasy conventions employed in this collection differ by story. (These were reprinted inThe Collected Short Fiction of C. J. Cherryh.)
Doris Piserchia – Earthchild (1977), in which the last human being on Earth faces competition from the world-spanning alien creatures that have devastated the planet.
George R.R. Martin – Dying of the Light (1977), a novel set on Worlorn, a world whose course is taking it into the far reaches of space, where all life on the planet will die.
Philip Jose Farmer – InDark Is the Sun (1979), a tribesman from the distant future quests across the landscape of a dying Earth. As with much of "Dying Earth" science fiction, this text ruminates on the nature of ending, and the meaning of time itself.
Thundarr the Barbarian (1980-1981)Saturday morninganimated series, created bySteve Gerber and produced byRuby-Spears Productions. Set in a future (c. 3994)post-apocalyptic wasteland divided into kingdoms or territories—the majority of which are ruled by (mostly evil)wizards (who combine magical spells with reanimating technologies from the pre-catastrophe world)—and whoseruins typically feature recognizable geographical features from theUnited States. The hero Thundarr (voiced byRobert Ridgely), a muscular warrior, whose companions include Princess Ariel, a formidable young sorceress, and Ookla the Mok (leoninehumanoid) traveled the world on horseback, battling evil wizards.
Gene Wolfe – The Book of the New Sun (1981–3) chronicles the journey of a disgraced torturer namedSeverian to the highest position in the land. Severian, who claims to have a perfect memory, tells the story in first person.The Book takes place in the distant future, where the Sun has dimmed considerably.[6] Wolfe stated that Vance's series directly influenced this work.The Book has several associated volumes.
Darrell Schweitzer – The Shattered Goddess (1983), fantasy novel set at the end of man's dominion over Earth, in the interval between the death of the last deity of the former age and the rise of the first of the new. Followed byEchoes of the Goddess (2013), a prequel short story collection.
Michael Shea – Nifft the Lean (1982), a series of sword and sorcery tales set in a far future age where demons and alien entities vie for dominion over Earth. A later story set in the same universe involved amash up with Vance's Cugel the Clever.
Alan Grant – King Batman (November 1, 1996), story inBatman: Shadow of the Bat Annual #4 in which a supreme evil overlord observes as reality itself is falling apart from his castle citadel situated in front of a dying star. He peers back in time featuring a penultimate battle between good and evil which effected the very nature of the universe itself, horrid outcomes leading to the abysmal state in which he surveys. Using his almighty power the last monarch known as He-Who-Dares uses his abilities to torque the outcome of said fateful conflict between Nu-Gotham and its legacy hero/monarch against the assault of an invading horde in goods favor. Causing reality to shift into a form of higher existential consciousness thus bringing about a new dawn.
Alan Moore – Wildstorm Spotlight #1 (February 1, 1997), set at the penultimate heat death of the Universe.Majestros of Khera/Earth heads up a small conclave of immortal nomads eons in the future as reality dies around them.
Damien Broderick, ed. – Earth is But a Star: Excursions through Science Fiction to the Far Future (2001), an anthology of canonical dying Earth short stories mostly set on Earth in the far future, interwoven with specially commissioned critical essays on the dying Earth theme.
Ian Edginton – The Establishment (November 1, 2002), the end of which being re-visitation of Alan Moore'sWildstorm Spotlight: The Big Chill where Majestros had found a vastly evolved iteration of his formerWildC.A.T.s associateSpartan who sought to restart creation itself as it was ending. A deranged scientist from an alternate future would endeavor to co-opt his remaking of the dying continuum for his own purposes, with the British superteam and main leads of the comic itself mobilizing to stop him.
Jason Aaron – The Last Days of Midgard (2013), a comicbook miniseries forThor: God of Thunder comics in early 2014, where Allfather Thor sits at the end of time overseeing both the rebuilding of Old Asgard and a dying planet Earth after humanity killed its ecosystem, the race itself dying off as a result.[7]
Joe Keatinge – Strange Visitor (August 27, 2014), at the ultimate heat death of the primeDC Universe. Earth's denizens of the distant future begin evacuating as the world comes to an end while old friends Rathotis andKamandi regale each other using old tales of Superman and his feats of courage and hope. Eventually the Starchild of El would return far more powerful than ever to rescue an astronaut crew from being stuck in another dimension in the distant past. The now immortalized Superman would use his newfound abilities to halt the coming bite of entropy long enough to save everyone onboard before letting the old universe wink out so he could ferry them into the next.
Dan Jurgens – Of Tomorrow (Apr 18, 2018), a short story spinning out ofAction Comics 1000. Superman pays final respects to his adopted home planet billions of years in the future where the Sun was in the onset of consuming Earth. He and most of humanity, his wife included, having left for the stars long ago; Kal-El simply leaving a glass mini-figure of his surrogate parents behind at the memorial for Jonathan and Martha Kent before flying off.
Stant Litore -Ansible: A Thousand Faces (2020), a collection of ten novellas and short stories published 2014-2020, partially in homage to the works of Ursula K. Le Guin and William Hope Hodgson (The Night Land). Telepathic explorers make first contact and unwittingly open up the twenty-fifth century Earth to a soul-devouring alien species. On a darkened Earth, humanity's survivors take refuge within a huge arcology inspired by the Last Redoubt inThe Night Land; a band of time travelers move up and down humanity's timeline to preserve the species, ranging from prehistory to the eventual heat death of the universe.
^Wolfe, Gary K. (1986-08-18).Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy: A Glossary and Guide to Scholarship. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 30.ISBN978-0-313-22981-7.
The Eldritch Dark – This website contains almost all of Clark Ashton Smith's written work, as well as a comprehensive selection of his art, biographies, a bibliography, a discussion board, readings, fiction tributes and more.
