Dying Earth subgenre
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The Dying Earth subgenre is a sub-category of science fantasy which takes place at the end of Time, when the Sun slowly fades and the laws of the Universe themselves fail, with the science becoming indistinguishable from magic. More generally, the Dying Earth sub-genre encompasses science fiction works set in the far distant future in a milieu of stasis or decline. Themes of world-weariness, innocence (wounded or otherwise), idealism, entropy and the hope of renewal tend to pre-dominate.
Early examples of this genre are Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville's Le Dernier Homme (1805) and H. G. Wells' novella The Time Machine (1895), at the end of which the time traveller travels into the far future. There he sees the last few living things on a dying Earth, before returning to his own time to relate his tale to a circle of contemporaries.
Two brooding works by William Hope Hodgson would elaborate on Wells' vision. The House on the Borderland (1908) takes place in a house besieged by unearthly forces. The narrator then travels perhaps psychically, and without explanation, into a distant future in which humanity has died and then even further, past the death of Earth. Hodgson's later The Night Land (1912) describes a time, millions of years in the future when the Sun had gone dark. The last few millions of the Human race are gathered together in a gigantic metal pyramid, the Last Redoubt (probably the first arcology in literature) under siege from unknown forces and Powers outside in the dark.
Beginning in the 1930s. Clark Ashton Smith wrote a series of stories situated in Zothique, the last continent of Earth. As Smith himself described it in a letter to L. Sprague de Camp, dated November 3, 1953:
- "Zothique, vaguely suggested by Theosophic 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."
Under influence of Clark Ashton Smith, Jack Vance wrote a series of fantasy books, called the Dying Earth series, which give the sub-genre its name.
- The Dying Earth (collection of linked stories, 1950)
- The Eyes of the Overworld (collection of linked stories, 1966)
- Cugel's Saga (novel, 1983)
- Rhialto the Marvellous (collection of linked stories, 1984)
[edit] Other Fantasy and Science Fantasy Examples
- C. J. Cherryh — Sunfall, a collection of dying earth 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. (Later reprinted in The Collected Short Fiction of C. J. Cherryh).
- Gene Wolfe — The Book of the New Sun, chronicling the journey of a disgraced torturer named Severian to the highest position in the land. Severian, who has a perfect memory, tells the story in first person. New Sun takes place in the distant future, where the sun has dimmed considerably, and the world is slowly freezing. Wolfe has stated that Vance's series influenced him directly.
- Mark S. Geston — Lords of the Starship, Out of the Mouth of the Dragon, The Day Star and The Siege of Wonder. Though similar in style and ambience, these four novels do not form a series.
- M. John Harrison — a series called Viriconium. Viriconium is the capital city in which much of the action takes place. Viriconium lies on a dying Earth littered with the detritus of the millennia, seemingly now its own hermetic universe where chronology no longer applies.
- Matthew Hughes — Fools Errant, Fool Me Twice, Black Brillion - in a style heavily influenced by Jack Vance.
- Paul Park — Starbridge Chronicles. (Not explicitly set either on Earth or in any specific time but tied to the same dark science fantasy ambience, for example city with the ironic name Paradise.) The three novels, Soldiers of Paradise, Sugar Rain, and The Cult of Loving Kindness comprise the series. As the planet does not show any tendency to dying, the classification is rather doubtful.
- Fred Saberhagen — Books of the Swords takes place in the far future, when magic has replaced science, but the general atmosphere of the book is more similar to the usual fantasy, and lacks the weight of history and the premonitions of the end, so typical for the Dying Earth books.
[edit] Science Fiction Examples
- Brian Aldiss — Hothouse (also known as The Long Afternoon of Earth). The Earth has stopped rotating, the Sun 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 giant banyan tree that covers the day side of the earth.
- Brian Aldiss — "...And the Stagnation of the Heart". Short story, sequel to "Circulation of the Blood...". In the previous story men gained immortality. Now, in the far future, they live transformed on a transformed Earth. The Sun is being slowly devoured by the mysterious beings.
- Aldiss' Helliconia Trilogy shows and decline of civilisation on the world where seasons lasts thousands of years. Admitted because of atmosphere and on a technicality — we do learn that the civilisation on Earth also declined.
- Samuel Delaney - The Einstein Intersection (1967, Nebula Award) - The alien protagonist of this novel, an inhabitant of earth in the far future, ponders the myth cycles of Orpheus and the Beatles, and the meaning they must have carried for their long vanished race.
- Philip Jose Farmer - In Dark Is the Sun 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.
- Edmond Hamilton — A novel, The City at World's End (1951) and the comic book story "Superman Under the Red Sun" from Action Comics #300 (1963).
- Tanith Lee — Don't Bite the Sun and its sequel, Drinking Sapphire Wine (collected in one volume as Biting the Sun), tell an often humorous coming of age story of one of a group of dissaffected transhuman teenagers living in the "Utopian" city of Four BEE.
- Paul McAuley — Confluence trilogy. Not so much a dying Earth as a dying artificial world at a time when Earth is long gone. The books are, in order, Child of the River, Ancients of Days, and Shrine of Stars.
- Robert Silverberg — Nightwings.
- Clifford D. Simak — City, a 1952 science-fiction story collection that is a series of eight connected legends of the Dogs as they look back on a mythical creature called Man.
- Cordwainer Smith — A series of short stories and a novel, Norstrilia, in The Rediscovery of Man series, are set some 14,000 years in the future at which time the Instrumentality of Mankind governs Earth and other planets colonized by humans. Thousands of years of Utopia and happiness having nearly destroyed the human race, The Instrumentality attempts to revive old cultures and languages in a process known as the Rediscovery of Man, trying to restore to it a lost vitality.
[edit] External links
- Notebooks A list of books belonging to Dying Earth genre.
- 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.
