Most science fiction takes place in the future, but even within the genre, few writers have ever had the imagination, poetic skills, and visionary scope to write convincingly about the really far future, and stories of that sort, which usually take place at least thousands and often millions of years from now, are among the rarest in science fiction.
Of course, the very idea of the far future, of a time thousands or millions of years removed from our own present day, is itself comparatively recent. To postulate a future millions of years from now, you first have to have a sense of a past that stretches millions of years behind us, an intuition into what has been called “deep time,” the kind of time, measured out in geological eras, in which mountains rise and fall, rock is laid down in patiently accumulating strata at the bottom of the sea before being thrust up into the air as naked new peaks, continents drift lazily around the globe, whole species of animals die, and new species evolve to replace them. When the officially sanctioned concept of the age of the Earth is that the Earth is no more than 6,000 years old (Creation having happened at 9:00 A.M. on October 26, 4004 B.C., according to the calculations of Bishop Ussher in the seventeenth century), and when it’s intensely controversial, if not downright dangerous, to declare otherwise, little thinking about either the really distant past or the really far future gets done (or if it does, it doesn’t get talked about much in public).
The idea of deep time, of a past that stretches back for millions and millions of years, rather than a few thousand, is a concept that really doesn’t begin to crop up in public discourse and scientific debate until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when people such as James Hutton, Charles Lyell, Jean Louis Agassiz (with his then-radical concept of an Ice Age, with the face of Europe covered by and reshaped by immense mile-thick glaciers instead of by Noah’s Flood), and Charles Darwin (whose On the Origin of Species proposed not only that species could become extinct—itself a fiercely controversial, much-debated concept—but also that all species evolved, the incremental result of many small changes over a period of time that certainly must have been immensely longer than any span imagined by Bishop Ussher) launched the first serious challenges to the concept of the Earth as a place only six thousand years old, gradually beginning to replace it with a vision of an Earth that was countless millions of years old—a span of time so staggeringly huge, so dismayingly vast, that it is difficult for the human mind,
used to measuring things on the mayfly scale of our own eye-blink lives, to even grasp it.
It’s probable that you have to have an understanding of this concept of deep time, though, of time stretching endlessly back into the past, before it’s even possible to conceive of the idea of the far future, to wrap your mind around the concept that time will continue on past the current day and keep on going for millions of years more … a concept that, through extrapolation, leads inevitably to the realization that changes as sweeping and dramatic as those that took place in remote geological ages past will continue to happen in the future—that the Earth of the future will be as radically different from the Earth of today as today’s Earth is from the Earth of the Cretaceous or the Mesozoic.
That being so, it’s not surprising that it isn’t until 1895, after the concept of deep time had become part of the intellectual/scientific discourse of the day, that we get the first clear vision of the far future in fiction, from H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, as the Time Traveller presses ever onward through time:
… the dim outlines of a desolate beach grew visible.
I stopped very gently and sat upon the Time Machine, looking round. The sky was no longer blue. Northeastward it was inky black, and out of the blackness shone brightly and steadily the pale white stars. Overhead it was a deep Indian red and starless, and southeastward it grew brighter to a glowing scarlet where, cut by the horizon, lay the huge hull of the sun, red and motionless.
… I cannot convey the sense of abominable desolation that hung over the world. The red eastern sky, the northward blackness, the salt Dead Sea, the stony beach crawling with these foul, slow-stirring monsters [giant crab-like creatures], the uniform poisonous-looking green of the lichenous plants, the thin air that hurts one’s lungs: all contributed to an appalling effect. I moved on a hundred years, and there was the same red sun—a little larger, a little duller—the same dying sea, the same chill air, and the same crowd of earthy crustacea creeping in and out among the green weed and the red rocks … .
So I traveled, stopping ever and again, in great strides of a thousand years or more, drawn on by the mystery of the earth’s fate, watching with a strange fascination the sun grow larger and duller in the westward sky, and the life of the old earth ebb away …
He ends up at last in bitter cold and near-total “great darkness” on the same desolate beach, now empty even of crawling crab-things. He is nauseated and sick, and he can hardly breathe. He can’t go on. He can penetrate no further into the future, having reached Earth’s furthest horizon, the End of Time. Appalled by the “remote and awful twilight” of the distant future, he flees back toward the warmer and more hospitable past.
Although Wells himself was certainly influenced by thinkers such as
Lyell, Agassiz, and Darwin, it is this vision of the far future, concentrated and intensified through the lens of fiction, Wells’s vision of a bleak and desolate landscape brooded over by the dull red ball of the dying sun, that would for the next hundred years be the dominant vision of what the far future would be like—and which, for the most part, is still the dominant vision even today. It’s possible to trace that vision through early works such as William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land and The House on the Borderland to J. B. S. Haldane’s “The Last Judgement” and Olaf Stapledon’s monumental (and extravagantly imaginative) Last and First Men, and on to the point where it enters the hothouse of the genre SF market in the early thirties via stories such as John W. Campbell’s classic “Twilight” (written under the pseudonym of Don A. Stuart) and, perhaps even more significant, the Zothique stories of Clark Ashton Smith (which would go on to influence directly the work of Jack Vance in the fifties, whose work would then go on to influence directly Gene Wolfe in the eighties, whose work … and so on). With startling rapidity after that, we quickly come to the first great “modern” far-future SF novel (and still one of the very best), Arthur C. Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night, in 1948.
Which brings us down to the territory of this anthology, which covers the years 1950 to 1998, an arbitrary period, chosen mostly for symmetry, but one that is not wholly indefensible: By 1950, the SF world was beginning to get back into full swing again after the partial interregnum of World War II, and the Campbellian Revolution in science fiction—circa 1939, when the new editor of Astounding magazine, John W. Campbell, began downplaying the melodramatic pulp stuff in favor of more thoughtful material that actually made a stab at rigor and scientific accuracy—had already taken place, with its lessons in the process of being absorbed and applied. Although “literary” writers such as Wells had been able to play in the far future only a few decades before, from this point on the development of the far-future story would take place almost entirely within the boundaries of the SF genre; indeed, the really far future is literary territory almost totally ignored by “mainstream” writers to this very day, even here, nearly to the beginning of a new millennium.
Perhaps this is not surprising, since, as I said in opening, even within science fiction itself, even within a genre whose writers are trained to think about the future and the majority of stories are set at least some distance into it, stories dealing with the really far future are, if not quite as rare as hens’ teeth, then at least comparatively rare. Perhaps this is because the special scope and sweep of vision called for to conjure up an evocative and poetically intense portrait of the far future calls for a degree—and a kind—of imagination rare even among SF writers. (Why so many Brits write far-future stories, and why so few women do, way out of proportion demographically in both cases, I’ll leave for wiser critics than me to try to puzzle out.)
This anthology, then, gives you an overview of the evolution of the far-future story—and of the evolution of ideas about what the far future will be like—from the middle of the twentieth century almost to the
beginning of the twenty-first. Not at all incidentally, it also brings you some of the most vivid, evocative, entertaining, and mind-stretchingly imaginative science fiction ever written, stories that will take you so far into the future that our familiar everyday world, everything that we see around us, all our history and culture, everything we are, is at best a fading distant memory, blurred almost to nothing by time—if, indeed, it is remembered at all … if, indeed, our remote descendants in that future are even human at all, as we today would understand the term … .
And, far from having to pant and shiver on that desolate terminal beach, you won’t even have to get up from your chair!
Enjoy.