Some of them have remained submerged others have re-risen, partially, and re-arranged themselves. “The continents of our present cycle have sunken, perhaps several times.
Between 19, Smith wrote sixteen stories, as well as a one-act play published posthumously, set on Zothique, the last continent on Earth. Smith’s description of the setting is appropriate for most of the literature that followed: Howard, creator of Conan the Cimmerian, and H. Smith was one of the “Big Three,” authors closely associated with the magazine Weird Tales (the other two are Robert E. William Hope Hodgson’s 1912 novel The Night Land imagines the entirety of the human race living together in a massive pyramid called the Last Redoubt (the first arcology in literature) millions of years in the future, the sun long extinguished, waiting for their weakening power sources to fail and the horrors in the darkness outside to overtake them.įrom the 1930s onwards, Dying Earth literature is dominated by two figures: Clark Ashton Smith and Jack Vance. Wells’ novella The Time Machine (1895) briefly takes its narrator to a far future where most life has gone extinct. Lord Byron’s harrowing poem “Darkness” (1816, which you can read here) describes an Earth with a dead sun. One of the earliest examples of Dying Earth fiction is Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s 1805 novel The Last Man (not to be confused with Mary Shelley’s post-apocalyptic novel of the same name), which chronicles the last man on Earth’s attempts to find the last woman and repopulate the human race.
These will be part of a larger series focusing on the Dying Earth subgenre of science fiction.ĭying Earth tales typically take place at the end of life on Earth, though some go even further to the end of time, with the universe itself breaking apart.
This first post will focus on the three novels that make up the bulk of the cycle the remaining volume, a short story collection, will be the subject of the second post. John Harrison known as the Viriconium cycle. This the first post of two covering a series of four books by M.
0 kommentar(er)
