The theory was more widely believed in the past than it is now. It still has some adherents in the scientific community, but according to the most up-to-date science, neither the ‘Big Crunch’ nor the ‘Big Bounce’ theories are true. We won’t collapse back, and we won’t bounce – we will instead wind down slowly. Entropy, rather than rebirth, wins the day.
Are we sure? The answer depends on how heavy the universe is, since gravity is the force that will draw the cosmos’s matter back into a new singularity. If the mass of the whole universe is dense enough, there will be enough gravity to slow our expansion and eventually reverse it. But the most current science suggests that the mass of the universe is below that threshold, and that it will not have enough gravitational attraction to fall back in on itself.*
Nevertheless, it is the idea of escape and rebirth that science fiction tends to cleave to. ‘Eucatastrophe’ is a term invented by J. R. R. Tolkien to describe the sorts of stories he himself wrote, in The Lord of the Rings for instance. The ‘eu’ in ‘eucatastrophe’ means good, and Tolkien was talking about those sorts of stories in which things seem bad until they swerve towards good at the last moment. Consider those tales where events get worse and worse until we reach a point where the whole situation appears hopeless. In tragedy, that is where the story ends and we leave the theatre or close the book sadder but wiser. But the last hundred years or so have proved allergic to tragedy, and we are nowadays much more interested in eucatastrophe – in the final twist in which evil is defeated in the nick of time, when the giant asteroid plummeting towards Earth is averted at the very last moment. Eucatastrophe is when the storyteller makes a happy ending out of a doomy situation, just as a conjurer pulls a rabbit from a top hat. We saw this with the religious and mythological apocalypses of the previous chapters. The world ends in fire or via enormous human suffering and death, and then – miraculously – a new world appears, clean and bright.
The truth is that although science fiction likes to pride itself on the ‘science’ part of its name, it is more informed by religious thinking than it cares to admit. The ends of the world in science fiction, after all, are generally religious apocalypses in a pseudo-scientific overcoat and hat, taking us through suffering in order to emerge somewhere new. This is a book about the representations of the end of the world, but in actual fact it is hardly ever represented.
Entropy is a real-life phenomenon, but naturally enough we tend to want to cling to our stories of more optimistic ‘endings’ even in the face of scientific evidence. It’s striking how few writers have followed Wells and Byron down the pessimistic route of the eternal freeze, even as the scientific discoveries piled up.
A few years before Byron’s ‘Darkness’, the scientist-poet Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles Darwin) published an epic poem called The Botanic Garden that also turned a clear eye on the likely end of things. Its apprehension of the end of the cosmos is no jollier than Byron’s:
Flowers of the sky! ye too to age must yield,
Frail as your silken sisters of the field!
Star after star from heaven’s high arch shall rush,
Suns sink on suns, and systems systems crush,
Headlong, extinct, to one dark centre fall,
And death and night and chaos mingle all!*
However, Darwin was no Byron. He worked for the betterment of humanity and was a firm believer in God; he tempers the gloominess of this vision with some more hopeful lines:
Till o’er the wreck, emerging from the storm,
Immortal Nature lifts her changeful form,
Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame,
And soars and shines, another and the same.
William Hope Hodgson’s novel The Night Land (1912) is set after the death of the sun, but the story concerns the survival of humankind after that catastrophe – survivors have holed up inside a gigantic pyramid called ‘the last redoubt’, powered by residual heat from inside the earth. More usually, science fiction authors set their stories shortly before the death of the sun, enabling a melancholic and elegiac style of storytelling. The American author Jack Vance’s short novel The Dying Earth (1950) initiated the vogue for this sort of storytelling, which is now known as ‘dying earth fiction’, but Vance’s wit and ornate inventiveness are a long way from the desolation of Wells’s terminal beach. Perhaps the work of ‘dying earth’ science fiction with the highest reputation is Gene Wolfe’s four-volume ‘The Book of the New Sun’ (1980–83): a major work of literature in which an apprentice torturer called Severian travels through a world that is at once medieval and high-tech, and over which a dying sun is giving out its last light. Wolfe is as inventive as Vance but not so irreverent, and he tackles the end of the world with gravity and integrity. But he was also a Catholic, and rather than follow through the remorselessly entropic logic of his novels, he wrote a sequel, The Urth of the New Sun (1987), in which Severian rejuvenates the dying sun and renews his world.
James Blish’s classic quartet of
