The Emperor – they say – sent a message, dictated it from his death bed, sent it to you alone, his feeble subject, to that miniature shadow hiding at the remotest distance from the imperial sun. He instructed the messenger to kneel down beside his bed and whisper the message in his ear. It was important, he believed, to get the messenger to repeat it back to him. He confirmed the messenger’s accuracy by nodding his head.
And so the messenger heads off with his message. It is to us that it is directed, but before he can reach us, he must make his way from the emperor’s deathbed, through the crowd of people attending the imperial passing. Then he has to make his way out of the huge palace, passing through an interminable number of chambers and antechambers. If it had been a matter, Kafka says, of simply crossing an open field he would have made rapid progress, but as it is, things are hopeless:
He is still making his way through all the private rooms of the inner palace. He will never find a way through. And even if he did, it wouldn’t make any difference. He’d only have to struggle down the palace steps, and, even if he did that, it wouldn’t make any difference. He’d still have the courtyards to cross, and after the courtyards the second palace that encircles the first, and, again, down stairs and through courtyards, and then, yet again, another palace, and so on for millennia. But say he managed at last to burst through the outermost door – although such a thing could never, never happen – why then: the whole royal capital city, the centre of the world, is standing before him, heaped buildings and streets clogged with mud. No one forces his way through such a place, certainly not a man carrying a message from a dead man.
The message, clearly, will never reach us. This is the final line of Kafka’s story: ‘But nevertheless, you sit at your window as evening falls, and you dream the message to yourself.’ In its gorgeous, haunting obliqueness this has always seemed to me one of Kafka’s most accomplished short stories. The end of the story never quite reaches us; we are left to imagine it for ourselves.
Our fascination with the end is always a contradiction. We feel death gives life meaning, we know it is inevitable and we are drawn to the excitement the end promises; but at the same time we cannot accept or understand the reality of it. We especially don’t want anything to end in the chaotic, unresolved way the universe might impose upon us. And so we continue to imagine it, over and over, in our search for meaning, for a moment of transcendence; a way to transform its finality into an experience we can finally comprehend.
INDEX
28 Days Later film 62
666, number of the Beast 49–50, 52
2040 documentary 168–9
A
afterlife, imagining an 10–11
AIDS 101–3
Aldiss, Brian 63–4
alien intelligences and invaders 117–18, 119–24
alien plagues 87–8, 89
Allen, Woody 74
Alzheimer’s disease 76
Amis, Martin 102 ‘An Imperial Message’ (F. Kafka) 190–2
Andaman people 32
antibodies and immunity 81–2
The Antiquary (W. Scott) 6
apocalypse insurance 7–8
Apocalypse video game 9
Apollo 79–80
Armageddon film 125–6
asteroid/planet collisions 124–9
Australian bush fires (2019–20) 158
Australians, indigenous 82–3
avian flu 85
B
B612
Foundation 128
The Battle of Dorking (G. T. Chesney) 118–19
Battlestar Galactica TV series 115
Bayes, Thomas 18
Bayesian probability 17–22, 182
Bear, Greg 89
‘the Beast’ 42–4, 49–50
berserkers in science fiction 114
Biblical apocalypse 8–9, 15, 39–52
Big Bang theory 137–8
as infinitely repeated event 150–4
process reversal 143–4
Big Bounce 144, 150, 151–4
Big Crunch 144, 149–50
bioengineering 70
bioweapons 84, 86
Black Death 81, 92
Black Lives Matter movement 60–1
Black Sea 30–1
Blackwood’s Magazine 118
Blood Music film 89
bodily and mental decay 73–7
bodily decay, fear of 73–7
Bonaparte, Napoleon 52
Bong Joon Ho 164
‘The Book of the New Sun’ (G. Wolfe) 148
The Botanic Garden (E. Darwin) 146–7
Boyle, Danny 62
Brave New World (A. Huxley) 68–9
Buddhism 23, 154
Bunyan, John 12–13
burial practices 74–5
Byron, Lord 6, 93, 94, 98, 139–40, 146
C
Call of Duty video game series 175
Cameron, James 112
carbon footprints/emissions 162, 163, 165
see also climate change
Carpe Jugulum (T. Pratchett) 176
Chernobyl disaster 52–3
Chesterton, G. K. 4–6
Children of Men film 9
Chinese astronomy 33
Chinese one-child policy 159
Christian God see God, Christian
Christianity 8–9, 15, 23, 25, 33
chronos and kairos concept 187–8
Cioran, Emil 141
‘Cities in Flight’ novels (J. Blish) 148–9
climate change 27, 182
carbon emissions/carbon footprints 162, 163, 165
The Day After Tomorrow film 155–6
deniers 166–7
engineering control 163–4
Industrial Revolution 158
negative influence of video games 174–9
population growth 158–62
portrayal in fiction 155–6, 170–1
speed of human response 166–7, 171–3
stewardship 173–4
taking collective action 168–9, 173–4, 179
wildfire 157–8
cocoliztli epidemic 82
Cold War 108
The Colour Out of Space (H. P. Lovecraft) 87
comedy in zombie fiction 66–7
consumerism/capitalism and zombies 64–5, 67–9
Contagion film 80
Copernicus 22
Covid-19
global pandemic (2020) 2, 59, 85, 86, 100, 105–6
creation and uncreation of life 26–9
D
Danse Macabre woodcuts (H. Holbein) 92–3
dark energy 145
Dark Forest (Liu Cixin) 122–4
Dark Knight film 87
Dark Souls video game 177–8
‘Darkness’ (Byron) 139–40
Darwin, Erasmus 146–7
Dawn of the Dead film 9, 65
The Day After Tomorrow film 155–6
The Day the Earth Caught Fire film 125
death, human inability to imagine 9–11, 189
death of earth
Big Bang as infinitely repeated event 150–4
death of the Sun 134–7
entropy of the universe 138–42
eucatasrophe vs tragedy 145–8
influence beyond the Big Crunch 149–50
reversal of the Big Bang 143–4
science fiction genre 148–9
The Time Machine (H. G. Wells) 130–4, 142
Death’s End (Liu Cixin) 124
Decameron (Boccaccio) 92
Deep Impact film 126
dementia 76
Dernier Homme (J. de Grainville) 95
Deucalion 28–9
deus ex machina 164
disease see plagues
Divine Incantations Scripture, Taoist 33–4
Donne, John 4
Don’t Even Think About It (G. Marshall) 172
‘Doom Soon’ vs ‘Doom Delayed’ 20–2
Doomsday argument 17, 18–22
Doomsday Clock 182
Dr. Strangelove film 15, 108–11
Dracula Unbound film 63–4
dying earth see death of earth
Dying Earth (J. Vance) 148
E
Ea 32
earth, death of see death of earth
Ebola virus 85
Eddington, Arthur 135–6
Efthimiou, Costas 63
Egypt, Ancient 74–5
Einstein,
