Photo by Rana Obaid.
Science fiction is a genre with a unique capacity to encompass the wide panorama of the highs and lows of human writing. The most elaborate and imaginative scenarios on the one and and some of the flattest, most contrived characters and dialogue on the other, often within the same book. Dune being a classic example of this.
I had a science fiction phase in younger times, primarily characterized by H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac Asimov.
It is a phase I have long since departed, and my reading journeys have taken me to many places since then. Only recently have I returned to this genre which so pricked my interest as a child. First through Houellebecq a few years ago then through Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, one of the most thoughtful blendings of Clarke and Asimov's imagingings of the distant future.
Now as I read through Jack Vance's tetralogy Tales of the Dying Earth, I am rediscovering a new aspect to the world of science fiction.
One expects early-mid century science fiction to be rather pulpy, so I was quite astounded by the masterful quality of Vance's work, particularly his firm grasp of human nature and the cycles of history in his sharply paced prose. His psychological analysis is fathoms deeper than the engineer-brain characters of Asimov and those who primarily write people to be the levers of their logic puzzle stories with near-zero interiority.
Vance's outlook carries a heavy weight of cosmic dread that few writers can properly convey. The feeling that the world, or at least the human race is old and dying, that there is no future, at least one worth speaking of.
When each layer of the cosmos has been tarnished from the home to the village to the city to the kingdom to the world to the fields to the trees to the waters to the very air itself. When the human organism itself is disintegrating either through mental decay or reproductive sterility. The world itself is tired and weary.
These physical, tangible displays being symptoms of a deeper spiritual, world-bound sterility and lifelessness. That we are are all bound on a ship destined for annihilation within the next generation or two.
This is dying earth literature. One may call it melancholic romanticism. The Germans aptly call the root of its feeling Weltschmerz. And it is this subgenre and a foray into its history that has compelled me to gather these thoughts here.
Le Dernier Homme
A genealogy of dying Earth literature can take many paths. Clark Ashton Smith, William Hope Hodgson, and H.G. Wells's Time Machine were certainly definitive shapers of the genre. But if you trace the strands further and further back, you arrive at the very first modern work of dying earth literature with Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville's Le dernier homme (1805).
De Grainville (1746 - 1805) was not a professional writer, nor in fact do we have any other writings from him except the manuscript for Le Dernier Homme which he wrote after leaving the priesthood during the French Revolution and was only published after he committed suicide.
Le Dernier Homme takes its cue from Milton's cosmic epic Paradise Lost. As Milton explored the mythology of the first human couple Adam and Eve, de Grainville regaled a prose romance of the adventures of Omegarus and Syderie, the last human couple. It is a fascinating universe that blends Greek tragedy, biblical apocalypticism, and environmental despair.
The Frame Narrative
The narrative opens in the (18th century) present day as the French explorer narrative explores a cavern of the dead in Syria. These ruins belong to the Palmyrene Empire, a clever little nod for the reader.
The Palmyrene Empire was a short-lived breakaway state that emerged and fell during the Crisis of the Third Century (235-284 AD), a political crisis which almost permanently disintegrated the Roman Empire. A proper analogue to the chaos of the French Revolutionary era as well as to this end of world scenario where the greatest empires of the world are crumbling into seeming oblivion.
Inside this cavern, the narrator is enraptured in a vision of the style of Revelation including graphic imagery such as an old man whose shoulders are mutilated and bloodied wings lie at his feet.
In this vision, the narrator is told that the last man will have no posterity to honor his sufferings, to sing of his trouble, to commemorate his spirit. The language of epic is deeply concerned with rendering proper honor to its subjects so that all descendants may properly honor the deeds of Achilles, Odysseus, Beowulf et al.
The task of the epic's audience is to hear and remember these stories, and thus carry on the memory. But if there is no audience that lives after the hero, then who is there to remember his deeds?
Their deeds must be retrojected back into the past, through an apocalyptic vision of the future so that those in the past may remember what is to come. A vision in the style of Revelation.
And so as if speaking to a muse, the narrator invokes Omegarus and Syderie to inspire his spirit, so that he may sing of their lives.
Punished Adam
The inner story begins with an extremely aged man head bowed low equally from age as from the suffering he endures. This ancient patriarch is none other than Adam himself who still lives. As punishment for his original sin, Adam is forced to stand and watch for millennia as every single one of his children enters the gaping mouth of Hell and witnesses the torment they must endure.
Though Adam sings of the beauty of creation and the life of the world which after all these years has not grown lost on him, he simply cannot bear to witness the eternal torment of all his children.
It is a weight that has crushed his spirit so completely that he no longer even feels any desire, even for this punishment to end.
It is a punishment reminiscent of Prometheus or other Greek figures such as Sisyphus who must endure endless cycles of their particular torment through the end of time.
But at this moment the angel Ithuriel (an angel likely coined by Milton and only appears in Book IV of Paradise Lost) arrives and announces the end of Adam's punishment.
The Almighty Most High has ordained that the human race must be brought to an end, and as no more new humans can enter Hell, Adam will be released from his punishment, but so long as he can assist in God's mission to extinguish the human race.
Adam whose misery has been so great is grateful for the chance to assist in this annihilation as he has no wish to see any more of his children created only so that they may be bound to eternal torment, if this is the only way that both he and his race may be freed.
Ithuriel transports Adam to late France where Adam immediately observes how desolate the land has become. All greenery has been stripped to barren rock. The trees have degenerated into moribund, white bark. Though there are no clouds in sight, even the sun itself casts a pale, eerie light on the world as if it were a gloomy day. Though the season is summer, the landscapes looks worse than winter.
It is from this strikingly modern environmental despair that Adam receives interior inspiration (lumière intérieure) that he must start a global revolution that will annihilate the human race.
And so he sets off to visit Omegarus, as Ithuriel had directed him.
The Tale of Omegarus
What Adam soon comes to learn is that the human race has already been bound toward destruction for many years now. He arrives at the palace of Omegarus and his young wife Syderie. Omegarus greets Adam lavishly and relates to him his own tale of the state of the world and how he found his own wife in these last years.
In this world, human fertility has dropped to zero and no one has been able to reproduce for decades now (the same scenario as in Children of Men). The earth grew deserted and depeopled. As Europe grew sterile, so too the climate degenerated, forcing people to live increasingly remote and separated as the land could only support a few in any given place.
Omegarus was born a miracle child to the king of France in this sterile world to the king of France. The first child in twenty years.
The whole realm celebrated Omegarus' birth with manic fervor, crowding the capital city, all hoping just to touch this messianic child. The Savior, the child who will be the father of a new race.
As Omegarus himself puts it, "I remained the only [unique] son in the agedness [vieillesse] of the Europeans."
France had reverted to a Greco-Roman style where classical temples had been erected to Yahweh and sacrifices made to restore the human race, to bring hope again. Some in these times were religiously seized by the hope that Omegarus would be God's instrument of this change, others had no hope or belief in God and wished merely to waste away in hedonism.
Still the faithful prayed.
But a young man cannot continue the race alone. Omegarus recounts his childhood, the training and education he received, how he had been prepared to lead and propagate a new human race.
But there was no woman for him.
"L’ennui me consumoit lentement, et ma jeunesse se fletrissoit". Ennui, that French term which cannot be reduced merely to boredom as it covers the feelings of isolation, dissatisfaction, loneliness, the sense that you simply do not belong, and there is nothing for you. This ennui slowly consumed Omegarus, and his youth withered. The seed slowly matured with no hope of fulfillment.
One day Omegarus is told he is must visit the sage Idamas who lives in the Rouen (the city where Joan of Arc died) who has had visions of the end of the world and where Omegarus may find a bride able to conceive.
Omegarus travels to Rouen, on the way hosted by Policlète et Céphise. Céphise is the second youngest human who remains, but who is now middle-aged. She recounts the birth of Omegarus when she herself was twenty years old, "You were to be, they said, the savior of the world". How all these years she has prayed for him How she holds on to a steadfast hope, even now as she herself enters the age of menopause, that Omegarus will save them all and found a new race.
The monologue is surprisingly touching and heartfelt, to see such genuine hope and tears for such a gripping world crisis. Especially for a generation such as ours so jaded and corroded by irony that it is unable to express itself as earnestly as we see here.
The sage Idamas himself lives in a "madness", gripped by a manic hope that the human race will be reborn, through his countless sleepless nights of prayer. He believes that God has spoken to him of the Earth's rejuvenation through his instrument Omegarus.
He adjures Omegarus and his party to join him on a tour of the world, to find the chosen bride for God's mission.
They travel to the capital of Normandy where a great, golden airship awaits them for this voyage. A ship which can travel over any sea and trespass any mountain. An airships whose sides were painted with elaborate historical and apocalyptic scenes, so perfect "that all the characters seemed to live and breathe".
Image of earthquakes and abysses. Of the battles of legions of angels whose slaughter and carnage is so great that their blood has reddened the trees beneath this aeriel confrontation.
It is on this ship that Omegarus embarks to begin his journey.
To be continued...