The furthest horizon, p.1
The Furthest Horizon, page 1
Preface
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.
Guyal of Sfere
JACK VANCE
Here’s one of the classic visions of the far future, from Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth, taking us millions of years into the future, to the Earth at the end of time, when the sun is growing cold and the world is on the brink of being plunged into eternal Night, grues and deodands creep through the haunted forests, and technology has (as per Arthur C. Clarke’s famous dictum) become indistinguishable from magic …
Born in San Francisco in 1920, Jack Vance served throughout World War II in the U.S. Merchant Navy. Most of the in dividual stories that would later be melded into his first novel, The Dying Earth, were written while Vance was at sea—he was unable to sell them, a problem he would also have with the book itself, the market for fantasy being almost nonexistent at the time. The Dying Earth was eventually published in an obscure edition in 1950 by a small semi-professional press, went out of print almost immediately, and remained out of print for more than a decade thereafter. Nevertheless, this slender little volume of stories became an underground cult classic, and was of immense evolutionary importance to the development of both modern fantasy and modern science fiction, as well as being one of the keystone works in the development of the hybrid form sometimes referred to as science-fantasy. Although it itself was clearly influenced by earlier work such as Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique and William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, the effect of The Dying Earth on future generations of writers is incalculable: for one example, out of many, The Dying Earth is one of the most recognizable influences on Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun. (Wolfe has said, for instance, that The Book of Gold, which is mentioned by Severian, is supposed to be The Dying Earth.) Vance returned to this milieu in 1965, with a series of stories that would be melded into The Eyes of the Overworld, and, in the early eighties, returned yet again with Cugel’s Saga and Rhialto the Marvellous—taken together, The Dying Earth and the three volumes of Cugel stories represent one of the most impressive achievements in science-fantasy.
Vance is also a towering ancestral figure in science fiction proper, where he has produced some of the very best work of the last forty years. His most famous SF novels—The Dragon Masters, The Last Castle, Big Planet, Emphyrio, the five-volume Demon Princes series (the best known of which are The Star King and The Killing Machine), Blue World, The Anome, The Languages of Pao, among many others—as well as dazzling short works such as “The New Prime,” “The Miracle Workers,” “The Last Castle,” and “The Moon Moth” have had such a widespread impact that writers describing distant worlds and alien societies with strange alien customs write inevitably in the shadow of Vance: no one in the history of the field has brought more intelligence, imagination, or inexhaustible fertility of invention to that theme than he has, a fertility that shows no sign of slackening even here at the end of the nineties, with recent books such as Night Lamp as richly and lushly imaginative as the stuff he was writing in the fifties; even ostensible potboilers such as his Planet of Adventure series are full of vivid and richly portrayed alien societies and bizarre and often profoundly disturbing insights into the ways in which human psychology might be altered by immersion in alien values and cultural systems.
Vance has won two Hugo Awards, a Nebula Award, two World Fantasy Awards (one the prestigious Life Achievement Award), a Grandmaster Nebula Award for Life Achievement, and the Edgar Award for best mystery novel. His other books include The Palace of Love, City of the Chasch, To Live Forever, The Dirdir, The Pnume, The Gray Prince, The Brave Free Men, Space Opera, Showboat World, Marune: Alastor 933, Wyst: Alastor 1716, Lyonesse, The Green Pearl, Madouc, Araminta Station, Ecce and Olde Earth, and Throy, among many others. His short fiction has been collected in Eight Fantasms and Magics, The Best of Jack Vance, Green Magic, Lost Moons, The Complete Magnus Ridolph, The World Between and Other Stories, The Dark Side of the Moon, and The Narrow Land. His most recent books are an omnibus volume, Alastor, collecting three of his Alastor novels, and the new novels Night Lamp and Ports of Call.
Guyal of Sfere had been born one apart from his fellows and early proved vexation for his sire. Normal in outward configuration, there existed within his mind a void which ached for nourishment. It was as if a spell had been cast upon his birth, a harassment visited on the child in a spirit of sardonic mockery, so that every occurrence, no matter how trifling, became a source of wonder. Even as young as four seasons he was expounding such inquiries as:
“Why do squares have more sides than triangles?”
“How will we see when the sun goes dark?”
“Do flowers grow under the ocean?”
“Do stars hiss and sizzle when rain comes by night?”
To which his impatient sire gave answers:
“So it was ordained by the Pragmatica; squares and triangles must obey the rote.”
“We will be forced to grope and feel our way.”
“I have not verified this matter; only the Curator would know.”
“Never. The stars are above the rain, higher even than the highest clouds, and swim in a rarified air where rain can never breed.”
As Guyal grew to youth, this void in his mind, instead of dwindling becoming sedimented with wax, throbbed with a more violent ache. And so he asked:
“Why do people die when they are killed?”
“Where does beauty vanish when it goes?”
“How long have men lived on Earth?”
“What is beyond the sky?”
To which his sire, biting acerbity back from his lips, would respond:
“Death is the heritage of life; a man’s vitality is like air in a bladder. Poinct this bubble and away, away, away, flees life, like the color of fading dream.”
“Beauty is a luster which love bestows to guile the eye. Therefore it may be said that only when the brain is without love will the eye look and see no beauty.”
“Some say men germinated in the soil like grubs in a corpse; others aver that the first men desired residence and so created Earth by sorcery. The question is shrouded in technicality; only the Curator may answer with exactness.”
“An endless waste.”
Guyal pondered and postulated, proposed and expounded, until he found himself the subject of surreptitious humor. The demesne was visited by a rumor that a gleft, coming upon Guyal’s mother in labor, had stolen part of Guyal’s brain, which deficiency he now industriously sought to restore.
Guyal therefore drew himself apart and roamed the grassy hills of Sfere in solitude. But ever was his mind acquisitive, ever did he seek to exhaust the lore of all around him, until at last his father in vexation refused to hear further inquiries, declaring that all knowledge had been known, that the trivial and useless had been discarded, leaving only that residue necessary to a sound man.
At this time Guyal was in his first manhood, a slight but erect youth with wide clear eyes, a penchant for severely elegant dress, a firm somewhat compressed mouth.
Hearing his father’s angry statement, Guyal said, “One more question, then I ask no more.”
“Speak,” declared his father. “One more question I grant you.”
“You have often referred me to the Curator; who is he, and where may I find him?”
A moment the father scrutinized the son whom he now considered past the verge of madness. Then he responded in a quiet voice, “The Curator guards the Museum of Man, which antique legend places in the Land of the Falling Wall—beyond the mountains of Fer Aquila and north of Ascolais. It is not certain that either Curator or Museum still exist; still it would seem that if the Curator knows all things, as is the legend, then surely he would know the wizardly foil to death.”
Guyal said, “I would seek the Curator and the Museum of Man, that I likewise may know all things.”
The father said with patience, “I will bestow on you my fine white horse, my Expansible Egg for your shelter, my Scintillant Dagger to illuminate the night. In addition, I lay a blessing along the trail, and danger will slide you by so long as you never wander aside.”
Guyal quelled the hundred new questions at his tongue, including an inquisition as to where his father had learned these manifestations of sorcery, and accepted the gifts: the horse, the magic shelter, the dagger with the luminous pommel, and the blessing to guard him from the disadvantageous circumstances which plagued those who travelled the dim trails of Ascolais.
He caparisoned the horse, honed the dagger, cast a last glance around the old manse at Sfere, and set forth to the north.
He ferried the River Scaum on an old barge. Aboard the barge, and so off the trail, the blessing lost its cogency and in fact seemed to stimulate a counterinfluence, so that the barge-tender, who coveted Guyal’s rich accoutrements, struck out suddenly with his cudgel. Guyal fended off the blow and tripped the man into the murky deep.
