Mike Ashley - The End of the World: and Other Catastrophes

This collection of science fiction short stories that deal with the "end of the world" and "other catastrophes", as the title wittily puts it, does an excellent job of showing that fear of the end of civilisation did not begin with World Wars and nuclear weapons. Nor did readers' love of the genre. Mike Ashley has put together a selection of stories that are heavily skewed toward the 19th and early 20th century. Unless you are a connoisseur of early, and obscure, science fiction it is unlikely that you will have read many of these. The book is published by the British Library which helps explain the skewing of the stories towards British authors, and almost all of them are male - which probably reflects the era more than anything.

But there are some fine tales here which tells us a great deal about the times they were written in. The terrors that are inflicted tend to be of the astronomical type. Science had yet to conceive of nuclear weapons and global climate change, so the authors looked mainly to the unknown external threat. Clouds of gas, or bodies colliding with the Sun are just two examples. A trio of stories about threats to London are perhaps the most entertaining. I was very struck by Owen Oliver's 1927 story, Days of Darkness, which tells the very personal account of two people sat next to each other on an omnibus when the lights go out. As London descends into chaos and anarchy, food and water become scarce but our two heroes proceed to fall in love in a very Edwardian way. There's a distinct element of John Wyndham's cosy catastophe here.

Robert Barr’s Within an Ace of the End of the World (1900) is one of the earliest examples of climate change in a story. In his world, humanity has discovered how to make raw food from the nitrogen in the atmosphere. Rich men get even richer providing cheap food, but the changing atmosphere leads to chaos and insane levity as everyone breathes the new air. The only exception are two groups of men and women who have hidden themselves in "iron houses" with artifical atmospheres, one in the United States and the other in Britain. The story ends as the British men travel to the United States and find the eight women in their white dresses waiting. There's a strangely pacifist message at the end, as the author comments "The race which now inhabits the earth is one that includes no savages and no war lords. Armies are unknown and unthought of. There is no battle-ship on the face of the waters. It is doubtful if universal peace could have been brought to the world short of the annihilation of the jealous, cantankerous, quarrelsome peoples who inhabited it previous to 1904." Perhaps the imminent World War was focusing Barr's mind.

Perhaps the most fascinating story is the 1889 story The Last American by John Ames Mitchell. This is the account of a Persian expedition to the United States centuries after the latters collapse. In the classic tradition of such stories, the Persian explorers misunderstand and misinterpret the things they discover, and eventually find the Last Americans - plural. But they behave exactly as European explorers behaved and the tragic ending allows Mitchell to ruminate on the future of civilisation.

Just one story is of the "Mad Scientist" type, and its interesting to read. Warwick Deeping's The Madness of Professor Pye (1934) literarily has a scientist in a tower in Suffolk killing everything around him with a death-ray. It is notable for two appearances of Mussolini.

The decline of Britain is a major theme of many of these stories, and several see London destroyed, to the gloating of the rest of the world. In one story the population is replaced by people from the Empire. It's not hard to detect some Victorian fears there.

A couple of more modern stories round off the collection. Ray Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rains is well known. John Brunner's Two by Two is less well known, though its a fairly well known trope. The ending is fairly predictable.

While the selecton of stories is excellent, the collection suffers from a weak introduction. Mike Ashley's essay is really just a survey of the genre, rather than offering any discussion of the genre itself, or the themes. I'd have welcomed his thoughts on why people love "end of the world" fiction. Nonetheless, get hold of this for the stories - they're a cracking read.

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