-Poul Anderson, After Doomsday (Panther Books, Frogmore, St Albans, Herts, 1975), CHAPTER ONE, p. 7.
Although there is the cosmic hiss. Meanwhile, Anderson lists the noises of murdered Earth:
the rumble and bellow of crust shaking, mountains opening and volcanoes erupting;
the seethe and hiss of boiled oceans now cooling;
the shriek and skirl of winds scouring recently molten continents, now bare black stone;
cracking, booming lightning.
The description continues:
ash;
smoke;
acid rain;
sulphurous clouds;
upthrust crags;
cities engulfed;
ships sunk;
trees, grass, deer, whales and human beings dissolved in lava.
This beginning is an ending.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And a horrifying ending! AFTER DOOMSDAY is a relatively short, brisk, fast moving book, so this gruesome description tends to be forgotten as readers move on into the story proper. I'm also reminded of how Earth is also destroyed in Greg Bear's THE FORGE OF GOD.
Sean
Paul:
"There was a terrible ghastly silence.
"There was a terrible ghastly noise.
"There was a terrible ghastly silence."
In the course of slightly less than two minutes, Earth has just been demolished (to make way for a new hyperspatial express route), in the third chapter of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Don't Panic.
David,
Constructing routes, roads, bypasses etc through hyperspace was a new concept in sf.
Paul.
Paul:
Well, but the Japanese arguably beat the U.K. to it.
From Wikipedia:
"Galaxy Express 999 is a manga written and illustrated in 1977 by Leiji Matsumoto, later adapted into a number of anime films and television series.... Matsumoto was inspired to create Galaxy Express 999 by the idea of a steam train running through the stars in the novel Night on the Galactic Railroad by Kenji Miyazawa."
Timothy Zahn in 2005 began a series dealing with an interstellar railroad, the Quadrail, in Night Train to Rigel.
Kaor, DAVID!
I am finding it difficult to grasp how it can be possible, even as wild fantasy, for there to be an interstellar steam railroad!
I find the hyperdrive of Anderson's Technic stories or Pournelle/Niven's Alderson drive in their Co-Dominium series far more plausible.
Sean
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