I am looking for literary and/or mythological tales in which an entire nation, race, or species collectively, consciously, and deliberately decides to go extinct. The precise reasons don’t matter, nor does the precise method. Maybe the folks believe themselves to be damned; maybe their sun is about to go nova. Maybe they’re planning on all poisoning themselves; maybe they’re simply not having babies any more. The point is that the folk in question in opts to go gently into that good night.
I am NOT looking for stories in which the last member of a species commits or determines to commit suicide after all his/her compatriots have died. That would be an individual decision, not a communal one.
Stargate SG-1, the race of Asgardians decide that their millenia-long fight versus genetic deterioration & nanobots needs to come to an end, so they sacrifice themselves and their home planet to destroy the nanobots, but first the give humanity (aka, Stargate Command) all their knowledge.
The classic of this type is Olaf Stapelton’s 1930s novel Star Maker, in which various races deliberately choose extinction out of pacifism when faced with starfaring races that have gone militant.
Another is Arthur C. Clarke’s short story The Nine Billion Names of God, where computerized monks deliberately bring the whole universe to an end.
Not exactly deliberately deciding, but there’s some science fiction short story about the world whose sun went nova to provide the guiding light when Jesus was born. Somehow they said they didn’t mind.
Also, Erik the Viking has a whole island of people drowning because they don’t believe they are or something odd like that.
One of Larry Niven’s “Draco Tavern” stories - “The Subject is Closed” talks about an entire species, the Sheegupt, that committed suicide after their researchers made some (undescribed) discovery about the nature of God and the afterlife. They set up painless assembly lines so everyone could suicide as quickly as possible. Investigators found no signs of struggle or dissent. The investigating species, the Chirpsithra, decided to end all investigation when several of their teams committed suicide as well.
Partially on point: old short story “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” has a race that at least is gently (even to some degree eagerly) accepting extinction (I think it’s implied the cause is accidental, rather than chosen, but their attitude is definitely not raging against the dying of the light)
Sorry. On the Beach by Neville Shute. Or really any book where the countries of the Earth decide to enter into a world ending nuclear exchange (i.e., not an accidental one like Dr. Strangelove).
On the Beach takes place after the nukes have dropped, though, and is more about people left coming to terms with the fact that the remainder of the human race is doomed by the decisions made by people already dead, though, so maybe not what your looking for.
Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question involves a humanity that recognizes that its existence as separate physical organisms that reproduce sexually is not sustainable, so they embark on a journey to become a collective, disembodied consciousness in hyperspace after the heat death of the universe. And it turns out that
the final consciousness appears to be YHWH of the Bible, who recreates the universe and humanity in its (former) image.
Good observation.
Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End features multiple civilizations, one of which is destined to evolve into a higher consciousness and one of which knows it is doomed to extinction. The doomed race decides to attempt to help the other one achieve that evolution and accept its own fate. Knowing that it is doomed, it decides not to expend effort to try to save itself, but to direct its efforts to helping others.
I may be misremembering, but George R R Martin’s novella “A Song For Lya” might fit the bill. As I recall, it’s a great story in any case. But I probably read it over 30 years ago. Hmm, maybe I should put it on my list to re-read. I also remember really liking “With Morning Comes Mistfall” in the same anthology, though I don’t remember much more than that.
…in which it’s discovered that an intelligent race was exterminated by the nova of the sun God apparently chose to be the Star of Bethlehem. There’s no indication that the race was anything but resigned to the disaster.
There’s also Asimov’s super short* SISENEG*, in which the supreme being pauses the universe program, thinks a while, then rolls it back to zero. “It never HAD existed.”
The Ian Banks Culture series includes the concept of very old races that gradually withdraw into themselves and away from the rest of the universe until they Transcend, moving onto some vaguely-defined higher plane of existence with motivations and ideas that are beyond the comprehension of those of us left in this universe. Not exactly extinction, but similar in practical terms.
The “Fire Upon the Deep” series by Vernor Vinge has something similar, IIRC.
That’s not really accurate. The Overlords were working under orders from the Overmind, and studied all the species it was helping join the Overmind in an effort to learn what was different about themselves, and how to eventually join the Overmind as well.
In The Forge of God by Greg Bear, hostile aliens turn the Earth into an anti-matter time bomb. While the sequel features a ship of survivors tracking down the alien home world and annihilating it in return, the first book ends with most of the cast staying on the doomed earth, waiting for the end.
Wasn’t that good a book, though.
Just because Skald hates it when people post non-book suggestions in his threads, I’ll throw out the Mass Effect games. In this series, every hundred thousand years or so, a race of genocidal AIs shows up an exterminates all organic sentient life in the galaxy, then goes into hibernation in deep space, waiting for the next batch of organic sentiments to evolve so they can do it again. In the last cycle, one race managed to hide a base filled with thousands of their species in stasis, along with a message to later races with valuable information on defeating the AIs - the hope being that the next generation of sentients would find and revive them before the AIs attack again. As the millennia passed, and various systems started failing, the life support on the pods was turned off, one by one, in order to keep the message intact. By the time the player finds the place, none of the stasis pods are working anymore - the race went extinct, finally, in order to pass on the knowledge about the AIs yo whoever came after.
