I was recently reminded of the shared-universe collection “Medea: Harlan’s World”, and remembered one of the biggest goofs in the collection. There is a story in the book by Robert Silverberg, “Waiting for the Earthquake”, where all the people have abandoned this planet they have had colonized for centuries because there is going to be a huge planet-wide earthquake due to tidal forces when there is a certain conjunction that happens every few hundred or thousand years. There is one man left who loves the planet and won’t leave, even though he knows that his death is certain when the earthquake comes. The story is about him visiting all these places he’s lived through his life and reminiscing about his past, and ends with him waiting for his doom as the ground starts to shake.
My problem with this - he travels all over the planet in a personal aircraft. Why doesn’t he just take off before the earthquake, fly around a few hours, and then land after it’s over and live out the rest of his life? He is not described as being suicidal - he strongly considers leaving the planet on an automated starship that was left behind, and decides that he doesn’t want to leave his home behind. It seems the author overlooked a way he could survive that was obvious to me as I read the story.
Could it have been that the earthquake was going to be so devastating that what remained would no longer be “home”? Or could the planet be unsuitable to sustain human life, either thanks to the earthquake or simply because the colony took everything with them?
No indication that the colonists were coming back that I remember…the planet was several decades away from earth (no FTL travel, people were frozen for the long voyages).
The earthquake was going to be much worse than anything on Earth. The sentient species that lived on the planet expected to be almost totally killed off - the only way their species was going to survive was their unusual reproductive system - the part of their body with the womb in it would drop off when they were pregnant, and they bred like crazy right before the earthquake. They counted on the odds that a few of the body sections with young in them would survive the quake, and their young were self-sufficient at birth.
There was a lot of stuff left behind when the people left - working spaceships, abandoned cities full of supplies that the main character was living off of. I also just remembered that he saw a naked human who had gone feral at one point - he wasn’t the last person left on the planet, but the last relatively sane one. The planet was going to be habitable after the quake, but most of the larger life forms were going to be killed by it and the tsunamis that it caused.