I was imagining a scenario the other day in which humankind continues on for at least dozens of millions of years, if not perhaps a billion or more (depending on how long this would be physicall possible) yet never manages to settle another planet, much less travel outside our solar system. Like as in, it just turns out to be too much of a challenge. Technology continues to progress, and we can do things that seem miraculous or magical–but we never do figure out how to get off the planet. And finally the sun explodes.
Any stories ever written along these lines?
I’m always coming up with scenarios but I never actually can write an actual story* so now my policy is to find other people who have written stories within scenarios like those I often imagine.
*Basically I have no articulate understanding of how people think or talk, and this is kind of necessary for writing a decent story.
Your scenario sounds a lot like Jack Vance’s *Dying Earth *stories. The sun never actually explodes, but everyone expects it to fizzle out any day now, which leads to a culture of decadent hedonism and fatalistic resignation.
Larry Niven’s A World Out of Time takes place on Earth 3,000,000 years in the future, where the sun is a red giant. It’s not quite the case where they never managed to settle another planet, though.
Olaf Stapleton’sLast and First Men written in 1930 would seem to fit the bill, although with the caveat that there is interplanetary colonization, but no interstellar travel.
Michael Moorcock’s series The Dancers at the End of Time is set on an Earth in the far future when the universe is coming to an end. Though there are aliens and space travel, none of the characters leave Earth (there is some time travel, though). It’s a study in decadence and misunderstanding (Moorcock has a very funny sequence where they try to re-create New York in the past. One of the elements is showing that the streets in Manhattan were so narrow that people had to walk sideways to past, leading to the famous “sidewalks of New York.”)
BTW, if you want to write this, don’t worry about your abilities until you’re finished. When I started, I figured I would have a hard time with characters, but plots would be easy. As I worked, I discovered I was the exact opposite: characters turned out to be easy, but plotting was hard.
Not exactly what you’re looking for, but one of my favorite SF stories (which is saying a lot) is Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars. It starts in the last city on Earth – Diaspar, which has existed for, I think, half a billion years. The inhabitants are happy but have an insurmountable aversion to going outside. The rest of the planet is, as far as they know, desert. They are aware that humanity once traveled the stars, but chose to forsake that.
Thanks for the words of encouragement. Plotting and character both seem to be beyond me, to be honest.* But it is something I know (knowing myself) I’ll periodically return to trying to do, as time permits.
*Ironically, I was considered by my short fiction writing instructor back in undergrad to be a pretty good writer. He nominated my stories for stuff and things like that. But get this: My best story was one in which nothing (really) happened and neither character spoke a single word. I used this as a premise for the story, and as a way to cheat around my serious weaknesses in plotting and character. You can only pull that off once.
That was the second episode of the restart called “The End of Time”, one of my favorites and the sheet of skin was Casandra. The so called last true human left.
Don’t worry about how you prefer to write: write what comes naturally. If it’s literary, so be it. If it’s not, that’s fine, too. But don’t overthink things. Start to write and see where it takes you.
Mote in God’s Eye has some similarities as well. Humans have faster-than-light travel, but they encounter another race that has been civilized but trapped in a single system for a long time. Things did not go well for them.
