Published by Dover Publications on September 21, 2016
Grave Predictions is a collection of stories about the world’s end. The first several stories are classics. If you haven’t read them, you’ll find it worthwhile to have them collected in one place. I have a mixed reaction to the entries from the current century. I suppose it’s hard to find current writers who match up to Bradbury and Ellison and Vonnegut and the others who penned the majority of the volume’s stories.
The collection begins with an introduction by Harlan Ellison. It rambles a bit, but it makes a good point. Humans are tenacious survivors, but can the human race survive its own capacity for self-destruction?
Here are the stories:
Eugene Mouton, “The End of the World” (1872). More an essay than a story, Mouton predicts that the world will spontaneously combust, making it an early prediction of global warming. He attributes the combustion to man’s obsessive consumption of resources (relentlessly pumping oil from the ground, deforestation, expanding cities to house excess population, etc.). All quite prophetic, even if current science might call some of the details into question.
W.E.B. DuBois, “Grave Predictions” (1920). Gasses from a comet’s tail wipe out the residents of New York and perhaps the entire world. A black messenger who was trapped in a vault and a white woman from a prosperous family are the city’s last survivors. Their disparities of wealth and race become foolish distinctions as they realize they have only each other — at least until reality intrudes. This is probably the kind of classic story that’s taught in high school, although I haven’t read it before.
Ray Bradbury, “The Pedestrian” (1951). In this classic Bradbury story, a man who wanders empty streets at night, choosing to view the world with his own eyes rather than watching television, is picked up by the one remaining police car and taken to the Psychiatric Center. The repressive state against the open-minded individual: an eternal theme of science fiction, and of Bradbury in particular.
Arthur C. Clarke, “No Morning After” (1954). Aliens make telepathic contact with a human to warn him of an impending danger to the planet, but the drunken scientist thinks he’s hallucinating. Bad luck for the human race, but whether humans are worth saving is a question that soon occurs to the benevolent aliens.
Philip K. Dick, “Upon the Grave Earth” (1954). A girl who believes she is a saint attracts blood-drinking creatures (Valkyries, perhaps) from another place. But when she goes to the other side, she realizes it isn’t where she belongs. Eventually it isn’t clear where anyone belongs, as the nature of reality -- a favorite PKD theme -- becomes difficult to separate from illusion.
Kurt Vonnegut, “2 B R 0 2 B” (1962) - The title is the phone number people call when they’re tired of living. After aging was cured, people began to live too damn long. But no new child can be allowed to live unless the parents find someone who is willing to die. A man whose wife gives birth to triplets finds an ironic solution to the problem. Classic Vonnegut.
Harlan Ellison, “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” (1967) - One of the most celebrated stories in science fiction. A raw, powerful tale about the last five humans and the machine that tortures them.
Ursula LeGuin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973) - A utopian society is made possible only by the misery and suffering of a child who lives beneath the city. The ones who walk away are those who have a conscience, who will not condition their own pleasure upon the suffering of others. This is apparently another story that is popular with teachers for the lessons it imparts, but I suspect it only resonates with bright and selfless students who would be willing to walk away from pleasures they didn’t earn. Those have become a rare breed.
Brian M. Stableford, “The Engineer and the Executioner” (1976) - An engineer who created a self-contained evolutionary ecosystem within an asteroid confronts the robot who was sent to destroy it. The theme here, one that tracks the history of science, is that anything new and different must be feared and destroyed. The ending is a dark lesson in irony.
Stephen King, “The End of the Whole Mess” (1986) - The narrator’s brother finds a cure for war (it’s in the water), but the cure is worse than the disease. This is an interesting story although not as chilling some of King’s bleak views of the future.
Joe R. Lansdale, “Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back” (1992) - The people who designed the weapons that ended the world come up from their shelters 20 years later, only to find man-eating roses waiting for them. This is an unsettling story about the consequences of self-inflicted madness, but the worst consequence is the way we punish ourselves for our sins.
Greg Bear, “Judgment Engine” (1995). At the end of the universe, a hive mind restores the consciousness of a human from our time to provide an “objective judgment engine” that will help them decide upon the future at the end of the present. A mathematical proof has established that more complex civilizations will always wipe out those that are less complex, so is it ethical for the various hive minds to avoid death by moving to a different universe? An interesting idea, but as a story it’s a little too contrived.
Erica L. Satifka, “Automatic” (2007). Ganymedeans saved the few surviving humans from the plague … although their generosity comes at a price. I’d rate this story: mildly interesting.
Mark Samuels, “The Black Mould” (2011). Sentient black mold takes over the universe. The story is amateurish. In his introduction, Ellison says he thought one of the stories was silly. I’m betting it was this one.
Ramsey Campbell, “The Pretense” (2013). Predictions of the world’s end are coming true, as the protagonist discovers when he leads his family on a (presumably) fruitless journey away from the disintegration of reality. This is a novella that probably should have been a short story, but it’s worth reading for the unsettling mood that it creates.
Carmen Maria Machado, “Inventory” (2013). A bisexual woman makes an inventory of her sexual experiences before and after the virus that works its way across the country. She finally hunkers down in Maine, but sex partners keep coming. As, eventually, does the virus. The story is touching and surprisingly powerful, sort of like On the Beach with a lot more sex.
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