It's the End of the World : But What Are We Really Afraid Of? (9781783964758) by Roberts, Adam (reading in the dark .TXT) 📗

Volume two of Liu’s trilogy, The Dark Forest (2008), continues the story. The question is: how to defeat an all-powerful enemy you know is coming, when your every countermeasure will be observed by them? Earth comes up with an unusual plan: four individuals are carefully selected – a head of state, a scientist, a general and the story’s main character, a sociologist called Luo Ji. These designated ‘Wallfacers’ are asked to devise a plan to save humanity, each of them working separately from the others and with all of earth’s resources at their disposal. No matter how bizarre or random their requests, they must be honoured; and if they appear to be acting for arbitrary, or insane, or inane reasons – well, such randomness can only help to baffle Trisolaran surveillance. When Luo Ji, a lazy, underachieving academic, is selected for this prestigious role, he can hardly believe it, and when he tries to turn the invitation down the world assumes that he is trying to throw the Trisolarans off the scent. So he decides to accept, and to use his new power to indulge his innate hedonism. He moves into a luxurious mountain palace and orders all sorts of indulgences brought to him, including his dream girl – a fantasy of perfect femininity from his youth.

Liu Cixin dramatises his impending world’s-end with aplomb. The world is divided between those who think the Trisolarans must be defeated at all costs and those who argue that Earth should build spaceships to evacuate as many citizens as possible before they arrive. In the end, the mood of the world shifts towards confrontation.

By the time the Trisolarans arrive, Earth has built a fleet of powerful space battleships to rebut the invasion and it seems the Wallfacers’ plans will not be needed. However, the aliens are so technologically advanced that they make short shrift of our defences. A character called Ye Wenjie explains to Luo Ji – the only Wallfacer still active – the true nature of the cosmos:

The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound . . . The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life – another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant . . . there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out.*

The final volume in the trilogy, Death’s End (2010), concludes the story: Luo Ji uses the threat of mutually assured destruction to force the Trisolarans into a truce: if they attack Earth, he will broadcast their existence throughout the universe, and more terrifying species will come hunting for them both. An uneasy peace ensues, although it does not last. The Trisolaran system is annihilated by forces even more powerful than them and they flee, believing that Earth will be next. The story doesn’t quite end there, but that’s where we’ll leave it for the moment.

If we’re terrified that technology will destroy us – whether by our own hand or someone else’s – we seem to be equally afraid that it can’t save us. In another space-related end-of-the-world scenario, the thing that smashes the planet to pieces is not sentient, and is guided not by hostility but by chance. From planets to asteroids, the vast reaches of space contain a multitude of objects that could spell our end – and in these stories, technology is now our only hope.

The key modern version of this kind of world’s end is the movie When Worlds Collide (directed by Rudolph Maté in 1951), the success of which kick-started the 1950s boom in science fiction filmmaking. Based on two 1930s science fiction novels by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer (When Worlds Collide and its sequel, After Worlds Collide), Maté’s movie tells the story of an astronomer called Emery Bronson who detects a rogue star called Bellus. He deduces that Bellus will crash into Earth, causing the end of the world. When Bronson presents his findings to the United Nations he is mocked, but a group of prescient millionaires finance the construction of a new spaceship called ‘Noah’s Ark’ and plan to fly on to the star’s lone planet, Zyra, which they determine is habitable. In the end, the spaceship launches and takes forty humans to a new life on Zyra.

The movie still carries a punch, and it has also spawned imitators. In The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), Soviet and US nuclear tests accidentally knock the Earth closer to the Sun, with devastating results. In Meteor (1979), a giant meteor is detected on a world-ending collision course with Earth, before catastrophe is eventually averted. In 1998, two movies – Armageddon and Deep Impact – were released in which brave men fly up on space shuttles to avert an impending world-ending meteor strike with nuclear bombs. Lars von Trier’s arthouse movie Melancholia (2011) is lower-key: a rogue planet is on a collision course with the world, but this one is a disaster that cannot be averted. The movie follows the lives of two sisters, played by Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, until the blue planet collides with the world and everything is brought to a final end. That this planet ‘Melancholia’ is an obvious metaphor for suicidal depression (from which Kirsten Dunst’s character suffers) does not rob the movie of its force, or the dark beauty of its final shots.

There is a grim but satisfying physicality in imagining the world being smacked, as if by an enormous cosmic hammer. Although we find it hard to picture the ongoing slowly increasing toxicity of our natural environment, we can picture a fist punching through a