Edmund Hamilton. City at World’s End (1951)

     Edmund Hamilton. City at World’s End (1951) A tale from the so-called golden era of SciFi, and it shows. The plot is simple: an atomic “super bomb” rips the fabric of space-time and projects Middletown, a city of some 50,000, millions of years into the future. The Sun has cooled to a red dwarf, the Earth’s core has cooled, too, and the planet is almost devoid of life. The scientists find a domed city, all 50K citizens move to it, an attempt to contact other people brings starships to Earth. The galactic government (run by humans, of course) wants to evacuate Middletown to a better place, but the people resist. A process to start a heavy-atom fusion-fission cycle in the earth’s core works, and lo and behold, grass starts growing, etc. But John Kenniston, the protagonist, decides to go with the star-folk, among whom he has found a possible future mate.
     There are several questions that nag a modern reader (me) of this book. One is sociological: what will the citizens of Middletown do? The mills have shut down to conserve energy, so there’s no work. Lack of work means lack of purpose, yet when the earth is warmed up, people happily return to Middletown. To do what, exactly? Another is biological: without green plants, where is the oxygen on this ancient Earth coming from? A third is cultural: were people in the 50s really so blind to the fact that women are less likely than men to wax hysterical in a crisis? Or that a uniform is no protection against the kind of panic and hysteria that is ascribed to the ordinary people of the city? Or that older folk are more likely to adapt to new situations than younger ones? And so on.
     Of course there’s no sex, just a chaste kiss now and then, and vague references to future plans and such. There is also the assumption that scientific people are not prone to hysteria, panic, fear, depression, or any of the other effects of the kind of shock that the citizens of Middletown undergo. In other words, this is an essentially adolescent fantasy, displaying the lack of awareness typical of that age. The aliens are generally friendly, and not really alien. The government is shown simplistically as bureaucratic. Hamilton gives us future humans who, after millions of years, are essentially the same as modern humans, who are said to be primitive and emotional. IOW, Hamilton seems to be unaware of what he is writing. No doubt the constraints of paperback publishing at the time (“not more than 50,000 words, please”) and the limitations of the demographic for which he wrote account for some of these flaws, but not when one considers that Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, etc were writing around the same time. The book is a neat example of the popular culture of the late 40s, early 50s, but doesn’t have much interest beyond that, at least for me. * (2004)