The future that awaits us is bathed in the light of a dying sun.
I.
As an American, I am heir to the hymns and curses of my home, as well as its perspectives towards the world. I write the following as an American to Americans to try to bring forth what appears to me as the mythic understructure holding together our relationship to the world and the unfolding of time across it. In this regard, I find the Dying Earth to be the surest handle to begin a grasp towards understanding.
The Dying Earth, as envisioned and struck to paper by Jack Vance, is the truest American image of the deep future. Spawning from his first collection of stories under the same name, The Dying Earth is a setting of an Earth that has become alien with time: everything in the world is dwindled, nature loosens apart to let the improbable flourish and the impossible to draw breath, and reality is divided into pockets determined at the whims of wizards empowered by their knowledge of mathematics.
I stake that the Dying Earth is a superior conception of the ontological terror humans as beings in the environment face versus what is normally called Lovecraftian. Opposed to Lovecraftian concepts of an indifferent cosmos filled with raw intelligences who are as gods to us, those visions always suppose a numinosity in the terror of things capable of destroying the world entire. In truth, though our world may end, the world as planet will not end, but endure—and it is in the terror of what grows after the end of the known that the Dying Earth is situated in.
As Americans we know that one day an apocalypse will arrive to tear veils and break the seals in the shadows. This apocalypse is always in the form of a nuclear explosion, which after all is only the evoking of a Big Doom hidden within atoms. After the Big Doom, we will meet the deep future.
I use the term deep instead of far because the aspects that compose the Dying Earth are latent within our world and only coming closer to hand. There, the coming horizon of dawn will not bring a brightening of the sun, but rather a dimness that cannot keep the known balance of life. The dawn of the Dying Earth will fail to clear the dew and dreams, and in that time after time, after progress, after history, after after—such strange things will grow.
This is the real American eschatology, the true terminator line whose crossing our souls await. Every single image and conception of purportedly Christian eschatology carry this tone and timbre, because though they set-dress the deep future in Abrahamic drag, the truth always manages to shrug its shoulders and draw attention to what lies underneath. Maybe not even 1 in 10,000 will recognize the term “Dying Earth,” but the its veins run very long.
Living in orientation to the Big Doom is knowing it can come at any moment and as long as it can threaten it is imminent. But it is also to know, maybe unknowingly, that the survivors will be their final selves in the deep future. We might say this is our eschatological ontology—we (the total human we) are who we will be, and this includes being lost to the occulted world that will set in.
II.
The present convergent crises at hand in this country are taxing to consider because they force us to recall the unknown known of the deep future. Our waking lives are lived in the fear of strange beings and madmen of awful power from the depths of worst imaginings. This brings our being in line with the human element that survives in the deep future—in a sense, we are already losing our footing in the ruins that have not yet toppled.
This experience exists in tandem with the epochal character of the environment. To describe it, some people bandy around the term “Anthropocene” but I say that is not quite right. This is not a time whose effects, though largely defined by human activity, do not reflect the process of humanity as such. To call it a Teratocene may be too hyperbolic, though it feels more correct—at any rate, we may define our present as undergoing Teratobasis, a monstrous movement.
III.
I’m going to talk about BLAME! now.
BLAME! is the name of a movie which depicts a future where technological advancement has led to the creation of a massive megastructure over the planet. In BLAME!, our tools have lost their need for users and keened themselves in inscrutable and horrifying ways. This is a future where humanity has ended in a guttered position: we have lost control of the structure’s primary systems, and the security system of the structure meant to defend humanity from threats can no longer recognize people as human. The security system (safeguards), then, has become entirely hostile towards humankind, and our species survives in the nooks and crannies of the world where the murderous safeguards cannot reach. These awful machines develop units of inconceivable ability and lethality in their slakeless thirst for extermination.
There is a plot that involves a wanderer in possession of strange powers only possible in this Dying Earth, but it does not matter in the end. It does not matter because the actions of the characters are ultimately lost to the vastness of the world. Some of the characters may be saved, and their attempts to survive the safeguards’ attempts to kill them may be successful to some degree, but they cannot ultimately overturn their conditions.
I cannot recall when I saw this movie, but this vision of an overwhelming, unescapable future born from a Big Doom is something that tilted me for some time after I initially watched it. It is not right to say I was afraid of this scenario, nor preoccupied with it, but when my mind was set to think on what I had seen in contrast with the world in which I lived, it felt like I had glimpsed at the future only to see a vast void sparsely littered with scraps of suffering.
BLAME! is a vision of the Dying Earth: the people of that world do not know sunlight and are plagued by monsters worse than any ghost story. It takes only a little ability to logically trace how the current state of things could go there; I do not recommend this trace. And yet, if you’re not careful and let your gaze observe things now, it is difficult to shake the notion that some people live in an understatement of the vision of BLAME!.
I think it is important to ponder the totality of such horrible visions of the future. Our media—our culture, in total—is full of visions of Big Dooms for the world, yes, but there is always acknowledgement that endorsement was necessary for doom to arrive. The megastructure and its horrors was designed, intended, and constructed. The lesson it can give us regarding a Big Doom is clear: it is not that these dooms aren’t stopped, but rather that they are brought forward, positively and affirmatively. At some point, someone had to hit the “go” button on the monstrous processes that take us into those dark times.
IV.
If we trace each aspect of the Teratobasis from its inception to now, all natural and life-preserving instinct recoils at the callous permissiveness on behalf of the orchestrators, and in that recoil asks “why was this not stopped?” Those questions have answers, however they never grasp the root condition from which they sprout.
If we ponder the why of the doing, we look farther into the problem and begin to approach the understanding of the actions that created it. This is, proximally and for the most part, not something being done seriously or at scale in any way accessible to most people, and would still be insufficient. After all, it is the magnitude of the dimness of the deep future that washes out illumination.
In order to keep footing in this shifting, undulating time we can take two considerations. First, always remembering though our world might end, the possibility of worlds on this planet will not end: things keep going, some way or another. Second, the world does not have to end up in guttered future: remember that Big Dooms must be chosen, affirmed, and cast into reality.
V.
To quote one of my dearest friends, I don’t have any answers, but if we shape our attention to what is happening, what could be, and the various paths open to us, I think we can start to grasp the shape of the first practical question for confronting the Teratobasis:
What does it take to kill monsters?