Given our recent discussion of such tales, I should note that I quite dislike one particular subset of lifeboat stories: the ones in which a small group of plucky pioneers somehow escape the dying Earth and reach a new world they can call their own. But in the meantime, the unlucky masses who could not make their way onto the flotilla die with their homeworld.
Why this distaste? Well…
(1) I don’t like it when protagonists win prizes by cashing in tokens consisting of other people’s lives. It seems that some authors are happy to kill off most of humanity as long there’s interstellar colonization. Perhaps getting rid of most of the population is the point? Jo Walton would describe this as a cosy catastrophe. Finally, an end to all those other people while the virtuous get a brand-new world.
(2) A successful escape is unlikely. A planet on the verge of destruction will have a hard time building a functional interplanetary or interstellar lifeboat with enough capacity to deliver a viable community to the target. Particularly when doing so in double-quick time. Even more so if it’s a small group doing the planning and construction. If the problem is simple enough that a handful of people could pull it off, odds are a lot of handfuls would manage it.
(3) If we’re talking stories limited to the Solar System, there are no backup Earths. A post-dinosaur-killing impact Earth is still more habitable than anything else available locally. Even nuclear war would have a hard time making the Earth as hostile as any other world in the Solar System.
Firefly’s backstory provides a marvelous example of the sort of thing I don’t ever want to see again: The Earth was somehow used up, despite which an astonishingly homogeneous subset of humanity managed to make it to another star system armed with the exact sort of terraforming technology that should have made repairing Earth easy-peasy.
Still, I have enjoyed some novels that subvert the trope.
Take, for example, Joan Slonczewski’s 1980 Still Forms on Foxfield. A UN report predicting the near-certainty of nuclear war spurred a golden age of space colonization R&D. Twenty years later, atomic war having failed to materialize, the product of that R&D was available for a group of Quakers to purchase as surplus. Imagine their surprise when they reached their destination to hear only ominous silence from the Solar System. Apparently, that UN report was correct after all, and Earth has perished in fire. Except, as we learn at the beginning of the novel, that is not quite correct either. Foxfield’s colonists, isolated for generations, must deal with sudden and unexpected contact from a world they assumed dead.
***
Although it is merely a background detail in Stephen Baxter’s 2000 The Light of Other Days, characters accept as inevitable that the giant asteroid Wormwood would in five centuries’ time obliterate life on Earth. As it turns out, five centuries is a long time and challenges that appear intractable at the beginning may not be by the end. After all, it is a problem that everyone on Earth is highly motivated to solve.
***
For that matter, the discovery in Larry Niven’s 1966 “At the Core” presents the usual set-up on a much vaster scale. The core of the Milky Way has exploded! Doom is utterly assured! On a timescale far beyond the human temporal horizon! While more prudent species fire up their intergalactic transport solutions, humanity leaves the problem to their many-times grandkids to solve. If there’s one thing humans are good at, it’s kidding themselves that inevitable consequences are not, even now, barrelling their way. Just ask me about climate change!
***
Emma Newman’s Planetfall series—Planetfall (2015), After Atlas (2016), Before Mars (2018) and Atlas Alone (2019)—provides a particularly ominous and plausible explanation as to how a small handful of survivors might somehow escape their world immediately before doomsday. They could set off doomsday once they embarked; this would prevent those nasty others from following the colonists to their promised land.
***
Perhaps you have your own favourite subversions of this popular trope? The comments are, as ever, below.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF(where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
You have put your finger on exactly why I don’t buy the ‘Verse’s’ official origin story. It’s not like the Alliance is a reliable narrator after all.
So, to digress about covers: for me, the iconic Neutron Star cover is this one:
A buck fifty! Paperbacks are so expensive!
It would seem to never-cynical me that the most likely reason for a small group departing a soon-to-be uninhabitable Earth is that the group leaving makes sure they cause doomsday. In this, Ms Newman’s novels seem to get the prize for most likely scenario.
——-
@1, PrincessRoxanna:
Given that at least one planet (Wash’s home) seemed so polluted the stars weren’t visible, you’re making me wonder if the “used up” bit was because the people who left Earth didn’t leave voluntarily, but those who stayed behind threw them out for wanting to continue polluting and generic environmental destruction.
I wonder if there are enough stories about groups who were so annoying the World Government said “Here’s a trillion atomic dollars, and a one-way ticket as far from us as you can get, now never bother us again” for an essay?
Though she found the phrase useful, Jo Walton did not coin “cosy catastrophe;” for this phrase we must thank Brian Aldiss in Billion Year Spree (1973).
@@.-@ Douglas Adams did it, I think.
(Does Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy count as a lifeboat story, wherein Ford Prefect elected to save exactly one human?)
@3, Now there’s a thought!
Mick Farren’s The Song Of Phaid The Gambler features a future Earth ravaged by tech gone bad, in which the inhabitants alternately curse and lament “the Lords” who left Earth centuries or millennia ago and who may – some hope – return someday…
There’s a Greg Egan story about a manned interstellar mission that ends up as the reverse of this trope. There’s some psychic effect that makes it lethal for a small group to get too far away from humanity.
Did Firefly say that the Earth was used up? The opening narration of the movie said they moved on from Earth because the Earth could no longer support the population size. That’s not the same thing.
@11- Per opening narration “Mal: Here’s how it is: The Earth got used up…” and “Book: After the Earth was used up…” I don’t think there’s really any elaboration on exactly what that entailed, though.
@12 – Maybe they thought better of it and changed it for the movie. Per the movie’s opening narration:
@@.-@: Cyril Kornbluth’s The Marching Morons. Also Hijack, by Edward Wellen.
@@.-@ That’s the idea of the B Ark
@15 I was thinking the same thing! :-)
#13: funny how terraforming always produces ecosystems indistinguishable from Southern California, innit? 🙃
Andrea K Host: “The Starfighter Invitation”, in which the protagonist discovers that the incredibly popular, cutting-edge tech, VR MMORPG that she is playing has quite another purpose than she thought. Beautifully written, original and elegant in plot and characterisation, as Host’s generally are. First of a projected trilogy, ends on an incredibly depressing note.
@@@@@#1 True. The Alliance is running all the schools and the information media.
The Verse is much more diverse once you move on to the comics and novels. About a third of the new characters are noticeably Asian.
@17@13
Except for the episode of ST:TNG that has a planet terraformed to resemble the British Isles. Specifically, Scotland.
Bloody unlikely if you ask me.
(There’s a reason the inhabitants of the British Isles were among the widest faring emigrants of the Age of Exploration and Conquest.)
@17 Except for the times it produces ones indistinguishable from the forests around Vancouver.
@@.-@: I believe Flint did something similar with Slow Train to Arcturus. It is also the origin story of Starcraft’s Confederacy.
@@.-@: Barnes’ Thousand Worlds series could be described that way.
@10: What Egan story is that?
Corollary of James’ comment #4 (groups who were so annoying the World Government said “Here’s a trillion atomic dollars, and a one-way ticket as far from us as you can get, now never bother us again”) is that said WorldGov is incredibly gentle and humane, not to mention wealthy, compared to any Actually Existing Superpower (whose usual way of dealing with incredibly annoying people tends to involve bullets or concentration camps rather than giving said groups insanely high-energy kinetic weapons, i.e. starships).
So it’s implicit in this scenario that Earth is basically run along the same lines as the Culture: so wealthy that money is a symptom of poverty, so nice they give even utter fuck-ups access to the best toys, and generally the sort of place that only wholly unreasonable people would want to flee. So, eh, Jonestown in Space?
@23: Charles Sheffield’s MacAndrew universe had a few dozen generation ships leaving the solar system – and every one of them seems to have been composed of loons of one sort or another.
@17: They lampshaded it in Stargate:SG-1 (shot in Vancouver) with sarcastic remarks about how many times a stargate seemed to be sited in conifer trees.
The late Ben Bova had a story where the Genetically Superior (I think? Something like that anyway..) stole a generation ship in order to avoid being sent off to The Camps. IIRC, it didn’t work out to be very utopian for their descendants.
26: I think that’s the Exiles trilogy. The World Government got panicky that newly developed genetic engineering technology would destabilize an already precarious Earth. Subsequent events suggested they were not wrong. The short term solution was to imprison the scientists involved on a space station. The long term solution was to turn the space station into a generation ship and head for Alpha Centauri. Unfortunately for the crew of the ship, they reach Alpha Centauri in the middle volume of a trilogy.
Perhaps the zombie apocalypse is a cosy catastrophe with the best of all words. You get rid of all those annoying othets. And you get to chop of their heads.
@22: I think the Egan story is “In Numbers”, from the April 1991 issue of Asimov’s. It doesn’t seem to be collected anywhere.
@15 Of course, you remember what happened to Golgafrincham…
@29: Thanks!
@20 I believe there’s a Doctor Who lampshade hanging quote “lots of planets look like disused quarries, it’s one reason Earth is so precious”.
See also https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BBCQuarry
And then there’s the 4th Doctor episode where they actually land in a real quarry, Hand of Fear. I didn’t get the joke when I first saw it but I do now.
You could come up with a good explanation for the Stargates always being in conifer forests – something like this:
well, we always have to put the gates in similar pressure and temperature environments. If you put one on top of a mountain and the other one at sea level, every time you opened it there would be a tremendous gale rushing through it. Similarly if you open a gate from Antarctica to somewhere like central Africa, you’ll get an adiabatic wind blowing through. You don’t want that. Also, we like living in temperate climates; so the gate, which is going to be the hub of our civilisation on that planet, should be put somewhere nice.
Obviously all our gates are on habitable worlds because those are the only ones we want to get to.
And every time the gate’s open, stuff tends to drift through… like seeds of invasive plant species.
So every gate is in a cool-temperate sea-level environment on a habitable world; of course they’ll all end up with the same vegetation growing around them…
If the Earth dies and no one escapes then the book basically ends and you don’t get to explore a new star system. I think it’s hopeful that someone escapes. As for saving the world instead of leaving it, it’s generally easier said than done. If you or I had the incredible powers of Kenneth Copeland then of course we would stop the global warming or the coronavirus, no charge, but we don’t have. Neither does he, but he takes the money anyway.
Rather a lot of Earth economic history is presented in David Gerrold’s “The Galactic Whirlpool”, in which a city space station is built for permanent occupancy and solar power generation I think. Spoilers – the crew default on the mortgage, declare independence, and head for the outer solar system colonies, then back again, accepting tourists and passengers, but eventually they choose to head out of the system and the fate of “The Lost Cometary Colony” remains unknown – for now, because meanwhile on Earth, Star Trek happens, since this is a Star Trek book, and eventually the Starship Enterprise discovers an artificial habitat far from Earth in which things have gone not entirely well.
Philip Wylie’s When Worlds Collide / After Worlds Collide and J. T. M’intosh’s One in Three Hundred were fairly recent paperbacks when I started trawling the used bookstores for SF in 1960. If there’s anything better than leaving behind billions of the doomed, it’s a climactic battle to defend your launch site from their desperate attempts to get aboard. (Cf. also the defense of the nuclear power plant in Lucifer’s [spit] Hammer: that’ll show those anti-technology environmentalist wreckers how to rebuild civilization!)
@13: Whoa — terraforming “dozens of planets and hundreds of moons” would take decades?!? Hardly seems worth all the bother.
Firefly’s magic terraforming tech kind of makes you wonder what Earth’s solar system looks like. At the very least Mars and Venus will be livable and probably the Galilean moons too. Cool!
“…developing enough capacity for more than one effort” pretty much sums up the Pak in Known Space (especially the later “Worlds” books). While humans, as you rightly said, plan to leave the problem to their descendants, the Pak have no choice but to try and save their descendants (ideally at the cost of everyone else’s descendants)…
@20
From a Freeman Dyson interview long ago: re settlement of asteroids, I asked: Is the sunlight at that distance adequate to grow plants?
Dyson: I think so. Plants are very flexible in their requirements, you know, and they could be genetically altered, if it’s needed. After all, a lot of things grow very well, even in England…
@20
“…insanely high-energy kinetic weapons, i.e. starships”
Or at any rate starships that pass through .9999… c on the way to and from FTL.
E. E. Smith’s planet-slinging aside, did anyone before C.J. Cherryh (starships dropping out of FTL and “dumping velocity” as they enter a stellar system) make it explicit that any vessel — or a half-eaten burrito jettisoned at the right moment on the right trajectory — could be a planet-killer?
ObSF: James White’s Deadly Litter.
First part of Neal Stephenson Seventies is a pretty good description of what could realistically happen when population of Earth knows they are all going to die when Earth’s surface going to be decimated. Both with “survivor’s flotilla” and those who are to stay behind.
@43 Sorry its Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. Stupid autocorrect.
Janet Kagan’s Mirabile has generation ships that left the Earth behind, but I don’t think Earth was destroyed, unless they too had to deal with Dragons Teeth.
@29: I dug out my old issue of Asimovs with that Egan story in it. Thanks. I had forgotten that one.