Space colonization stories are a subgenre of SF. Space colonization stories in which the Earth has become a backwater world, cut off from thriving colony planets, are a thriving sub-subgenre.
At first glance, this seems odd. Earth is rich in resources and offers humans a shirt-sleeve environment1 . Why wouldn’t it continue to be the leader of the pack?
Sometimes it’s because we have trashed the Earth, rendering it uninhabitable. Stories like Thomas Scortia’s Earthwreck, Arthur C. Clarke’s “If I Forget Thee, O Earth,” and Joe Haldeman’s Worlds Apart are set on Earths where nuclear and biological weapons have turned the surface of the planet into a death trap2 . Any humans remaining have two options: flee or go extinct.
(In reality, even a radiation-soaked Earth would be still more habitable than any world in our Solar System. SF authors ignore or downplay that because they want to tell stories about extraplanetary societies.)
A few authors go that extra 1.6 kilometers and obliterate the Earth entirely. Wil McCarthy’s Queendom of Sol setting imagines a communications system with a failure mode that can and does turn the Earth into a small black hole. Nothing encourages the settlement of other worlds quite like having your old one reduced to the size of a marble.
Sometimes the issue isn’t that we’ve made Earth too hostile, but that our exuberant embrace of advanced technology has created something far too friendly for our own good.
Wil McCarthy seems to like destroying the Earth. In Bloom, nanotech beasties swarm the face of the planet, absorbing everything they encounter like an unstoppable katamari. The only recognizable humans left in the system are those lucky enough to escape the planet in time.
Similarly, the backstory of Michael Swanwick’s Vacuum Flowers postulates the abrupt appearance of a terrestrial mass mind known as the Comprise. The only sure way to avoid incorporation into the light-speed-limited Comprise is to gain enough distance from it that the Comprise cannot maintain cognitive continuity.
In Poul Anderson’s “Epilogue,” human travelers return to Earth after the passage of many years to find that it is now the domain of an ecosystem composed entirely of robots
When humanity fails to render the Earth undesirable, aliens can do the job for us. The classic example is, of course, John Varley’s Invaders, who suppress advanced technology to preserve the terrestrial species they prefer.
Some books don’t imagine compelling physical reasons to shun the Earth.
The Earth of Vonda McIntyre’s The Exile Waiting isn’t uninhabitable, but it is worn out and poor, with little to offer traders or visitors. In Melissa Scott’s Silence Leigh books, Earth has been deliberately sequestered from the greater interstellar community in order to better control it.
In other works, E. C. Tubb’s Dumarest series for example, the issue is that the galaxy is very big and Earth is insignificant. Like Ontario’s Josephsberg, it exists, but many maps overlook it.
In John D. MacDonald’s Ballroom of the Skies, Earth is kept carefully sequestered from the galaxy because it is the sole source of an irreplaceable resource that would vanish if Earth were ever brought into the galactic mainstream. (Explaining more would be getting into spoilers.)
Sometimes it’s hard to say why the two groups, terrestrial and extra-terrestrial, avoid each other.
In Pamela Sargent’s Venus trilogy, Earth’s Nomarchies and the space-based Habbers view each other with suspicion and condescension.
In Varley’s Thunder and Lightning series, off-worlders like Podkayne Strickland-Garcia-Redmond view people from Earth with contempt, taking steps to ensure that as few people from Earth are allowed to emigrate as possible. There is no mention, however, of anyone wanting to build any sort of wall around Earth3 , at least.
I suspect that some isolated or ignored Earths, particularly the more backward ones, owe their inspiration at least in part to a combination of American Exceptionalism and what might be called historical orthogenesis: having founded off-world colonies which in this mythology must outshine the mother world, the Earth’s insistence on continuing to exist is at least a little rude, if not misguided. Best to underline the point by making it clear the Earth is now at best a second-rate locale….
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 surprisingly flammable.
[1]Not all humans appreciate shirtsleeves weather, like those misguided souls who migrated from coastal California to Ontario for the weather. Ask me how I know.
[2]It’s a death trap for humans, but any animals able to survive the conditions would flourish. Wildlife has prospered in places like Chernobyl and the Korean DMZ; living with radiation and landmines is apparently easier than living with humans.
[3]In the Mallworld stories, the Selespridar went one better than a wall and sealed the Solar System off in its own universe. However, the entire point was to keep us contained, so no humans were allowed out first.
In my For Your Safety series the robots forcibly made Humanity evacuate the Earth, because otherwise the continued stress on the environment was going to turn it into Venus Mk. 2. Fortunately the Groupmind also made them a spiffy space habitat to live on.
In one of William Barton’s books, the rich chased all the poor people off the planet so they could enjoy the Solar System’s one garden world for their own. But at least the poor people had tiny space-apartments in which to live (as opposed to being processed for mulch, which seems much more like the way plutocrats would solve the problem of RIFing the terrestrial population.).
@2: Somewhat similarly, in one of Sheffield’s books, the well-connected stayed on Earth, and many others left, so that by the time of the book, almost everyone left on Earth can claim some sort of relatively recent aristocratic ancestry.
If your example rests on spoilers, then either give the damn spoilers or leave it off the example list. I’m not going to be coyly seduced into reading this novel by dangling the possibility of spoilers over me.
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Earth becoming uninhabitable and space explorers desperately looking for a replacement is very common in movies, most prominently Interstellar. It always seems a little cheap to me, like they can’t think of any other reason to explore space. Greg Egan has an interesting variation on this in Diaspora where the Earth is sterilised by a gamma-ray burster. The characters are AIs and aren’t directly affected, but it freaks them out enough that they start exploring space to find an explanation for it. There was a review in Analog of a book with a variation on the “Lost Earth” theme: it was stolen. It just vanished from the Solar System one day and the characters have to track it down. Anyone know the title?
A superb recent “abandoned Earth” is Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, in which an Earth only slightly advanced in space technology compared to us tries to get at least a few thousand young people into space, when they know the surface will shortly become uninhabitable. It’s a little harrowing at times as, through human folly, the human race in space goes from four digits, to three digits, to two digits, to …
A classic isolated and ignored — and partially radioactive — Earth, laughed at for claiming to be the birthplace of the human race, shows up in several novels by Isaac Asimov. A desertified Israel may have been at the back of his mind.
6: Roger MacBride Allen’s The Ring of Charon?
I assumed one of Asimov’s models was specifically Judea in the Roman era. Judea and the Romans had a relationship that at times fell short of perfect tranquility, just as Earth is known to the Empire for being mildly troublesome.
Thanks, that must be it. This idea was also used in Starfinder, the SF version of the Pathfinder roleplaying game. The creators wanted to make a clean break with the fantasy setting on the planet of Golarion. So they just have it disappear, replaced by a huge space station, with a gap in everyone’s memories and records around the time it vanished.
In Adrian Tchaikovsky‘s Children of Time, a tiny part of humanity manages to abandon Earth on time to get a second chance to build something new.
There was never a sequel to my knowledge but each of the gates to alien worlds in Dave Duncan’s Strings was temporary. Over time, the Earth was establishing an increasing number of colony worlds that would soon be isolated from Earth and each other.
(how many colonies survived isolation was an open question.)
@10 — There was one sequel to Ring of Charon — The Shattered Sphere — but as far as I’m aware, Earth is still lost, sadly.
I’d add Cities in Flight by James Blish to the list of tired Earths. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities_in_Flight)
Trying to remember: In Banks’ Feersum Endjinn, had the Earth been abandoned?
Let’s add Edmond Hamilton’s “Requiem” to this list.
A good story about humans coming back to watch the sun go Nova and absorb the earth (depopulated).
In Clifford Simak’s City, humanity leaves, and Earth goes to the dogs (literally).
And in his Cemetery World, Earth ends up as a gigantic, well, the answer is right on the cover.
@6: The idea of Earth being lost after having been moved to another location (in this case in one of the Magellanic Clouds) is a plot point in Dan Simmonds’ Hyperion Cantos as well
Well, that’s potentially just a temporary inconvenience since one of the Clouds is headed our way.
In a lot of stories it’s probably just a way to get rid of the Ancients, only in this case human Ancients. You can’t have the Wild West in space if technologically more advanced cops are nosing around all the time. Mobility in your typical space saga is such that it’s hard to just say Earth is so far away that it can be mostly ignored. Better to lose it or blow it up – then those potential plot problems are neatly sorted.
“Earthsearch”, although…… never mind.
“Wall-E” contains a Wall, look. :-)
E. E. “Doc” Smith at least once had all of the cool people go out to conquer space, leaving a heap of losers back home.
I’ve always quite enjoyed this sub-genre. My heart resonates with it, for some reason. (If I ever do write anything of significance, will probably involve Earth being lost!) Thanks for the write-up, some on here I’d not heard of before! I knew Asimov would be mentioned, but thought I would be the first to mention Dumarest of Terra. Should have known you’d not overlook that, James! Thanks for the article.
Arthur C Clarke’s ‘Rescue Party’ was his first published short story, and deals with aliens gathering artefacts from a deserted Earth just before it is destroyed.
If we’re just looking at American SF, a lot of people in the U.S. have refugee roots. Famines, religious persecutions, wars, political persecution, ethnic cleansing, Highland clearances, there’ve been a lot of people who were forced to leave home and go looking for a new one.
There’s also the knowledge that all empires fade. The whole, “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings/ Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and Despair!” thing.
@@@@@ GarethWilson: The Earth goes missing at some point in one of Dan Simmons’ Hyperion novels… although it seems to matter less than you’d suppose.
In Terry Dowling’s great linked collection Wormwood (Aphelion, 1991) various alien races have altered the surface of the Earth to suit themselves and their client races and humans have to cope.
Even DC comics got on the bandwagon back in the 90s, with a run of one-shot Annuals called “Legends of the Dead Earth,” showing that, although Earth itself is long gone and burned-out, the memories of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and others are still mythologized across the universe.
(I particularly enjoyed the “Impulse” one, that presented a far-future speedster fighting a one-man resistance against an alien occupation by making the planet too annoying and uncomfortable for the conquerors to want to stick around. Weaponized itching powder, stink bombs, and hacked heating/air-conditioning as weapons of resistance.)
Sarah Zettel’s Reclamation also features the Earth being … misplaced. It’s one of my favorites of hers, and I recommend it highly.
I rather enjoy the Earth “ages” that Cixin Liu conjures in his trilogy.
I see Asimov mentioned in general, but no one has specifically mentioned the extended Foundation (+Robots) series. The origin planet of humanity was mythical by then.
Not sure if it would count, but in The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun, the Earth’s surface is abandoned by those who still live on Earth while the Spacers have abandoned the whole planet.
I’d add a couple (I think) lesser-known works:
The Helix and the Sword by John C. McLoughlin
The Leaves of October by Don Sakers
Also, André Norton’s Star Rangers would probably qualify.
Andre Norton’s “Breed to Come” (humans abandon Earth, leaving it to the dogs (and cats)) as well as another of her books, “Star Rangers” (is that the right one?), has Earth being rediscovered after being abandoned.
Andre Norton – my gateway drug for written Science Fiction.
Clifford Simak’s City is by far my favorite. The story is narrated by dogs (now the apex species), who reason that a species as illogical and unlikely as “humans” must have been fictional, but who really did build those ruins? (aliens?)
@23 Arthur C Clarke’s ‘Rescue Party’ is one of those stories that gives me a frisson every single time I read the last few paragraphs. I want to believe humans could be as brave and determined as ACC depicts, but I fear we’re the frogs in a vat slowing coming up to a boil, and will never know when it’s too late to jump.
Century Rain by Alistair Reynolds is a favorite of mine. Earth has been overrun and made uninhabitable by nanobots meant to control the weather. Another good one is Michael Gear’s Forbidden Borders trilogy where humankind has been confined to a few star systems and Earth is remembered as an ancient myth until one human decides to break free and find out for himself.
I’m sad that Andre Norton’s ‘Breed to Come’ missed making the list.
In Jack Chalker’s Academy series, the Earth isn’t precisely dead, or even totally dying, but a rising sea level due to melting polar caps has rendered much land uninhabitable as it gets swallowed by oceans and seas alike. Finding intelligent life on other earth-like worlds proves hard, and more ruins of past civilizations exist than living worlds by far. It would also fit the earlier article about the end of the world, as a frightening truth is discovered about the Earth’s history that links it to some of the far distant worlds where intelligent life once thrived but is no more.
Alan Dean Foster’s “Dream Gone Green” has an ecologically ruined and long-forgotten Earth.
Dennis Taylor’s most excellent Bobiverse series ends up with the multitude of the Bob AIs evacuating the Earth after the nuclear wars of the 22nd century. The few million survivors of the radiation poisoning of the Earth are moved to space stations and other star systems.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/bookseries/B06X15BL54/ref=dp_st_1680680587
Thanks for the flashbacks to playing katamari!
hoopmanjh (15): Unless my memory is worse than usual, the setting of Feersum Endjinn is the Earthly base of a (former) space elevator; the elevator itself is long gone because people from Outside don’t visit anymore. I don’t remember whether there are other humans on Earth.