Карен Хабер - This Way to the End Times

Great are the stars, and man is of no account to them. But man is a fair spirit, whom a star conceived and a star kills. He is greater than those bright blind companies. For though in them there is incalculable potentiality, in him there is achievement, small, but actual. Too soon, seemingly, he comes to his end. But when he is done he will not be nothing, not as though he had never been; for he is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things.

Man was winged hopefully. He had in him to go further than this short flight, now ending. He proposed even that he should become the Flower of All Things, and that he should learn to be the All-Knowing, the All-Admiring. Instead, he is to be destroyed. He is only a fledgling caught in a bush-fire. He is very small, very simple, very little capable of insight. His knowledge of the great orb of things is but a fledgling’s knowledge. His admiration is a nestling’s admiration for the things kindly to his own small nature. He delights only in food and the food-announcing call. The music of the spheres passes over him, through him, and is not heard.

Yet it has used him. And now it uses his destruction. Great, and terrible, and very beautiful is the Whole; and for man the best is that the Whole should use him.

But does it really use him? Is the beauty of the Whole really enhanced by our agony? And is the Whole really beautiful? And what is beauty? Throughout all his existence man has been striving to hear the music of the spheres, and has seemed to himself once and again to catch some phrase of it, or even a hint of the whole form of it. Yet he can never be sure that he has truly heard it, nor even that there is any such perfect music at all to be heard. Inevitably so, for if it exists, it is not for him in his littleness.

But one thing is certain. Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment, its matrix of storms and stars. Man himself in his degree is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things. It is very good to have been man. And so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts, and peace, thankful for the past, and for our own courage. For we shall make after all a fair conclusion to this brief music that is man.

ROBERT SILVERBERG IS ONE OF science fiction’s most beloved writers, and the author of such contemporary classics as Dying Inside, Downward to the Earth, Lord Valentine’s Castle, and At Winter’s End. He is a former president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and the winner of five Nebula Awards and five Hugo Awards. In 2004, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America presented him with the Grand Master Award.

This Way to The End Times

EDITED BY Robert Silverberg

© 2016 by Three Rooms Press

“Introduction” by Robert Silverberg, Copyright © 2016 by Agberg, Ltd.;

“The Eternal Adam” by Jules Verne, first published in 1910 in the collection Hier et Demain. English translation by Willis T. Bradley first published in 1957 in Saturn Science Fiction;

“The Last Generation,” by James Elroy Flecker, first published in 1908 by the New Age Press;

“Finis,” by Frank Lillie Pollock, first published in 1906 in Argosy ;

“The Coming of the Ice” by G. Peyton Wertenbaker, first published in 1926 in Amazing Stories;

“N Day,” by Philip Latham, Copyright © 1946 by the estate of R. S. Richardson. Reprinted by permission of Barry Malzberg, agent for the estate of R. S. Richardson;

“Guyal of Sfere,” by Jack Vance, Copyright © 1950, 1978 by Jack Vance. Reprinted by permission of John Vance, executor for the agent of Jack Vance;

“A Pail of Air,” by Fritz Leiber, Copyright © 1951, 1979 by Fritz Leiber. Reprinted by permission of Richard Curtis Associates, agents for the estate of Fritz Leiber;

“Who Can Replace a Man?,” by Brian W. Aldiss, Copyright © 1958, 1986 by Brian W. Aldiss. Reprinted by permission of the author;

“Heresies of the Huge God,” by Brian W. Aldiss, Copyright © 1966 by Brian W. Aldiss. Reprinted by permission of the author;

“The New Atlantis,” by Ursula K. Le Guin, Copyright © 1975 by Ursula K. Le Guin. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agents, Curtis Brown, Ltd.;

“When We Went to See the End of the World,” by Robert Silverberg, Copyright © 1972 by Agberg, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the author and Agberg, Ltd.;

“The Wind and the Rain,” by Robert Silverberg, Copyright © 1973 by Agberg, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the author and Agberg, Ltd.;

“The Screwfly Solution,” by James Tiptree Jr., Copyright © 1977 by Alice B. Sheldon, copyright © 2005 by Jeffrey D. Smith. First published under the name of Raccoona Sheldon. Reprinted by permission of Jeffrey D. Smith and the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc., agents for the author’s estate;

“Daisy, in the Sun,” by Connie Willis, Copyright © 1979 by Connie Willis. Reprinted by permission of the author and the Lotts Agency, agents for the author;

“After-Images,” by Malcolm Edwards, Copyright © 1983 by Malcolm Edwards. Reprinted by permission of the author;

“The Rain at the End of the World,” by Dale Bailey, Copyright © 1999 by Dale Bailey. Reprinted by permission of the author;

“The End of the World as We Know It,” by Dale Bailey, Copyright © 2004 by Dale Bailey. Reprinted by permission of the author;

“Final Exam,” by Megan Arkenberg, Copyright © 2012 by Megan Arkenberg. Reprinted by permission of the author;

“Three Days After,” by Karen Haber, Copyright © 2014 by Karen Haber. Reprinted by permission of the author;

“Prayers to the Sun,” by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, Copyright © 2016 by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro;

Last and First Men, by Olaf Stapledon, Copyright © 1930 by William Olaf Stapledon. Extract printed by permission of the author’s estate.

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ISBN 978-1-941110-47-8 (trade paperback); ISBN 978-1-941110-48-5 (ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016936893

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