2 The Tales of the Last Days, 1805-3794 I. F. CLARKE Thirty-six years ago cinema audiences throughout the world saw their worst fears realized in the brilliant, unsparing images of Dr Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The final frames in the Kubrick film displayed the mushroom cloud that signalled the end for all living things; and the last sound from that worst of all possible futures was the voice of Vera Lynn, as she sang of her hope that the world might have a second chance: 'We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when.' The up-to-date technology, which underpinned the feasibility of the coming cataclysm in Dr Strangelove, concealed the fact that the script of the Kubrick film had recycled one of the most ancient stories known to the peoples of Earth. Long before the many different accounts of the last days of humankind were committed to writing, the tribal lays had recorded the great floods and the other catastrophes that would lead to the End of the World. The Indian version, which figures in the Mahabharata and the Puranas, expected that the Fire of the Cosmic Conflagration would bring on the dissolution of the universe. This was comparable to the Ragnarok myth of the Scandinavians and the Gotterdammerung of the Germans - that fearful time foretold in the Voluspa, when the last days would bring in 'Fear, malice, and foulness, Ere the World ends. Ere the Doom fall': Earth sinks in the sea the Sun grows dark, the shining stars from the sky roll down; Steam clouds form and fostering fire; the flame high rising licks heaven itself. 1 15 D. Seed (ed.), Imagining Apocalypse © Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2000

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Imagining Apocalypse

The Greeks refined that simple prefiguration into the Stoic doctrine of the Eternal Return - the perpetual cycle of destruction and renewal. 'According to this theory,' St Augustine wrote, 'just as Plato, for example, taught his disciples at Athens in the fourth century ... so in innumerable centuries of the past, separated by immensely wide and yet finite intervals, the same city, the same school, the same disciples have appeared time after time, and are to reappear time after time in innumerable centuries in the future.' 2 Divine intervention in human history, however, had revealed that time would have an end. The dead would rise again. There would be a Last Judgment, and life everlasting thereafter. Time had become linear and all human life had acquired infinite purpose. The Christian account of past and future is a story repeated in countless sermons, many poems, in spectacular paintings and most striking of all - in the Sistine Chapel frescoes. There the compelling, primordial images of Michelangelo still reveal the beginning and the end of the long journey from the initial fiat lux to the final entry into vitam venturi saeculi. That late statement from an age of faith was completed some two centuries before Turgot made the first major statement on the idea of progress: 'The whole human race, through alternate periods of rest and unrest, of weal and woe, goes on advancing, although at a slow pace, towards greater perfection'.3 These notions of progress and perfection were a positive encouragement to go forward in time - to contemplate the more desirable shapes of things-to-come. And so, during the last thirty years of the eighteenth century, a new literature of anticipation began to emerge in the first rudimentary tales of the future. The most popular of these - with four editions in the first year - was Sebastien Mercier's L'An deux mille quatre cent quarante of 1771. France in the Year 2440 is no Baconian elsewhere; for Mercier transported his readers from the eternal repose of the old-style static utopia to a world-to-come where no one would ever need to sing Dies Irae. L'An 2440 had immense influence, because it presented a vision of human destiny - a future-perfect society that exemplified the epigraph from Leibnitz: 'The Present is big with the Future'. Mercier creates a revised version of the Eden story. The point of origin in his projection is the central, formative doctrine of the Enlightenment - that the constant augmentation of knowledge is the great engine of human progress. Mercier writes with zest and certainty, as he takes over the controls of space and time - the

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whole world surveyed and realigned from China to the Americas; all things directed towards the achievement of a final beatitude in time to come. Within twenty years of Mercier's self-assured message from the future, a succession of European writers had followed his example in their visions of the technological advances and social improvements in store for humankind. 4 The fallout from the first explosion of great expectations obscured the last unsolved question about the future: Would the world go on for ever? The French futurologues had an answer, as they then had answers for every conceivable form of future society. The world would end in accordance with the laws of nature, not by a word from God. So it was written according to Jean-Baptiste Fran