The City at World's End

Book/Story:  The City at World's End
Author:  Edmond Hamilton
First Published:  1951
Copyright:  Copyrighted when published, but no renewal was recorded.  Public Domain in the U.S.
Download:  http://manybooks.net/titles/hamiltoneother05cityworldsend.html
Rating:  Three Stars  (Worth Reading)

I picked this book at random - it was basically the first free "science fiction ebook" my search turned up.  I'm glad I picked it up though.  In addition to a good read, I've gotten to learn about the history of science fiction itself.  Edmond Hamilton is credited as being one of the fathers of the "science fiction" genre as we've come to know it - he was a prolific writer for Weird Stories, and a co-author of the first hardcover fiction compilation to explicitly have a space theme.

I hate to give spoilers, and I've tried to not mention important details, but I recommend that, if you're tempted to read this novel anyway, you should probably go do it now, then come back later and finish the rest so we can compare notes.

The City at World's End is a good read in and of itself.  I found it rather "easy" reading - not too difficult, very straightforward descriptive style - stereotypical science fiction concepts.  Then I realized that this book, and others around this time period, formed the basis for the science fiction that I grew up with, much like you can find Tolkein in every fantasy novel.  This book seems simplistic at times because it's one of the first.  The concepts seem dated because you've seen their echos in every sci-fi novel and movie since. Newer stories are more flashy, have a bigger scope or new technology, but they can't get away from the roots of the genre.  This novel has everything I expect science fiction to have - spaceships, FTL travel, time travel, big furry aliens, exploring what it means to be human.

I feel a bit silly saying this, but I was surprised how little has really changed over the last 60 years.   I mean, my parents were alive when this book was written, and I know life hasn't changed *that* much.  If you've watched WWII movies, you know what technology existed then.  All the trappings of modern life are mentioned - suburbs, cars, jet planes, power plants, telephones, radios.  Even the automobile makes in the story - Jeeps, Cadillacs, Buicks, Fords - are still being sold today.  I had to go look up what a Hupmobile was though - a cool-looking brand that was in production from 1909-1940.   Perhaps I find it surprising because science fiction tends to seriously over-estimate the rate of technological change.  In the 1960s, Arthur C. Clarke predicted we'd be building huge spaceships and travelling to Jupiter by 2001.  I'm guessing 2201, if ever.  Or maybe it's just the human tendency to think of everything that happened before your birth as

If you are paying attention while you're reading though, you notice the lack of many things we take for granted these days - television, computers, portable phones... and you notice references to things we don't use any more.  For instance, when the main character makes a phone call, he deals with an operator.  The mayor tells the townspeople to "stay by your radios" for bulletins.  All the townspeople heat their houses with coal.  I love parsing out these little details.   Being written before televisions were widely available, the author spends a lot of time on the high-tech concept of being able to communicate with video in a manner "unlike our primitive television apparatus".  "They didn't even use vacuum tubes - they'd apparently got beyond the vacuum tube".

One special touch is that a scientist named Hubble is one of the main characters.  This is presumably Edwin Hubble, although his first name is never given.  The real Edwin Hubble passed away two years after this book was published.

There's a lot to argue with culturally - how the townspeople are largely treated like sheep - how his wife seems almost completely helpless, and the alien babe is threatening and unattainable until she breaks down and cries - but these sorts of novels were generally written for geeky guys anyway.   There's also some serious optimism in the way the townspeople and the mayor defer to Kenniston and Hubble because they're scientists.  But the ultimate message about different aliens working together and all being just "people" still resonates with me, after all these years.

I've given "The City at World's End" a rating of three stars, or "Worth Reading".  Although some of the technology and cultural attitudes are quaint (which I suppose is to be expected), it was a surprisingly good story, had enough twists to keep me interested, and shows the roots of what it means to be science fiction.  If you didn't pick it up you wouldn't be missing a whole lot, but it does gain by virtue of being in the public domain, and being free.  :)

Introduction

Like many other people, I got a Kindle for Christmas.  Being an avid reader, particularly of science fiction, I immediately started digging around looking for things to read on it.  I quickly discovered that there is a wealth of free literature out there, much of it free and generally unavailable in book form.  Some has been released into the public domain by amateur or professional authors, and some is old enough that the copyrights have expired.  I'm sure that some of them are excellent reading, and some of them are awful, so I'd like to sort through some of these and share the ones that I think are worth reading.

I like reading current speculative science fiction, but I've always had a thing for the old stuff.  I find it fascinating seeing how authors extrapolated the future from what was known in their time.  The inventions or concepts they came up with, references to technologies we don't use much anymore.  One of my favorite pieces is a black-and-white science fiction film from 1902 - Le Voyage Dans De Lune - depicting a group of scientists piling into what amounts to a huge bullet and shooting themselves to the moon.  When they're done killing natives they all pile back in, except the last guy whose job it is to push the capsule over the edge, so they'll fall back to earth.  He grabs onto the back and hangs on for the ride.

Due to exposure to modern science, I don't know anyone, 108 years later, who would put up with this in modern fiction. It likely wasn't meant to be taken really seriously in the first place (note the rocket sticking the man in the moon in the eye), but nonetheless this film is from a time when nobody really knew, there certainly  could have been someone living up there.  Some people probably had figured out that there was no air between the earth and the moon, but nobody had been up there to check it out in person.  Everyone knows now that if you shot that thing out of a cannon fast enough to hit the moon, you'd be squished flat on one side of the trip or the other.  But when it was made, people watched it and wondered.

The boundaries of the unknown and the things we're willing to suspend disbelief for have been pushed a lot since then, from the radius (or interior) of the earth and oceans, to the outer planets of our solar system, to other galaxies and the end of the universe itself.  The more questions we answer, the more we create.  Current science fiction deals with light-speed travel vs. ftl, wars between galaxies, biological modification and runaway nanotechnology, the evolution of life over the millenia or our translation into pure software constructs.  Huge heady concepts, fascinating to read about, and I love the lot of it.  But there's also something about looking back and reading the speculations of those who came before, wondering if there were men on the moon, speculating about transmission of pictures through the air, wondering how we would live with these mechanical constructs called robots.

And a lot of it is freely available and waiting for me to load it on my Kindle, which was certainly someone's idea of speculative fiction, way back when.

Coming up next:  The City At World's End, by Edmond Hamilton