The darkly hilarious thrust of Kubrick’s satire is that the people attracted to attempt the prevention of the apocalypse are precisely the kind of people who are aroused by its prospect. Sellers was contracted to play a fourth role, the pilot of the one B-52 that is not recalled when the attack is finally called off (on account of its radio being broken), and which drops its bomb. However, he was unable to master the Texas accent required for the role, and the part was played by US actor Slim Pickens instead – Pickens rides his bomb to its target like a rodeo horse, whooping with delight. The film ends with shots of mushroom clouds sprouting all around the world, as Vera Lynn sings ‘We’ll Meet Again’.
The humour certainly works; jokes, after all, emphasise the things that people try to hide away, pointing out the absurdities of our habits and hypocrisies and upending our expectations. And what could be more absurd than nuclear apocalypse; humans unable to stop themselves from bringing about the end of the world? We have good reason to fear what is – perhaps – our natural inclination towards destruction.
Assuming we don’t intentionally use our own technology to destroy ourselves, the machines may come after us on their own. Science fiction is brimming with tales of caution around losing control of our creations, of artificial intelligence surpassing human intelligence and deciding we are superfluous. This is nothing new: right back at the beginning of science fiction, Shelley’s Frankenstein is a tale of a man losing control of his creation, with terrible consequences. But in an age of constant technological advances and increasingly sophisticated AI, combined with our reliance on technology and machines for the way we live our lives, these stories express our fears that in our arrogant quest for advancement we may be the architects of our own destruction.
Take The Terminator (directed by James Cameron in 1984), which styles the end of the world as a direct result of human hubris. Humanity has constructed ‘Skynet’, an adaptive and intelligent worldwide neural network that resolves to eliminate all life on earth. Scenes in the movie alternate between a future of colossal destruction, in which gigantic death machines roll across landscapes littered with human skulls beneath a dark and foreboding sky, and present-day scenes, before the disaster. The reason for this is that Skynet has invented time travel in order to eliminate military threats before they are even born by killing their parents.
Terminators are human-scale killer robots, so called because their purpose is to terminate human life. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s muscular non-acting adds a deliciously charmless implacability to their pursuit of our ultimate terminus. These killing machines must, according to the logic of the franchise’s world-building, be ‘coated’ with human skin in order to travel back in time and to infiltrate our secret hideouts – although the story suggests that future humans all keep dogs, since they can ‘smell’ something is not right about these killer robots, so you’d think their disguise is more or less useless. But the ‘real’ reason why Terminators look like us is to reinforce the fact that we are the cause of our own downfall. During the course of the film their flesh tends to be ripped away to reveal the grinning metallic head of death beneath.
Of course humanity never does come to an end, thanks to a series of increasingly disappointing sequels: Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) was followed by Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), which in turn spawned Terminator Salvation (2009), Terminator Genisys (2015) and Terminator: Dark Fate (2019). Then there was the television show Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the many spin-off video games, from T2: Arcade Rampage, RoboCop Versus The Terminator and Terminator: Dawn of Fate through to guest spots in Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon and Mortal Kombat 11, as well as myriad comics and novelisations. Time travel enables both good and bad guys to come back and overturn what their antagonists have done, providing an endless number of rebootable narrative possibilities. Goodies come back in time and undo the end of the world, while baddies come back in time and reset the end of the world. In the first and second movies, the end of the world is narrowly averted; in the third the stopping of the end of the world is narrowly averted, so the world ends again.
Science fiction fandom has a term for these determined, single-minded killers: berserkers. This word was appropriated from Viking tradition (it refers to a warrior who gets so carried away in battle that he fights in a terrifying frenzy – devastatingly and with no thought of injury) by the American science fiction author Fred Saberhagen in 1963. Saberhagen’s berserkers are machine intelligences that are implacably life-hating and take the form of gigantic spacecraft that fly around the galaxy, compelled by their programming to seek out all life and destroy it. The berserkers were, we learn, created as an ultimate war machine by a now-extinct organic life form, the ‘Builders’, to help them win an interstellar war against their enemies, the ‘Red Race’. For reasons that are not explained, these machines not only destroyed the Red Race but turned on their creators and eliminated them too.
Saberhagen published dozens of ‘berserker’ short stories in the science fiction magazines of the 1960s and 1970s, later assembling them into no less than sixteen novel-length publications. But although the original stories are little read today, a great many later science fiction books and films have been influenced by the idea. Gregory Benford wrote a whole string of ‘Galactic Center’ novels in which humanity is forced to flee across the galaxy, pursued by implacable machine intelligences set on annihilating them. The British science fiction writer Alastair Reynolds’ ‘Inhibitors’ sequence (the first in the series was Revelation Space in 2000) embroiders a similar story. The TV show Battlestar Galactica, commissioned in 1978 to cash in on the success of Star Wars, imagines a life-hating robot species called the Cylons, who persecute the last human remnants in space, having already ended their world; the flashier remake of this series (2003–9) explores the motivations of these machine intelligences in greater detail, without ever making any more sense of them.
Iterations of a similar end-of-the-world idea also occur in video games and films. The popular game Mass Effect (2007) is an expansive space opera in which organic life forms come under periodic attack from a life-hating alien machine species called the ‘Reapers’ – giant sentient and synthetic-technological starships.
As machines and technology become an increasingly fundamental part of our lives, so the tales of their uprising intensify. The most successful and resonant of all the recent stories of technological apocalypse is the Matrix trilogy. Directed by the Wachowski sisters, these films tie together several themes as well as technology: it is also religious apocalypse – the story of a saviour figure gifted with miraculous power who has come to save the world. And it is a kind of zombie, or ‘techno-zombie’, story, as ‘Smith’, the malign computer intelligence, infects increasing numbers of people, turning the global population into an army of belligerents, all focused on one destructive aim. To me it presents a fascinating portrayal of disease.
Like the best science fiction, The Matrix is more effective as a metaphor than as a piece of internally consistent world-building. The trilogy’s premise is that human beings have been enslaved by machine intelligences in a post-apocalyptic future: our bodies are being held in individual pods and used as batteries to run the machine world. To distract us from our confinement, our minds are plugged into a collective virtual reality – the Matrix. This makes no sense on its own terms, but to pick holes in the conceit is, of course, to miss the point. These movies express a metaphorical truth about modern humanity’s dependence on computers and our shift to a virtual simulacrum of life. And, as metaphor, they are as eloquent as they are cool.
The first film in the trilogy, The Matrix, is a classic of its genre. The movie’s core conceit and many of its specific details have acquired widespread cultural currency, although its sequel, The Matrix Reloaded (2003), is regarded as a disappointing anticlimax, and there’s even less love around for the final instalment in the trilogy, The Matrix Revolutions (2003). Much of this movie is narratively incoherent, but its en
ding finds a compromise between man and machine. After a lengthy battle with the machines’ army, sent to destroy them, the humans realise they cannot win this war; Neo goes back into the Matrix to negotiate a truce with the ruling machine intelligences.
The idea of the existence of life forms more intelligent than our own clearly troubles us. If it’s not our own AI coming to take us down, it’s aliens. There was a time when space aliens tended to be morally as well as technologically superior to humanity. The gigantic and wise alien visitor from the star Sirius in Voltaire’s Micromégas (1752) looks down with serene disapproval on an earth wracked by war and injustice. In many cases, nineteenth-century space aliens inhabit a purely spiritual realm, as in Marie Corelli’s hugely-successful-but-now-forgotten A Romance of Two Worlds (1886), in which human suffering is revealed as a function of our earthboundness, and the interstellar spaces through which the novel’s protagonist travels are suffused with spiritual wonder (C. S. Lewis reused the idea for his ‘Space’ trilogy of science fiction novels, 1938–45).
However, most science fiction now focuses on aliens as great invaders, come to end our world, and although the likelihood of such apocalypse is miniscule, this fantasy plays a large role in science fiction and popular culture.
Why the change? It seems likely that the shift between the 1750s and the 1890s was caused by the massive expansion of Western imperialism. The early eighteenth century was hardly a time of innocence in terms of the European exploitation of the rest of the world, but by the end of the nineteenth century imperialism was being pursued on a scale and with an inhumanity unprecedented in human history. It was also becoming as unignorable at ‘home’ as it was in those countries that were on the receiving end of imperial aggression, and fed into rising concerns over what would happen as these competing empires increasingly came into conflict with each other.
George Tomkyns Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871), a short novel about an imagined future German invasion of Britain, sparked a trend for ‘invasion stories’. It is badly written, hectoring and crass, but it touched a chord of anxiety in the British public: Blackwood’s Magazine, where the story was first published, reprinted the issue six times to meet demand, and produced as a separate volume it sold 110,000 copies in two months. Scores of similar tales appeared over the following decades, imagining future invasions by Europeans, Chinese, Americans and other peoples.
It was a particular stroke of genius by H. G. Wells to replace human adversaries with alien ones in his 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, not least because it so effectively changes the threat level from a local to a global one. He was imagining what it might be like to find oneself on the receiving end of this mode of apocalyptic alien expansionism. It is Wells who deserves the credit for establishing the portrayal of aliens from outer space as malign, predatory monsters bent on dominating or destroying the globe.
In The War of the Worlds, terrifying bear-sized, octopus-like tentacular Martian invaders crash to earth in gigantic metallic cylinders, emerging from their landing craft to pilot towering mechanical tripods that devastate south-east England. After several months of wreaking death and destruction, they succumb to mundane germs against which they have no natural defence. But you already know the story. The War of the Worlds is Wells’s most famous novel, and has had a greater influence on the development of twentieth-century science fiction than any other (except Frankenstein, perhaps).
Wells’s aliens are material rather than spiritual beings, more highly evolved and much more technologically adept, but uninterested in human moral orientations. They refract the idea of British imperial expansion back upon the British, bringing destruction, exploitation and death to London. As the novel goes on, we learn that ‘more highly evolved’ means that they have dispensed with a stomach and digestive system altogether and instead feed like vampires, taking the blood directly from other animals. They come to Earth to eat us.
Had the invaders not died of disease, it would have been a global disaster, with the subjugation of our species and the end of civilisation as we know it. But we might speculate that it would not have led to the destruction of all life on earth, as they needed to keep us around to feed on.
Nonetheless, many modern science fiction writers have explored a more extreme version of Wells’s alien invasion. A great many stories and films have been written and made in which alien invaders even more malignly destructive than Wells’s Martians attempt to destroy human life – perhaps most famously in Roland Emmerich’s loose adaptation of Wells’s novel, Independence Day, the highest-grossing film of 1996. Wells’s invaders are motivated by the desiccation of their home world and a desire to find a new place to live, but the ruthless alien invaders in Emmerich’s movie are more like locusts, their whole civilisation predicated on the model of travelling from one planet to the next, stripping each in turn of their natural resources before moving on.
The Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin explores a central mystery in his novel The Three-Body Problem:* what does a popular immersive virtual-reality game have to do with the suicide of prominent Earth scientists? The answer is that a superior alien species known as the Trisolarans, living in a solar system many light years away, are planning an invasion that will wipe out humanity. It will take 400 years for the Trisolaran fleet to reach us, but they have already made their presence felt. Using a technology based on ‘sophons’, particles that transmit back everything they observe, they have been monitoring humanity and can communicate with us if they wish. This technology is so sophisticated that nothing can be hidden from the Trisolarans: they have access to all computer databases and human communication. The only thing to which their surveillance does not have access is the inside of human minds.
Volume two of Liu’s trilogy, The Dark Forest (2008), continues the story. The question is: how to defeat an all-powerful enemy you know is coming, when your every countermeasure will be observed by them? Earth comes up with an unusual plan: four individuals are carefully selected – a head of state, a scientist, a general and the story’s main character, a sociologist called Luo Ji. These designated ‘Wallfacers’ are asked to devise a plan to save humanity, each of them working separately from the others and with all of earth’s resources at their disposal. No matter how bizarre or random their requests, they must be honoured; and if they appear to be acting for arbitrary, or insane, or inane reasons – well, such randomness can only help to baffle Trisolaran surveillance. When Luo Ji, a lazy, underachieving academic, is selected for this prestigious role, he can hardly believe it, and when he tries to turn the invitation down the world assumes that he is trying to throw the Trisolarans off the scent. So he decides to accept, and to use his new power to indulge his innate hedonism. He moves into a luxurious mountain palace and orders all sorts of indulgences brought to him, including his dream girl – a fantasy of perfect femininity from his youth.
Liu Cixin dramatises his impending world’s-end with aplomb. The world is divided between those who think the Trisolarans must be defeated at all costs and those who argue that Earth should build spaceships to evacuate as many citizens as possible before they arrive. In the end, the mood of the world shifts towards confrontation.
By the time the Trisolarans arrive, Earth has built a fleet of powerful space battleships to rebut the invasion and it seems the Wallfacers’ plans will not be needed. However, the aliens are so technologically advanced that they make short shrift of our defences. A character called Ye Wenjie explains to Luo Ji – the only Wallfacer still active – the true nature of the cosmos:
The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound . . . The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life – another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant . . . there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other peo
ple. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out.*
The final volume in the trilogy, Death’s End (2010), concludes the story: Luo Ji uses the threat of mutually assured destruction to force the Trisolarans into a truce: if they attack Earth, he will broadcast their existence throughout the universe, and more terrifying species will come hunting for them both. An uneasy peace ensues, although it does not last. The Trisolaran system is annihilated by forces even more powerful than them and they flee, believing that Earth will be next. The story doesn’t quite end there, but that’s where we’ll leave it for the moment.
If we’re terrified that technology will destroy us – whether by our own hand or someone else’s – we seem to be equally afraid that it can’t save us. In another space-related end-of-the-world scenario, the thing that smashes the planet to pieces is not sentient, and is guided not by hostility but by chance. From planets to asteroids, the vast reaches of space contain a multitude of objects that could spell our end – and in these stories, technology is now our only hope.
The key modern version of this kind of world’s end is the movie When Worlds Collide (directed by Rudolph Maté in 1951), the success of which kick-started the 1950s boom in science fiction filmmaking. Based on two 1930s science fiction novels by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer (When Worlds Collide and its sequel, After Worlds Collide), Maté’s movie tells the story of an astronomer called Emery Bronson who detects a rogue star called Bellus. He deduces that Bellus will crash into Earth, causing the end of the world. When Bronson presents his findings to the United Nations he is mocked, but a group of prescient millionaires finance the construction of a new spaceship called ‘Noah’s Ark’ and plan to fly on to the star’s lone planet, Zyra, which they determine is habitable. In the end, the spaceship launches and takes forty humans to a new life on Zyra.
It's the End of the World : But What Are We Really Afraid Of? (9781783964758) Page 8