The Entropic Shore: Science Fiction & Deep Time

Time & Location

MWF per. 6, FAC 0127
Office hours (Spring 2026): 4105 Turlington Hall, M, 2–4 PM, and by appt.

An eclectic survey of the influences on modern science fiction (sf) of two scientific concepts that emerged with the genre as its near-contemporaries during the nineteenth century: deep time, a measure of geological history that reaches far beyond humanity’s narrow slice of the universe’s calendar, and entropy, the tendency of isolated systems to evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium and maximum disorder. The under-appreciated penultimate chapter of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) is the model here: the Traveler journeys thirty million years into Earth’s future to the shore of a frigid sea below a dim, swollen, red sun. The the only sign of life is a repulsive football-shaped creature, the last descendant of homo sapiens hopping fitfully in the halting surf. The extinction of humanity coincides, Wells proposes, with the coming thermodynamic equilibrium. Wells’ vision of unidirectional energy dispersal – the Traveler’s posthistorical leap to the entropic shore – owes much to the predictions of his contemporary, physicist William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, that compare the universe to a mechanical clock inexorably winding down.

We will read selected long and short sf by authors from the late 19th and early 20th centuries from whom the shocks to the system of these concepts elicited influential future histories of decline and dispersal, including Wells, Camille Flammarion, William Hope Hodgson, J.–H. Rosny, aîné, Olaf Stapledon, and lesser-known authors writing in the Radium and pulp sf eras. We’ll consider the influences of that literature on others writing in the mid-to-late 20th century, such as Isaac Asimov, J.G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Ted Chiang, and Pamela Zoline. We’ll conclude with a brief reflection on a legacy of these concepts in the fatalist arc of contemporary environmental sf, in works by Fernanda Trías and Claire Vaye Watkins.

As the century progresses sf’s version of entropy morphs into mostly a metaphoric, no longer a thermodynamic, concept: visions of the twilight of the Anthropocene stripped of their notes of cosmological inevitability and the specter of a long (a very long) quiet. A fundamental challenge for writers and readers, as we will see, is to imagine how the human epoch can draw to a close and that not be felt as terrifying, world-ending tragedy. (It can be; we’ll develop methods of reading that make this clear.)

Writing requirements include two short essays and one longer research paper on assigned readings.