Spoiler alert: planet Earth isn’t gonna make it out of this one. Alien invasions, malevolent AI, nuclear warfare – there’s no shortage of ways that our world will meet its maker. While sci-fi stories offer scientific solutions to save our doomed blue marble, these authors know that Earth’s fate was sealed from the jump. Here are 10 sci-fi books where the Earth is destroyed – for when you’re feeling hopeless, curious, existential, or just plain sick of the place.
Death’s End
The culmination of Cixin Liu’s Remembrances of Earth’s Past trilogy, Death’s End is the story of the end our planet – brought on by scientific meddling. The bulk of the novel orbits around an alien invasion spurred on by The Trisolarians, extraterrestrials who wish to colonize our planet in order to avoid extinction. Caught up in an interstellar arms race, humanity feverishly seeks out new technology in order to give ourselves a fighting chance. When humanity decides to mess around with lab grown black holes, we take a tumble that we just can’t get up from. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to create a physics breaking, reality ripping death object in the same place we all sleep? Seriously professor, don’t $%^& where you eat. While humanity survive’s Earth’s doom, it’s ultimately short lived on a galactic timescale – wartime tragedy strikes the Solar System soon after.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
Most sci-fi novels treat the end of our world with some degree of reverence, but Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy is not most sci-fi novels. In lieu of nuclear war, deadly super-viruses, or a collision with a rogue planet, Earth is taken out by something far more mundane: bureaucracy. When the extraterrestrial Vogons decided to build a hyperspace highway throughout the Galaxy, our planet just happened to be in the way – so they destroyed it. Totally unceremonious, completely impersonal, just business. Now the poor Englishman Arthur Dent is one of the last survivors of the human race, a refugee taking a thumb out ride across the cosmos. He was saved at the last minute by a hitchhiking alien, and has been paying for it ever since.
The Road
While the Earth is technically in tact in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (i.e. not blown up) the human beings that live on it certainly won’t be for very much longer. The quintessential post apocalyptic novel, The Road follows an unnamed father and son across a slowly dying planet. It’s never quite explained what happened to the Earth. The skies are eternally clouded, the climate is cooling, wildlife is dying out. Nuclear war? Volcanic eruption? Climate change in endgame? No one can say. McCarthy describes it as “the salitter drying from the earth.” What’s “salitter”? An extremely obscure word that only a literary hipster like McCarthy would use – it means “the essence of God.” Yikes. That’s tragic. Our planet has been abandoned by the divine, or perhaps things have gotten so bad for our planet in this novel that not even God is powerful enough to save it.
Childhood’s End
Another novel where life as we know it ceases to be, Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke is our planet’s swan song sung by alien overlords. No, literally, the aliens that took over the planet in this novel actually call themselves “The Overlords.” Despite their threatening name, The Overlords claim that they have come to help. They want to get rid of war, famine and disease – and art and culture in the process. As the Overlords’ plan to save humanity by eliminating everything that makes us human is slowly revealed, we realize we’ve made a terrible mistake giving them control of the planet. Who wants to be part of a homogenous intergalactic hive mind anyway? I’d much rather keep my individuality, leave me to eat my Pop-Tarts and yell at the T.V. in peace. Sadly, The Overlords deprive humanity of that choice – and the Earth quite literally falls apart in the process.
Dawn
The first book in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis series, Dawn begins in the throes of Armageddon. The governments of the planet all decided to push the big red button at once, and consume the world in atomic fire. One hundred years after Earth’s utter destruction, a woman named Lilith Iyapo wakes up on an alien spaceship, where she’s told that she and a few other humans were saved in order to repopulate the planet. Her rescuers, an alien race called The Oankali, are a three-sexed species that are capable of highly advanced genetic engineering – they saw us across the intergalactic bar and really liked our vibe. They want to use their gene splicing skills to repopulate the planet with human/Oankali hybrids. Can’t they at least buy us dinner first? Planet Earth will live once again, but this time alien life is moving in with us.
Last and First Men
Described the author as a “future history,” Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men is a doozy of a novel – the chronicle of our planet over two billion years. In the course of this unfathomably long history, civilization is wiped out and rebuilt eighteen times. That’s actually… way less than I thought it would be? Wow, good job guys! As humanity grows, self-annihilates, and evolves its way out of the muck once more, we come back a little different each time. Giant heads, seal flippers, bug antennae – we gain and lose quite a few physical attributes. Earth becomes totally uninhabitable on civilizations fifth go around, but don’t worry! Our descendants terraform Venus, and eventually make it all the way out to Neptune. At the end of two billion years, the Solar System itself is annihilated, but hey, we had a great run. “A” for effort.
The Forge of God
A quintessential “Earth gets blown up” novel, The Forge of God by Greg Bear is the story of an alien invasion – which was announced by the aliens themselves in perfect English. After humanity stumbles across a dying alien in the desert who says “I’m sorry, but there is bad news” before kicking the bucket, Earth’s scientists uncover a hostile plot against us. A particle of matter and its antimatter opposite have been dropped into the Earth’s core, and the force from the resulting co-annihilation is causing our planet to eat itself from the inside out. Lucky for us, another benevolent alien race has stepped in to help us out! While the Earth doesn’t make it, humanity is able to continue the fight due to the intervention of kindly extraterrestrials – and hit hard against our attackers with hard science.
Oryx and Crake
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood is the story of a world rendered utterly unrecognizable by the machinations of one man: the mad scientist known as Crake. A teenage prodigy, Crake is accepted into the Watson–Crick Institute, where he studies genetic engineering before getting employed at the bioengineering company RejoovenEsense. Crake uses the company’s state of the art facilities to work on a little side project: the “Craker.” Named after Crake himself, the God-playing scientist intends to use this genetically engineered species of post-humans to slowly phase out the human race. After manipulating a RejoovenEsense product to secretly render the human race infertile, Crake’s plan starts coming together. Most sci-fi novels center around groups of people making poor decisions that lead to our planet’s destruction, but if you’re interested in a story where one guy dooms us entirely on his own, this is your novel.
Children of Time
Before the end of the first sentence of Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, Earth already has one foot in the grave. The novel begins on a starship flying away from our dying planet, rendered uninhabitable by human meddling. In preparation for the end, scientists terraformed other Earth-like planets across the stars, hoping to secure a new Eden for future generations. When a ship containing some of the last surviving members of the human race touches down on one of the these garden worlds, we’re shocked to find that another civilization has already moved in. Due to a terraforming error, primates on this planet died out, and spiders became the dominate, intelligent species. These uplifted arachnids have their own societies and customs, and humanity is horning in on their turf. In this novel, we’re the alien invaders – and the spiders show far more humanity to us than we do in return.
A Canticle For Lebowitz
In A Canticle For Lebowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr, our planet is destroyed not once, but twice. Humanity truly does have a terrible track record. After annihilating ourselves via nuclear war, our history is preserved by a group of Catholic monks that dedicated themselves to preserving fragments of our scientific and cultural texts. As the world is slowly given a Conclave-style makeover, humanity slowly hoists itself out of the Dark Ages and into a second Renaissance. If you thought the Catholic cardinals were dramatic when choosing a new pope, just wait until you see what happens when the post-Catholic governments of the world rediscover nuclear weapons. Spoiler alert: the exact same thing that happened the first time. Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, I guess they didn’t teach that in future-Catholic school?
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