Weekly Short Story: Fast Falls the Eventide by Eric Frank Russell

Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day;
Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away;
Change and decay in all around I see;
O Thou who changest not, abide with me.

So goes the second stanza to the Christian hymn Abide with Me! Fast Falls the Eventide. Twentieth-century science fiction writer Eric Frank Russell clearly used it for his wonderful short story Fast Falls the Eventide, which appeared in the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 14 (1952)(DAW Books, 1986).  I picked it because it examines a topic common in science fiction: the far distant future and the ultimate fate of Earth's humanity...

It is millions upon millions of years into the future and Earth's atmosphere is barely breathable while the Sun is a diminishing, dying red.  There are only around a million humans left on the planet, while they have achieved a kind of symbiosis with the planet's remaining, evolved life forms, with partial verbal communication between species commonplace.  Although life on this planet is gradually dying out, humanity has spread throughout the cosmos and is thriving on worlds on which other, alien civilizations rule.  It is the strategy for our species' survival over the eons that intrigued me in this story, a strategy accurately spelled out at the story's end by a Zelamite leader called Nethame upon the arrival of the only human, a young woman from Earth named Melisande, to his own planet.  And it seems the Zelamites are looking for their own ideas for withstanding the ravages of time...

Many science fiction stories and series...Star Wars included...see the conquering of space as being basically a matter of combining military prowess, faster-than-light technology, and sheer numbers to advance whatever race or species is doing the conquering.  I liked Fast Falls the Eventide because it presents an alternative in which all sides win.  I also was intrigued with the notion of humanity keeping its basic biological form over the vast stretches of time...one might think that our species would have undergone a number of different transformations over that period.  But, of course, this is just a story in the final analysis, and Russell...who was known for seeing things in ways that others couldn't or wouldn't...painted a somber yet hopeful picture of the ways things might turn out...

I'd like to place a link to this interesting tale, but apparently it hasn't yet become part of the public domain...still, it's definitely a worthy investment of your time if you happen to come across it...