Rachel Swirsky’s “Dispersed by the Sun, Melting in the Wind” is a short story about the end of the world. She remixes several SF cataclysmic tropes into this one gut punching story that unveils how it happened and how it ends up for humanity through the last two survivors separated by the Earth itself.
The story brings together asteroids, engineered plagues, and nuclear fallout in such a way that I was immediately reminded of Deep Impact, James Tiptree, Jr.’s “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain,” and Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach. Coincidences, madness, despair, and lies conspire to compound humanity’s problem of survival.
Her choice to cast a man as “the last man” builds on the past history of such stories such as Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. However, his helplessness to protect his dead son, and ultimately his own body, from preying ravens points to Frederick Nietzsche’s concept of the “last man,” which is the antithesis of the Ubermensch, or superman. Swirsky isn’t allowing humanity a chance to attain greater being in physicality, but she alludes to something after when she writes, “The last two humans are simply the final pair to march hand in hand into an unexplored realm.” Whether that realm is absolute death or transcendence of the body is left up to the reader.
The last man’s opposite is the “light-eyed child,” who literally lives on the other side of the world. This child is first identified as a child and then as a girl. Her sex is problematized in this apocalyptic world, because all the men have been killed by engineered bioweapons. The women in her community hope that she will transform into a boy thanks to providence granting her the gift of “water eyes.” She even tries to catalyze the change through her own volition.
Swirsky’s story is powerful and carefully written to excise the most impact from its modest length. I definitely recommend this story! Luckily, you can read it online here.
Thanks to John Scalzi for posting a link to the story on his blog.
