progress. Figures ranging from Frederick Engels, the late nineteenth-century German philosopher, and John Tyndall, a physicist contemporary with Thomson, were reluctant to accept the second law of thermodynamics, seeing it as too bound up with creationism and conservative values.55 Tyndall, though a physicist, was so uncomfortable with the second law’s potential for confirming creationist accounts of the world that he avoided publishing or speaking publicly about the topic. He also thought about ways that heat could be restored to the sun, as through planetary collisions.56 Such resistance to the second law among Western materialists endured well into the twentieth century, as seen in the writings of Svante Arrhenius in the 1910s and J. B. S. Haldane in the 1930s.57
It was only when applied to the question of English resources that ripples of a negative and materialistic reading of entropy first surfaced.58 A British philosopher, William Stanley Jevons, evoked the heat death when he asked readers to imagine the coal reserves of England as empty as a cleaned coal bin. The hearths of England, when that day comes, “will be then suddenly extinguished, and cold and darkness will be left to reign over a depopulated country.”59 But Jevons only drew that apocalyptic picture to provoke a controversy he could then resolve. Even when England’s coal supply is exhausted, as Jevons relates, England will be able to obtain coal from more resource-rich countries like the United States. He saw no need to be pessimistic, because England had managed to find fuel all over the world and used it to spread civilization.60
While Jevons merely flirted with apocalypticism, other Victorians embraced the idea of entropy as metaphor for decline. Charles Dickens played with entropic themes in novels like Little Dorrit (1857) to conjure a vision of Britain in decline.61 Robert Louis Stevenson, a popular novelist at the time, used his engineering background to explore irreversibility as an inherent quality of energy processes, represented in the details surrounding the transformation of Jekyll into Hyde in his famous 1886 book.62 The American historian Henry Adams, who trained in England, detected a “universal truth” in entropy that “order was the dream of man.”63 For him, the second law was a general truth that could explain human history.
Though entropy as metaphor captivated Victorians, it made literal appearances in British and European speculative fiction as well. The founder of the British scientific romance, H. G. Wells, illustrated the heat death of the universe in an 1893 essay of “the last men” living deep underground as Earth grows colder and colder.64 Similarly, his novel The Time Machine in 1895 described a chilly end for the world. The time traveler of the novel goes thousands of millions of years into the future where he discovers the sun has become large and red, and the Earth’s rotation has ended.65 He travels forward thirty million more years to find the Earth cold and dark; the sun has died. The silence is horrifying: “All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives—all that was over.”66
Perhaps because it did not present an imminent threat, the heat death of the universe didn’t capture the Western apocalyptic imagination to the extent that species replacement did. Darwinism may have inspired the scientific apocalyptic because it could cut both ways. There was no obvious way out of entropy without God. Natural selection, however, held out the hope that Westerners could overcome “races” or even aliens that posed a challenge. After 1945, the prospects of humankind surviving long enough to freeze to death were grim, but species replacement remained a powerful apocalyptic concept.
The long journey of the time machine indicated how insignificant a single human’s life is, given the vast time scale involved. The invocation of cosmological time showed how Wells was a master of raising a reader’s apocalyptic expectations only to dash them. The heat death was so far in the future that it hardly presented an immediate threat. However chilling his description of the end of the world, Wells allowed his time traveler to return home in comfort. Wells did tackle an imminent End through cosmology in “The Star” (1897). The story centers on humans who experience the passage of a rogue planet through the solar system. Its trajectory unexpectedly takes it so close to Earth that earthquakes, tidal waves, and volcanic eruptions roil the surface. Though the reader is denied a fiery ending, Wells uses the ending to make another point about human insignificance, this time given the expanse of space: from the perspective of Mars, hardly anything seemed to have happened.67
In 1894, Camille Flammarion, a French astronomer, summoned immense time spans and stretches of space in Omega: The Last Days of the World. Omega exploited the apocalyptic aspects of entropy, but Flammarion was unable to present such a bleak future without reservation. A Catholic who had lost his faith, Flammarion became a spiritualist who believed that science and metaphysics could be joined; he was not unique in this interest, as Western contemporaries like the American philosopher William James and the English novelist Arthur Conan Doyle also explored ideas such as psychic and postdeath communication during the same time period. Flammarion portrays the End as occurring ten million years into the future through the disappearance of water and the advance of cold until only two survivors remain. In a supernatural ending, the two last humans, Omegar and Eva, are magically transported to Jupiter (where other humans before them had migrated) to live out their lives. In his epilogue, Flammarion discusses the end of the solar system with the death of the sun, “and one after another the stars, each one of which is a sun, a solar system, shared the same fate; yet the universe continued to exist as it does today.”68
As an astronomer, Flammarion may have found it easier than others to differentiate among the ends of Earth, humanity, and other worlds, but he still couldn’t abide the perishing of humanity. He concocted a scheme for its continuing existence: Omega’s narrator notes, “The conscious existence of mankind had attained an ideal state. Mankind had passed by transmigration through the worlds to a new life with God, and freed from the burden of matter, soared with a progress in endless light.”69
Just as scientists like Flammarion broadened their concerns about the future of humanity to consider how a natural event could affect the entire planet, so did science inspire writers to turn their attention to the universe at large. In the late nineteenth century, observations of Mars and its canals, which were first spied by an Italian priest in 1876, inspired ruminations on the possibility of life on other planets. Wells in The War of the Worlds was one of the first novelists to grapple with the eschatological possibilities of first contact.
Wells’s instructor at the Normal School of Science in London during the 1880s was T. H. Huxley (Darwin’s so-called bulldog), and Huxley no doubt instructed Wells in evolutionary theory.70 Wells used the lessons he learned in The War of the Worlds (1898). The Martians have an advantage over humans, having evolved streamlined bodies and developed powerful weapons. When he leaves an inn that had served as his refuge from the aliens, the narrator compares himself to “a rat leaving its hiding place—a creature scarcely larger, an inferior animal, a thing that for any passing whim of our masters might be hunted and killed. Perhaps they also prayed confidently to God.”71 God has no place in this apocalypse, and bacteria defeat the aliens: “But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle.… But there are no bacteria in Mars.”72 Though humanity survives this attack, the narrator muses on the inevitable end of the world, and the knowledge of life on other planets allows him to distinguish between the end of the Earth and the end of humanity: “when the slow cooling of the sun makes this earth uninhabitable, as at last it must do, it may be that the thread of life that has begun here will have streamed out and caught our sister planet within its toils.”73
An American, seemingly unsatisfied with the ambivalent ending of Wells’s War of the Worlds—after all, the Martians could find a way to resist the bacteria and return—wrote an “unauthorized” sequel, published also in 1898. In Garrett P. Serviss’s work, the Americans prove to be the salvation of mankind as Thomas Edison discovers how to duplicate the power of the Martians and builds a spaceship. The world, having come together in
