by Edmond Hamilton
First published in the July 1950 issue of Startling Stories. Published as a hardcover novel by Frederick Fell in 1951.
This review is based on the Del Rey Science Fiction paperback edition published in July 1983.
Publication information is sourced from The Internet Speculative Fiction Database and the copyright page of the Del Rey book.
. . .
"And the released force of the first super-atomic bomb did it. It blew this town into another part of the space-time curve, into another age millions of years in the future, into this dying, future Earth!"
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
City at World's End is a cornball redemption of America's angst over inventing nuclear weapons.
Let me see if I can explain.
The allegorically named American city of Middletown gets blasted by an experimental nuke and catapulted into a bizarre future. Middletown is home to some kind of Top Secret atomic research and development project. The husbands do the science shit, and the wives stay home, in the kitchen, and in the dark. Middletown's importance as a military asset has painted it as a target, or there has been a horrific accident. The text is somewhat ambiguous on this point. Instead of destroying Middletown and killing all the people, this new kind of nuke blasts a hole through the fabric of space/time causing the city and all its residents to be transported into the far future.
In the far future, the Middletowners seem to be the only humans left. There's an eerie abandoned shell of a futuristic city just down the road full of fantastic technology. The Middletowners relocate to this more secure location. Soon, future humans and extraterrestrials arrive in space ships. It is revealed that humanity abandoned the Earth to establish an interstellar dominion, one made possible, in the fullness of time, due to the groundwork laid in the 1940s by the advent of nuclear weapons and all of the attendant scientific advances that grew from harnessing the power of the atom.
So, uh, the logic-if you can call it that-at work here is that as horrific as the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, and as terrorizing as the proliferation of doomsday weapons was to everyday people on planet Earth . . . eventually . . . somebody somewhere made a bomb so powerful that it skipped over Genocide and just went straight to Space/Time Warp. And, luckily, Middletown and its people got blasted by one of these "special" nukes as opposed to the bland and boring "incomprehensible slaughter" kind. It's rather convenient.
Now, City at World's End is told from the perspective of a nuclear physicist named Kenniston-possibly named for the Lensman Kimball Kinnison-who must maneuver from one chapter to another, all the while performing significant Protagonist Actions until the story ends. These actions include learning extraterrestrial languages, giving stirring speeches to doofus crowds of Middletowners that seem like set-ups for The Simpsons jokes, and ditching his Earth Wife for a bodacious Space Babe on the very last page. Along the way, he saves the Earth and wins the respect of an intergalactic coalition of humans and extraterrestrials. At one point, Kenniston has to convince the intergalactic future folk to let him use an even more special kind of nuke to restart the rundown core of Earth. So you see, nuclear weapons seem scary to Earthfolks in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but who knows? Maybe in the far future, a super-duper nuke can be used to reignite the core after running down to fumes.
Yeah . . . City at World's End isn't terribly convincing. It is painless enough to read, though, coming as it does from the prolific science fiction writer Edmond Hamilton who had written scores of sword and planet tales for the sci-fi pulps by 1950 when this story was first published. Hamilton's prose style is concrete, no tricks, and he even generates some creepy mystery vibes in the early chapters. Later, when the Middletowners deal with the intergalactic folks, the writing loses some of that tension, but it is easy enough to follow. No mention is made of Communism, the USSR, and the USA doesn't seem to have any real politics, aside from fully normalized misogyny. Technology drives everything. Ultimately, City at World's End is more of an attempt at a dramatic techno-allegory than a swashbuckler, so give it points for ambition. If one looks at science fiction as a way of processing anxieties about the future, and the disturbing potentialities of advanced technology, then I guess City at World's End is a way of using storytelling to make sense of nuclear weapons. We use religion to make sense of suffering and death. City at World's End seeks a deeper purpose for The Bomb.
One of the more amusing episodes involves the Middletowners' first contact with extraterrestrials who are described with a chimerical mixture of human and animal traits. Nothing too alien. I could picture the action figures, the Saturday morning cartoons. The adults of Old Earth react with fear, but their unbigoted children love these beings from beyond the stars. I wondered if young George Lucas read City at World's End and got a nuke-induced future prophecy of a fortune hustled from mass produced action figures. I guess that's one more reason to stop worrying and kiss The Bomb. If it helps, you can imagine one of those "special" nukes as being shaped like a pair of gleaming steel ass cheeks.
