Three stories about The Ends of the Earth by John Fraser

Making the world uninhabitable is a prospect facing us all, each has a strategy to hasten or retard - even avoid - it. Such a project would be the greatest exploit of an evolving species - greater than the creation, quicker than biology and a cock-eyed triumph of the good life and its sciences. Most of us alive won’t know if the plan succeeds, so hypothesis is the mode proposed.

The people described in these thematically connected tales are precarious, but very human. Extinction would come when the exploration of the planet has barely finished - one thinks of the poet’s ‘round earth’s imagined corners’. If the world indeed is not flat, it still can be conceived of as having ends.

In ‘Rain’, the characters display their comfortably familiar habits - competition, jealousy, distraction. They find they’re ill-equipped to wait out their end - which comes (or maybe not) from an unanticipated direction.

‘Summer Nights’ has its protagonists at the edge of modernity - in the shadow of a monster tower, they seek their space, a ‘green’, beyond exploitation, beyond the limitations of their work and relationships - and only partly succeed.

‘The Esplanade’ sets its scene in an imaginary ‘Cambodia’, where the past, war and massacres, still looms over the new visitors and long-term occupants. Preservation of the ruins means also preserving the realm of Death. The story ends with a parade where Death and human power are both featured, in a temporary equilibrium.