Visions of worldly Armageddon and ‘end times’ have been a consistent theme of mythologies and religions since antiquity. In the nineteenth century, however, scientific advances transformed understanding of the Earth as a cosmic object subject to inexorable physical laws, regardless of its inhabitants. 

In the final chapter of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), the Traveller is flung so far into the future that he sees the Earth languishing beneath a dim,
dying sun. This vision of a remote future Earth, lingering under the feeble light of an exhausted star, was taken up by later works such as William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land (1912), and eventually gave rise to the ‘Dying Earth’ mode associated with writers such as Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe.