A ruined structure may be nothing more than a structure that has fallen into ruins; a Ruin is a ruined structure that has been contemplated. Ruined structures have been noticed for millennia, often as signs of humanity's decay from the time of the gods, when there were giants in the earth: but as sacred drama, not the passage-work of history. Focused contemplation of the ruin qua Ruin as a creative dynamic – where the contemplator of a Ruin not only enjoys an ironic/elegiac perception of the inevitability of the passage of past glories, but refigures that perception into a vision of his own world transformed into Ruins as contemplated by a future observer – seems not to have become a recognized topos until the eighteenth century, either as part of the conventional rhetoric attending the Grand Tour, or as a literary device. Neither a transformation from the soap operas of sacred drama to historical perspective, nor the consequent awareness that we live in some future mortal's past, was likely to have become commonplace until antiquity had been both domesticated and dramatized through the new historiography of writers like Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), whose immensely detailed, secular History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1766-1788 6vols) demonstrated to civilized Western Europeans that the story of the ruin and revival of the ancient world was a take both exemplary and continuous with the present (> Decadence). The perspectives that Gibbon brought into focus for the West – en passant making Ruins contemplatable as both Icon and lesson – made the past storyable.
There is a further implication of this alteration in the perspective of the West. Once it is conceived that our own world may be gazed upon from the future, just as we gaze upon the past, then it follows that the world of the future – in order to give habitation to a plausible contemplator – should somehow, in our imaginations, be as livable as the ancient world we were now begun to domesticate into history. The fully-developed topos – where our contemplation of the past is specifically linked to a future observer's contemplation of our own world – shapes Les Ruines, ou méditations sur les révolutions des empires (1791; trans anon as The Ruins; Or, a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires 1792) by Constantin François de Chassebouf, comte de Volney (1757-1820), published only two years after the French Revolution. It is most clearly articulated at the climax of Chapter Two, after de Volney has meditated upon a valley of ruins along the Euphrates, and contrasts this abandoned solitude with the prosperity of "modern Europe". But then a thought strikes him:
Reflecting that such had once been the activity of the [Ruins] I was then contemplating, who knows, said I, but such may one day be the abandonment of our countries? Who knows if on the banks of the Seine, the Thames, the Zuyder-Zee, where now, in the tumult of so many enjoyments, the heart and the eye suffice not for the multitude of sensations, – who knows if some traveller, like myself, shall not one day sit on their silent ruins, and weep in solitude over the ashes of their inhabitants, and the memory of their former greatness.
As far as the History of SF is concerned, it is at this point that idea of the future grows teeth: for if we can contemplate a future (like de Volney's) arguably continuous with the present (see also Félix Bodin's later arguments about the habitable future), we can contemplate changing it. The spatial focus of traditional Proto SF begins to fade around now; it is from this point that the Fantastic Voyage risks belatedness, and authors of what was becoming Fantastika begin to create narratives that plausibly address the central concern of the sf to come, which is Time.
From around this point, looking back at the ruins of our own civilization from a future viewpoint is a commonly employed sf shift of perspective, whether or not a substantial Time Abyss is involved. The particular image of a future tourist regarding the decayed stones of London – whose first known appearance is in Thomas Lyttelton's Poems, by a Young Nobleman . . . (coll 1780 chap) – is further discussed under New Zealander. An early non-English-language instance of the general theme can be found in Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville's The Last Man (1805), which opens with a reference to the ruins of Palmyra. Anna Laetitia Barbauld's Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: A Poem (1812 chap) sees American tourists in ruined England after a gloom-laden "Napoleon Wins" (> Hitler Wins) conclusion to the then-current European war. Lord Byron's "Darkness" (in The Prisoner of Chillon, and Other Poems, coll 1816 chap) employs the device to depict the End of the World in terms so unremittingly unmetaphorical that the poem might be deemed the first Scientific Romance, a form of sf which often deploys contemplators of the coming world who draw conclusions from the historical past. And one year after "Darkness", Byron's friend (and companion at the Villa Diodati during the "Year Without Summer"), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) created in "Ozymandias" (11 January 1818 The Examiner) what remains the most famous Ruins and Futurity image: that of the "vast and trunkless legs of stone [standing] in the desert", all that remains of "Ozymandias, king of kings". Shelley wrote this sonnet in friendly competition with his friend, the poet Horace Smith (1779-1849), the sestet of whose own sonnet, "On a Stupendous Leg of Granite . . ." (1 February 1818 The Examiner), perfectly domesticates the topos from de Volney:
We wonder [at Ozymandias], and some hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when through the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the wolf at chase,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What wonderful, but unrecorded, race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
Variations on this elegiac approach may be found in William Delisle Hay's The Doom of the Great City; Being the Narrative of a Survivor, Written A.D. 1942 (1880 chap), a New Zealander tale whose ruined City is London; in Reginald Berkeley's Cassandra (1931); in Robert Herrick's Sometime (1933); in Jack London's The Iron Heel (1907); in several works by Stephen Vincent Benét; in Nelson S Bond's "The Priestess Who Rebelled" (October 1939 Amazing; rev vt "Pilgrimage" in The Thirty-First of February, coll 1949), the matriarchal assumptions of a Ruined-Earth tribe are deflated by actual sighting of its supposed deities, the carved Presidential heads of Mount Rushmore; in Horace C Coon's 43,000 Years Later (1958), featuring the Statue of Liberty overseeing the ruins of New York, an image famously recycled in Planet of the Apes (1968): though New York in that film is buried beneath the sand, we know it is there.
Frequent Satirical use is made of such a distanced future viewpoint, grounded in Anthropology or archaeology, to cast a cold eye on our present civilization's quirks. Early works employing this subtheme include Jonquil's Queen Krinaleen's Plagues (1874), F Carruthers Gould's Explorations in the Sit-tee Desert: Being a Comic Account of the Supposed Discovery of the Ruins of the London Stock Exchange some 2000 Years Hence (1880 chap), and Charles Duff's non-sf satire Anthropological Report on a London Suburb (1935) as by Professor Vladimir Chernichewski, which applies the technique to London. Well-known examples presented as mock-scientific papers are The Weans (November 1956 Harper's Magazine as "Digging the Weans"; much exp 1960 chap) by Robert Nathan, and "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema" (June 1956 The American Anthropologist) by Horace Miner, both of which discuss contemporary Americans as irrational and hard-to-understand primitives. This Satire extends to the investigating Scientists who persistently fail to grasp the "rituals" associated with toilet and other activities, as also in David Macaulay's Motel of the Mysteries (graph 1979), in which the unfathomable strangeness of a twentieth-century motel is lovingly analysed. Here a woman wears an uncomprehended lavatory seat as exotic headgear, a specific echo of Heinrich Schliemann's wife adorning herself with the treasures of Troy. A twenty-first-century instance is Serge Lamothe's Les Baldwin (2004; trans Fred A Reed and David Home as The Baldwins 2006 chap).
More overtly sf versions of such archaeological distancing and/or incomprehension include Arthur C Clarke's "History Lesson" (May 1949 Startling; vt "Expedition to Earth" in Expedition to Earth, coll 1954), in which historians from Venus attempt to understand vanished humanity from a surviving record which proves to be a Disney animation; Fritz Leiber's "Later Than You Think" (October 1950 Galaxy), where archaeology reveals an extinct past civilization on Earth – not humanity as canny readers have been led to expect, but our successors the rats; and Randall Garrett's "No Connections" (June 1958 Astounding) – a Parody of Isaac Asimov – wherein Far-Future seekers for the planetary origin of humanity fail to recognize complexly "alien" toilet plumbing excavated from the Ruined Earth. The best known example is A Canticle for Leibowitz (April 1955-February 1957 F&SF; fixup 1960) by Walter M Miller, whose Post-Holocaust monks devotedly create illuminated copies of holy relics which include a shopping list and circuit diagrams. Norman Spinrad adds a twist to the theme with "The Lost Continent" (in Science Against Man, anth 1970 ed Anthony Cheetham), where it is made clear that the mindset of vanished "Space-Age America" ultimately became incomprehensible, not only to the story's African tourists in derelict New York but also to ourselves.
Many sf works employ the Linguistic tease of common Earthly personal- and place-names that have supposedly mutated over the centuries, the earliest example of the trope perhaps being found in Edgar Allan Poe's "Mellonta Tauta" (February 1849 Godey's Lady's Book), another early example being the portmanteau name "Bab-y-london" in Explorations in the Sit-tee Desert (cited above). Isaac Asimov's Pebble in the Sky (1950) has "Senloo" (St Louis); the many corruptions of Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker (1980) include Cambry (Canterbury) and its Ardship or Archbishop; Stephen {HUNT}'s The Kingdom Beyond the Waves (2008) alludes to a drowned City of Lost Angels (Los Angeles, California); the titular City of Gerald Kersh's "Voices in the Dust of Annan" (13 September 1947 Saturday Evening Post as "Voices in the Dust"; vt in Sad Road to the Sea, coll 1947) is ruined London; Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality sequence features such names as the supposedly meaningless Meeya Meefla (Miami, Fla); Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun (1980-1983 4vols) is set in a much-changed Far Future South America, implying that its mighty city Nessus was once Buenos Aires. Further examples are very numerous.
Earth itself vanishes into legend in various Far Future sf scenarios. Thus Sol is regarded as merely one of several possible candidates for humanity's original Sun in Foundation (May 1942-October 1944 Astounding; fixup 1951; cut vt The 1,000 Year Plan 1955 dos) by Isaac Asimov. The prolonged galactic quest for lost Earth in E C Tubb's Dumarest sequence is met with incredulity even at the name, as in the opening volume The Winds of Gath (1967 dos US; rev vt Gath 1968): "Please do not jest [. . .] Many races so call the substance of their planet as they call it dirt or soil." Variations of this speech recur throughout the sequence. [DRL/JC]
see also: H Grattan Donnelly; Lang-Tung; Norman Lavers; Alan Seymour.
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