“Have you ever experienced Darkness, young man?”
If you somehow haven’t heard of him, Isaac Asimov was an incredibly prolific writer, best known for various science fiction stories, including the “Foundation” series and a book of short stories titled “I, Robot.” He also wrote this week’s topic, a short story about the collapse of civilization when faced with mass panic: 1941’s “Nightfall.”
The fictional planet of Lagash has six suns, numbered Alpha through Zeta. As such, the people living in a civilization on Lagash, including our main character Theremon 762, have never experienced total darkness. It’s heavily implied that these people don’t even have independent light sources, instead relying on light from windows.
Theremon, a reporter, arrives at Saro University in anticipation of a supposed apocalypse. A scientist named Sheerin 501 explains that their section of Lagash will soon be plunged into total darkness. Five suns have set and the final one, Beta, is entering an eclipse. This will result in the reveal of madness-inducing Stars, and the people of Lagash will soon burn their own cities to the ground in a desperate hope for light.
Although “Nightfall” isn’t a horror story in the traditional sense, it’s still massively unsettling. I chose to write about it for this column not because the story made me fearful, but because it’s about fear itself. Humans are resistant to change, and we don’t fare well when our circumstances are altered. When accustomed to eternal light, how do we react when night finally falls?
If the terrors of “Nightfall” had to be pinned down as any specific fears, I’d categorize it as claustrophobia (enclosed spaces) and astraphobia (outer space). The second is much more interesting, so let’s start with the first one.
Theremon doubts Sheerin. Although he doesn’t doubt the eclipse, he doesn’t believe that darkness can cause insanity. Sheerin dares Theremon to draw the curtains shut. Theremon does, and when the pair are plunged into complete darkness, Theremon begins to feel an intense feeling of claustrophobia. He panics.
“Nightfall” asks the reader to consider a world devoid of all light. A world in which humanity has been robbed entirely of sight, forcing us to stumble our way along paths unseen. Our perspective suddenly shrinks down to the things that we can hear and touch — and neither of those can be trusted. In those few moments of darkness, Theremon is powerless, and he is trapped.
Moving on: How big is space?
From my understanding as a journalist who has never taken a physics class, space is big. Neil deGrasse Tyson’s 2014 documentary “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” has a scene where the camera continuously zooms out to show our “cosmic address”: suns, solar systems, galaxies and space upon space upon space. Tyson has us imagine our observable universe, containing countless galaxies, as a single drop of water in an ocean. Waterfalls upon waterfalls.
We can’t even be sure that these worlds operate under the same rules as our world. Our modern understanding of the universe is that it might be infinite; but if it isn’t, the boundary is so far away that we don’t know if we’ll ever find it.
When the characters of “Nightfall” speculate on the size of the universe, photographer Beenay correctly guesses what these speculated-about “Stars” are, but he gets the amount wrong. Beenay predicts about one or two dozen.
Theremon remarks on this idea. “Two dozen suns in a universe eight light years across,” he said in the story. “Wow! That would shrink our world into insignificance.”
The reason for only a dozen or two stars? “There just isn’t any place in the universe you could put a million suns — unless they touch one another,” Beenay said.
When the eclipse reaches totality and the stars are revealed, it’s unsurprising that Theremon’s mind fractures at the sight. There are 30,000 stars in the sky — Lagash, and therefore Theremon, are meaningless in this colossal world.
The story’s takes on astraphobia, claustrophobia and nyctophobia (fear of the dark) all connect back into one fear: insignificance. This insignificance is what finally causes Theremon to break down.
Just as Sheerin predicted, Lagash’s Saro City, positioned just outside of their windows, begins to burn.
A key aspect of “Nightfall” is a religious group referred to as “the Cult.” The Cultists have a text called “The Book of Revelations,” which includes predictions and hymns about this apocalypse. Sheerin speculates that the book was written by the survivors of a previous iteration of this eclipse-born apocalypse — most likely madmen and children who have little coherent recollection of the event and instead describe it in fantastical ways.
The Cult is clearly an analogue to all sorts of real-world religions, but one specific belief stands out. Believers with a sacred book, hoping it will give them the tools to withstand the end of the world. The idea that the apocalypse is a recurring cycle, having already wiped the world with plans to do it again.
The Cult is meant to parallel Christianity and it teaches its followers to embrace the end of the world instead of rejecting it. We don’t get to learn how this works out for them, but it’s definitely a way to cope with the apocalypse, especially if you know it’s going to happen one day. It’s also very similar to the way the Bible provides ideas on what will happen to people after they die.
Humans don’t like feeling insignificant or temporary. The unknown of death is a horrifying thought. The rest of the world will continue ticking on after you and everyone you know passes on. When Theremon looks to the sky and sees the endless universe before him, he is suddenly hit with the realization that the Stars do not care about him. Neil DeGrasse Tyson has finally zoomed out to show the waterfall, and Theremon sees how small he truly is. The infinite darkness is unforgiving, and he will soon be crushed by it. Theremon is insignificant; he may as well be dead.
Information for this article was sourced from Isaac Asimov’s 1969 book, “Nightfall and Other Stories.”