Readers unfamiliar with "Inconstant Moon" may prefer to read these notes only after reading the story.
"Inconstant Moon" (1971) by Larry Niven has been arresting my attention for twenty years. The story first came to my notice when I read about it in The Science Fiction Encyclopedia.
[....] equally ironic in its own way is the ingenious "Inconstant Moon" (in All the Myriad Ways, coll 1971) by Larry Niven, in which a sudden increase in the Moon's brightness reveals to those who can deduce its meaning that the Sun has gone nova and that dawn will bring destruction.
I first read the short story in an anthology while sitting in a public library. I finished rereading it for the third time yesterday.
* * *
"Inconstant Moon" begins as an end-of-the-world short story. First-person narrator Stan and his inamorata, Leslie, to-and-fro around LA, drinking and gathering food and drinks for a final picnic.
Regrets?
[....] Leslie mused, looking at giant stuffed animals in a toy store window. “Isn't there someone you would have murdered, if you'd had the time?”
“Now, you know my agent lives in New York.”
“Why him?”
“My child, why would any writer want to murder his agent? For the manuscripts he loses under other manuscripts. For his ill-gotten ten percent, and the remaining ninety percent that he sends me grudgingly and late....
[....] “There was a girl in my sorority—”
—and she was guilty of sibling rivalry, so Leslie claimed. I named an editor who kept changing his mind. Leslie named one of my old girl friends, I named her only old boy friend that I knew about, and it got to be kind of fun before we ran out. My brother Mike had forgotten my birthday once. The fiend....
When high winds, rain, and sleet begin, Sam christens the phenomenon “Nova weather!" He and Leslie contemplate a few Robinsonade daydreams, like smashing a Rodeo Drive jewelry store window.
* * *
But the more Stan thinks about the weather they see, the less likely he thinks the sun has actually exploded.
[....] The lights flickered, then came on again.
Too casually, Leslie asked, “Do you really think the sun might go back to normal?”
“It better be back to normal. Otherwise we're dead anyway. I wish we could see Jupiter.”
“Dammit, answer me! Do you think it was a flare?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Yellow dwarf stars don't go nova.”
“What if ours did?”
“The astronomers know a lot about novas,” I said. “More than you'd guess. They can see them coming months ahead. Sol is a gee-naught yellow dwarf. They don't go nova at all. They have to wander off the main sequence first, and that takes millions of years.”
She pounded a fist softly on my back. We were cheek to cheek; I couldn't see her face. “I don't want to believe it. I don't dare. Stan, nothing like this has ever happened before. How can you know?”
“Something did.”
“What? I don't believe it. We'd remember.”
“Do you remember the first moon landing? Aldrin and Armstrong?”
“Of course. We watched it at Earl's Lunar Landing Party.”
“They landed on the biggest, flattest place they could find on the moon. They sent back several hours of jumpy home movies, took a lot of very clear pictures, left corrugated footprints all over the place. And they came home with a bunch of rocks.
“Remember? People said it was a long way to go for rocks. But the first thing anyone noticed about those rocks was that they were half melted.
“Sometime in the past, oh, say the past hundred thousand years; there's no way of marking it closer than that—the sun flared up. It didn't stay hot enough long enough to leave any marks on the Earth. But the moon doesn't have an atmosphere to protect it. All the rocks melted on one side.”
The air was warm and damp. I took off my coat, which was heavy with rainwater. I fished the cigarettes and matches out, lit a cigarette and exhaled past Leslie's ear.
“We'd remember. It couldn't have been this bad.”
“I'm not so sure. Suppose it happened over the Pacific? It wouldn't do that much damage. Or over the American continents. It would have sterilized some plants and animals and burned down a lot of forests, and who'd know? The sun is a four percent variable star. Maybe it gets a touch more variable than that, every so often.”
Something shattered in the bedroom. A window? A wet wind touched us, and the shriek of the storm was louder.
“Then we could live through this,” Leslie said hesitantly.
“I believe you've put your finger on the crux of the matter. Skol!” I found my champagne and drank deep. It was past three in the morning, with a hurricane beating at our doors.
“Then shouldn't we be doing something about it?”
“We are.”
“Something like trying to get up into the hills! Stan, there're going to be floods!”
“You bet your ass there are, but they won't rise this high. Fourteen stories. Listen, I've thought this through. We're in a building that was designed to be earthquake proof. You told me so yourself. It'd take more than a hurricane to knock it over....
Sheltering at Leslie's apartment, the couple face the immediate prospect of flooding, blown-out windows, and no utilities.
Instead of depicting the last few elegiac hours of two middle class professional Angelinos mourning the extinction of all life on earth – epitomized by Stan's earlier musing "A little longer, we'd have reached the stars...." – the mood shifts to with-enough-shovels Farnham's Freehold mode.
Stan's last thoughts are about siring a race of reverse-conquistadors.
[....] We had food for a week, maybe ... but hardly a balanced diet. Maybe we could trade with other apartments. This was a big building. There must be empty apartments, too, that we could raid for canned soup and the like. And refugees from the lower doors to be taken care of, if the waters rose high enough...
Damn! I missed the nova. Life had been simplicity itself last night. Now ... Did we have medicines? Were there doctors in the building? There would be dysentery and other plagues. And hunger. There was a supermarket near here; could we find a scuba rig in the building?
But I'd get some sleep first. Later we could start exploring the building. The day had become a lighter charcoal-gray. Things could be worse, far worse. I thought of the radiation that must have sleeted over the far side of the world, and wondered if our children would colonize Europe, or Asia, or Africa.
This may make story-sense for the tale Niven wrote.
Speaking personally, it's a let-down.
But, then, I'm a sucker for extinction poignancy à la On The Beach (1957) pathos.
Jay
24 February 2024