Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's 2007 film <i>Sunshine</i> is another great example of this genre. Rather than abandoning a frozen earth due to the dying sun, they send a mission to deliver a bomb into it to "restart" it.<p>A real all-star cast featuring not only a young Cillian Murphy, but a young Michelle Yeoh, Chris Evans, Hiroyuki Sanada, Benedict Wong, Cliff Curtis, and Rose Byrne!<p>Highly recommended, despite never satisfactorily explaining why they require a manned spacecraft to do the job rather than sending a robotic drone ship. Seems to me that adding humans to the mix greatly increased the complexity and risk of the mission.
I never realized I had misread _The Time Machine_ or _The Magician's Nephew_ as being about red giants, rather than heat-death! Goes to show how easy it is to seriously misunderstand aspects of '<i>science</i> fiction' when the science changes...<p>OP missed a good historical example before Thompson, however: Isaac Newton himself had a cosmology with the Sun being renewed by periodic comet impacts. Unfortunately, we would all die when the Sun flared up after impact, but at least aliens on other planets would get a renewed Sun: <a href="https://gwern.net/newton" rel="nofollow">https://gwern.net/newton</a>
New Sun by Gene Wolfe is a great example of that genre.
Also of the unreliable narrator, as the protagonist is writing his autobiography, is not well educated and suffers from rather interesting neurological divergence (he forgets nothing).<p>All in all, it makes for a very good series. Especially once you realize that you are reading about sci-fi world, as written about by a person living in essentially ancient society.
Another entry in the dying Earth/Sun or Last Civilization approach is The Phoenix in Obsidian aka The Silver Warriors from 1970 by the oft forgotten but quite seminal Micheal Moorcock of Elric fame, but He wrote way more than that. Set in a frozen Earth and with a Sun that is just a white dwarf. The last surviving sea is so salty and dense is gelatinous and ship actually "flap" over it. It's part of the John Daker/Ereköse series, and in turn part of the bigger inter-books Moorcokian Multiverse.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Moorcock" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Moorcock</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_in_Obsidian" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_in_Obsidian</a>
Liu Cixin has a novella about moving the earth to avoid a supernova <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wandering_Earth_(novella)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wandering_Earth_(novella)</a>
This hammered home for me how incredibly recent are a lot of the scientific discoveries we take utterly for granted. Even before nuclear energy, atoms themselves were only confirmed to exist in the 20th century. Everyone knows about plate tectonics, but that was confirmed in the 60s or something.
Olaf Stapledon’s <i>Last and First Men</i>, from 1930, seems to fit this genre too. It gets a bit outlandish with telepathy, but it’s ambitious novel telling of humanity’s ebbing and flowing, evolving a lot along the way, from ‘present day’ to the far, far future when the solar system is engulfed by a supernovaing sun. Considering its ambition, it reads surprisingly well.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_and_First_Men" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_and_First_Men</a>
Since it fits the topic and my efforts to find this story have been unsuccessful for years, I'll give it a try:<p><i>I am looking for a short story about an astronaut conducting radiation measurements on the dark side of the moon (or maybe mars). The astronaut ponders the strange measurement results when it dawns at him that the sun must have gone supernova and earth probably scorched. He returns to earth as the last living human, but discovers that other lifeforms (I believe to remember it was about a butterfly) seem to have survived and despite the end of humanity, life was going to continue.</i><p>I read this story about 30 years ago in an anthology of short stories which my future wife brought from our local library. Unfortunately, I don't remember any of the other stories and authors, but I believe they were all well known names and not obscure pulp fiction authors.<p>Today it strikes me, how naïve the thought was, that libraries and books were for eternity and that everything I'd read would be effortlessly available for me in the library to read again when ever I wanted.
The Spin by Robert Charles Wilson is magnificent. Set in a contemporary setting, the sun and stars are replaced by projection shield that simulates them, and as the topic suggests it’s because the sun has died, but who did it???<p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/910863" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/910863</a>
"For another thing, if the light came from incandescence, what on earth was a pulsar? Surely a star couldn’t be alternately collapsing and un-collapsing."<p>This is odd, as pulsars were not discovered until 1967, and not hypothesized prior to their discovery.<p>Variable stars have been known to science of since 1638, and an explanation for one type, eclipsing binaries, had been established by 1784.
You can't have an article about the dying Earth genre and not mention The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe.<p>The novel is deep and mysterious, involving — among many other things — a far-future Earth in which aliens have placed a black hole inside the sun.<p>It's one of those books whose true meaning and cryptic clues are mined endlessly on mailing lists, forums, and podcasts (there are at least four that cover this book).
I recall back in 7th grade I mapped out a sci-fi story about people having to abandon the Earth after it suddenly transitioned into its red giant phase. I didn’t ever get to writing the story, but I was captivated by the concept of the need for sudden evacuation.
To add yet another entry into the genre is Asimov's _The Gods Themselves_, where humanity exchanges energy between themselves and a parallel universe with different physical laws, only to discover those physical laws are leaking over and will result in the destruction of the Sun. The middle section is the story of the aliens in the parallel universe and is an interesting look at a three-sex species, and it makes me wonder how Asimov would interpret modern LGBTQ issues.
Really enjoyed this journey. Could have extended into more modern tropes of singularity and mastery of energy the sun provides finding it's way into modern sci-fi.
I've never really understood the pessimism of the dying sun trope in SF. If humans are still around in billions of years then our descendants will either have spread throughout the galaxy, or will have the technology to either tweak the Sun to not go nova, or to move the Earth out of harm's way. Seems like a major failure of the imagination.<p>(Also: the idea that we need to find other planets to live on if the Sun goes nova or if we screw up the Earth is another one. We'll probably be living in millions of large space colonies, not on planets.)
> For while the dying-earth genre came to an end in the 1940s<p>uhh...<p><i>Dying Earth</i> is a fantasy series by the American author Jack Vance, comprising four books originally published from 1950 to 1984.<p><i>The Book of the New Sun</i> (1980–1983, 1987) is a four-volume science fantasy novel[2] written by the American author Gene Wolfe.
> During the Age of Enlightenment ... as the scientific method replaced religion as the explanation for physical phenomena<p>This happended more than 2,000 years earlier. The author seems to miss basic knowledge in the history of philosophy and science.