Oolite Bulletins

I am legend / The Omega Man

Disembodied wrote: ↑Wed Jun 10, 2020 11:26 am

spud42 wrote: ↑Wed Jun 10, 2020 11:15 am

Planet of the Apes ?

I'll accept this: the human beings are "animalistic", and I did specify that to count as "human" they should be able to pass during daylight hours. Closing time on a Friday night, maybe the Planet of the Apes humans could fit in, but even in Glasgow they'd struggle to go unremarked upon during the day. Assuming there wasn't an Old Firm match on.

That's one.

More caveats there than a graduation ceremony at the Law college.

I'll try another dodgy one - the humanoids in Bank's Culture. Though I'm not at all sure that he ever says they're humans in any ancestry/ descent sense.

cbr wrote: ↑Wed Jun 10, 2020 12:58 pm

I am legend / The Omega Man

That's two!

RockDoctor wrote: ↑Wed Jun 10, 2020 1:08 pm

I'll try another dodgy one - the humanoids in Bank's Culture. Though I'm not at all sure that he ever says they're humans in any ancestry/ descent sense.

No, sorry: the Culture humanoids are explicitly NOT post-Earth-human, and Earth-humanity still exists. In the novella "The State of the Art", the Culture GCU Arbitrary and her crew - including Diziet Sma and the drone Skaffen-Amtiskaw - secretly investigate Earth, to see if they should instigate first contact.

Disembodied wrote: ↑Wed Jun 10, 2020 2:21 pm

- secretly investigate Earth, to see if they should instigate first contact.

If only...

Would you accept Seveneves (Neal Stephenson)?

Cmdr James wrote: ↑Wed Jun 10, 2020 4:19 pm

Would you accept Seveneves (Neal Stephenson)?

No, I don't think so … some of the seven "races" might look a bit odd, but I think most of them would still pass. Plus (to avoid spoilers) gurer ner "ebbgfgbpx" uhzna fheivibef yrsg ba gur cynarg …
https://rot13.com

I wasnt so much thnking of the races, I was thinking about the point in time where there were only (more or less) 7 people. But I take the point

There are also a great many stories where it isnt clear how many (if any) other people exist. Do they count, or do we explicitly need to know humanity is gone?

Cmdr James wrote: ↑Wed Jun 10, 2020 4:41 pm

I wasnt so much thnking of the races, I was thinking about the point in time where there were only (more or less) 7 people. But I take the point

Ah, true … but this is just *nearly* post-human, not *actually* post-human.

Cmdr James wrote: ↑Wed Jun 10, 2020 4:41 pm

There are also a great many stories where it isnt clear how many (if any) other people exist. Do they count, or do we explicitly need to know humanity is gone?

It should be explicit that anything recognisable as "human" has shuffled off the stage (barring the odd surviving narrator/protagonist/weird relic of a bygone age).

Disembodied wrote: ↑Wed Jun 10, 2020 2:21 pm

In the novella "The State of the Art", the Culture GCU Arbitrary and her crew - including Diziet Sma and the drone Skaffen-Amtiskaw - secretly investigate Earth, to see if they should instigate first contact.

I was trying to persuade the library to get hold of a copy of that late last year.

Clarke's Childhood's End again - the last survivor of the human race witnesses the ascension of everyone else into a sort of cosmic mind, and is the last man on earth for a few minutes until the Earth itself goes bye-bye...

Not sure if the last story of James Blish's "Pantropy" series (Surface Tension and sequels) counts. A human-crewed spaceship delivers modified colonists to Earth since the place is no longer habitable by humans - the colonists look vaguely like walruses if memory serves me correctly. At the time of the story "true" humans are a vanishingly rare species, since colonists are modified to suit their new world rather than terraforming it, and are rarely seen on any planet.

Aldiss' Hothouse has no surviving humans as we think of them - the remaining human descendents are much smaller tree dwellers.

Professor Jameson (In stories by Neil R. Jones) is a scientist who has his body frozen and shot into space after his death. 40 million years later aliens find it and implant his brain into a robot body - needless to say the rest of the human race is long gone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_R._J ... on_stories

ffutures wrote: ↑Thu Jun 11, 2020 12:36 am

Clarke's Childhood's End again - the last survivor of the human race witnesses the ascension of everyone else into a sort of cosmic mind, and is the last man on earth for a few minutes until the Earth itself goes bye-bye...

That makes three.

ffutures wrote: ↑Thu Jun 11, 2020 12:36 am

Not sure if the last story of James Blish's "Pantropy" series (Surface Tension and sequels) counts. A human-crewed spaceship delivers modified colonists to Earth since the place is no longer habitable by humans - the colonists look vaguely like walruses if memory serves me correctly. At the time of the story "true" humans are a vanishingly rare species, since colonists are modified to suit their new world rather than terraforming it, and are rarely seen on any planet.

Hmm … probably not. "Rare" is not rare enough!

ffutures wrote: ↑Thu Jun 11, 2020 12:36 am

Aldiss' Hothouse has no surviving humans as we think of them - the remaining human descendents are much smaller tree dwellers.

Hothouse would count: the human descendants would definitely stand out in a crowd. Four.

ffutures wrote: ↑Thu Jun 11, 2020 12:36 am

Professor Jameson (In stories by Neil R. Jones) is a scientist who has his body frozen and shot into space after his death. 40 million years later aliens find it and implant his brain into a robot body - needless to say the rest of the human race is long gone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_R._J ... on_stories

Professor Jameson makes five. Over to you!

Other possibilities could have included Charles Stross's Saturn's Children / Neptune's Brood; H. G. Wells' The Time Machine (particularly the scene on the beach, beneath the swollen red sun); and there's the micro-story, written by Thomas Bailey Aldrich:

Imagine all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring at the door-bell!

Or to quote Fredrick Brown

The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door ...

and see
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ ... eardAKnock

ffutures wrote: ↑Thu Jun 11, 2020 12:36 am

Aldiss' Hothouse has no surviving humans as we think of them - the remaining human descendents are much smaller tree dwellers.

Lee Berger and 14 hundred-odd specimens of Homo naledi look askance at each other from either side of the "Superman Crawl".

A lot smaller than Naledi I think - I got the impression they were about the size of a smallish monkey, but I could be wrong.

OK, let's see... Let's have five stories about places/worlds/people who experience more or less than the three normal dimensions of space.

Things like hyperspace are excluded, because they aren't a "normal" dimension as such. Ditto things that appear to be normal to our senses but are actually extended into additional dimensions, e.g. the interior of the TARDIS, and parallel worlds etc. because that's a different type of dimension.

Usual rules - no more than one from any source / author.

I guess the obvious one is flatland.