The Men Return by Jack Vance (1957)
In "The Men Return," the Relict Finn crouches on a crag, starving, and watches the Organisms play on a plain where nothing holds a fixed shape. Earth has drifted into a pocket of non-causality, and cause and effect no longer work. Of two billion people, only the mad survived, and they now live as the Organisms, whose erratic ways match the erratic land. A few Relicts, those most strongly charged with the old causal habit, cling to life, but their logic gives them no leverage against the world. Time has no meaning, the sun is gone, and the Relicts are dying out. Two Organisms, Alpha and Beta, lie on the plain. Alpha speaks of visions: knots tightening into hard points, the Relicts vanishing like gnats, and great lights coming in the sky. Hungry, Alpha sets out to eat Finn, but chance carries him into Beta, and he eats Beta instead. Finn joins the meal and eats pink flesh, then fails to drag the rest uphill before it sinks into granite and withers. At the camp on the crag, Finn finds two old men, Boad and Tagart, and two women, Gisa and Reak. Boad steals a slab of lichen that Gisa brought and dies of its poison, and his body dissolves into foam. Tagart offers himself as food but suggests Reak instead. Finn proposes that they all climb a tall obsidian peak and ride a bank of passing air to a better land. At the top, Tagart is the only one who will board the air. His raft dissolves and he falls. The women, now without meat, turn on Finn and move toward him, while he insists he is the last Man. Then the Organisms stare upward as the milky sky cracks and the blue sky of old appears with a blazing sun. The ground hardens, the obsidian turns glossy black, and the restrictions and logic of the old time return. Alpha recognizes that his intuition has come true. The Organisms try to fight the change and die at once. One hurls himself at the sun and breaks his neck, six hunt for air and drown in a new river, and others fall into a crevasse or choke on swallowed rocks. When Alpha comes upon Finn, Finn picks up a rock that stays hard, sharp and heavy, and kills him with it. Finn points out where a city, farms and cattle will be, notes that the sun will rise and set again and rain will run to the sea, and steps over the fallen Organism to begin making plans.
By Jack Vance · First published 1957 · Genre: Science fiction, Dying Earth fiction, Post-apocalyptic fiction · 3,998 words
First lines
Alpha caught a handful of air, a globe of blue liquid, a rock, kneaded them together....
The Relict came furtively down the crag, a shambling gaunt creature with tortured eyes. He moved in a series of quick dashes, using panels of dark air for concealment, running behind each passing shadow, at times crawling on all fours, head low to the ground. Arriving at the final low outcrop of rock, he halted and peered across the plain.
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- A Possibility by Ambrose Bierce
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Genres
- Science fiction — The story rests on a speculative premise: Earth drifts into a pocket of non-causality, cause and effect collapse, psychokinesis operates, and the sun returns through cosmic shifts.
- Dying Earth fiction — The degenerate, decaying world of mottled skies, poisonous flora, shifting terrain and a depleted surviving humanity closely follows the Dying Earth subgenre tradition in which the Earth is in its final, strange age.
- Post-apocalyptic fiction — Humanity has been reduced to a few survivors, the Relicts, who scavenge and die out after a world-altering catastrophe that has destroyed the old civilization and its logic.
- Speculative fiction — The narrative explores hypothetical conditions of reality, perception and time with no grounding in known physical law, which is the defining mode of speculative fiction.
Tags
science fiction · short story · post-apocalyptic · far future Earth · causality · non-causality · logic versus madness · madness as survival · last of mankind · hunger and survival · cannibalism · time has no meaning
What this Textopian page supports
The Men Return is listed on Textopian as a short story by Jack Vance, dated 1957 CE.
This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.
- Work type: Short story
- Author: Jack Vance
- Date: 1957 CE
- Language: English
- Genres: Science fiction, Dying Earth fiction, Post-apocalyptic fiction, Speculative fiction, Philosophical fiction
- Length: 3,998 words
- Structure: 1 section, 108 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Fairly Easy (7th Grade)
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