Author Robert Harris, best known for his novel Pompeii about the destruction of that city in AD79, which combined historical fact with fiction, was recently interviewed in the media about his latest book ‘The Second Sleep’ which is set in the future that looks eerily like our medieval past.
The story begins in 1468 but not the 1468 we know when Henry VI was king. No – this is 1468 set in the future, one and a half millennia after the catastrophic collapse of our own civilisation, as such the calendar and humanity had to start again from Zero. Set in a misty, medieval England, where a young priest is sent to a remote village to bury the vicar who died under mysterious circumstances. Soon the reader realizes this is a story not from the past but the future, when civilisation collapsed and must be re-discovered.
As Harris pointed out not one single civilisation or culture has ever survived. Just think of the Aztec and the Inca empires, the Roman empire and the peoples of ancient Polynesia – all destroyed and many more before them.
So this book is possibly more prediction than fantasy. Why should our modern technically advanced world order be in any different in surviving, as Harris points out the answer is it probably won’t. The question being when is this going to happen? He envisages it will be swift and total. No lingering death for us, as we depend on precarious and complex supply chains. All it would take is the collapse of the internet and its complex communication systems which will probably happen he predicts, as an act of war.
In the interview Harris believes modern office buildings would vanish and collapse entirely in a century or less. Motorways would be covered in undergrowth in less than a decade, but solid stone structures like churches would survive intact as they have done – some for thousands of years. And what would our descendants make of a small slim black rectangle showing a picture of an apple with a bite taken out of it, they might find in a ploughed field. What they might ask, could this strange object be, was it some kind of toy. All modern means of transport – cars, trains and aircraft would corrode and evaporate over time.
So if this prediction becomes fact, where as Christians does this leave all of us? Although this scenario will probably not occur in our lifetime, or in our children or our grandchildren’s lifetime, has the pandemic of Coronavirus already impacted on our way of life and all the other troubles of our world ; climate change, pollution and all the social injustices we see and hear about.
Has lockdown corroded our ability to connect sociably with one another? Our church buildings are locked. Normal face to face contact is limited to just a small number. The joys of our weekly Services with singing and communal acts of worship have gone for the moment. Therefore we have to believe what the Bible teaches us, that God will sustain us and the second coming of Christ, as prophesised in Luke 21: 27-28, “Then the Son of Man will appear coming in a cloud with great power and glory, so when these things happen stand up and raise your heads because your salvation is near” will relieve us of all of our troubles and we will have eternal life.
Keith Ramsay