form of several "devils", to extort goods and services from a terrified populace. Eschatology and the ultimate fate of the universe In the far future of Le Dernier Homme (1805) by Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville Earth is becoming sterile and the human ability to reproduce is failing. A man travels to the last fertile woman to begin a rebirth of the human race and at return meets Adam, the first man, who has been condemned by God to watch all the damned among his descendants enter Hell, and is now charged with persuading the pair not to prolong the life of humanity, which God has determined must now end. The world then begins to end the dead to rise from their graves while Ormus, the spirit of Earth, who cannot survive without humanity, despairs. Omega: The Last Days of the World (1894) by Camille Flammarion The poem Darkness (1816) by Lord Byron Star Maker (1937) by Olaf Stapledon The Nine Billion Names of God (1953) by Arthur C. Clarke The Last Question (1956) by Isaac Asimov (see #Creation myths) City at the End of Time (2008) by Greg Bear That Extraordinary Day (2012) by Predrag Vukadinović At the end of Tau Zero (1970) by Poul Anderson, the universe collapses in a Big Crunch and then explodes in a new Big Bang. However, the starship with the book's protagonists on board survives because there is still enough uncondensed hydrogen for maneuvering, outside the monobloc, and eventually they could colonize one of the new universe's planets. Manifold: Time (1999) by Stephen Baxter begins at the end of space and time, when the last descendants of humanity face an infinite but pointless existence. Due to proton decay the physical universe has collapsed, but some form of intelligence has survived by embedding itself into a lossless computing substrate where it can theoretically survive indefinitely. However, because there will never be new input, eventually all possible thoughts will be exhausted. Some portion of this intelligence decides that this should not have been the ultimate fate of the universe, and takes action to change the past, centering around the early 21st century. Left Behind is a series of 16 best-selling novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, dealing with Christian dispensationalist End Times: the pretribulation, premillennial, Christian eschatological viewpoint of the end of the world. The primary conflict of the series is the members of