The scifi speculative fiction short story “The Comet” was written in 1920 by talented Harvard University Black author W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois is well known for many of his efforts and writings; “The Comet” is one of his few works in the scifi fiction arena.
I highly recommend you read “The Comet”. It’s only 10 or so pages long. I read it in the anthology “The Spark of Modernism” edited by William Gillard, James Reitter, and Robert Stauffer.
My notes here have some spoilers to the story.
In the story, we begin by meeting Jim, a lowest-of-the-low employee at a New York City bank. Jim is treated reasonably, but it’s clear from the onset that Jim is being sent to do the worst jobs. When the lower vault level floods, it’s Jim who is sent into the mold and slime to retrieve some volumes. As it turns out, this is lucky, because just as Jim is down in the grime, a comet passes Earth, and its gasses instantly kill pretty much every living being. Jim emerges from the vaults in absolute shock at the dead bodies everywhere.
Jim goes through stages of disbelief. First he thinks just the bank was attacked and worries he’ll be blamed. Then he realizes the death is everywhere. He grabs something to eat from a fancy restaurant, knowing that they never would have served him in normal times. He takes a car (tossing out the corpse) and heads toward home, to see if his family is OK.
Then he hears a voice.
It’s a woman up in a building, and he races up to her. Only when they meet do we realize (through her eyes) that Jim is Black, and she is a white rich woman. There’s the moment of “Wow, we never would have normally talked” quickly overridden by “yikes the entire world has been slaughtered.”
They go together to Harlem, to check on his family. The family is all dead. Then they go to a business tower, to check on her father. A note is found that says the father and “Fred” have gone off on a ride. Jim and the woman drive all over NYC looking for the father without any luck. It’s now time to try to figure out if they are the only two humans left in the entire world.
They go to a phone switchboard. In the 1920s, phone switchboards were manual cable-and-port giant boards where young white single women worked. The women would stick cables by hand into various ports to connect calls. Even though the white woman here is rich, idle, and has never worked a day in her life, it is wholly assumed by both of them that she MUST be the one to figure this out, solely because she is white and female. She does her best but can’t reach anybody.
She panics, realizing she is trapped alone with a scary Black man. She runs off. Then she realizes that being wholly alone is even scarier, and she goes back to him.
They gather up rockets and go up onto the roof of the father’s work building. They start setting off rockets to try to alert any others in the region that someone is alive.
As they wait there, they realize they are the only two humans left on Earth. Note that the comet hit at noon and it is probably barely 8pm by now. But already they’ve forgotten their loved ones and moved right on to wanting to have sex with each other to start a fresh human race, with their kids having sex with each other, etc. etc.
It turns out, the rockets work. Cars start arriving, the father runs upstairs, followed by her fiance Fred. Fred is furious that a black man (N-word) is there with his white fiance. She barely rouses herself to say that Jim helped her out before the dad is throwing cash at Jim and hustling them all off the roof.
Now Jim is left alone with the street rabble who arrives and wants to lynch him for having the temerity for being alone with a white woman. Only a few of the mob mention that Jim was trying to rescue the woman.
The Jim’s wife arrives with their dead baby in her arms, and Jim holds her.
I love the writing style. I enjoy the scenario. I’m iffy on the entire “in 8 hours they have wholly forgotten about their loved ones and are ready to have sex with a stranger”. I know SciFi can be like this sometimes; it doesn’t mean I’m keen on it. I’m also a bit iffy on how it goes from being beautifully evocative and subtle to having some passages near the end where Du Bois is pretty much jamming it down the reader’s throat that these two are the Primal Man and Woman full of fertility and sexiness ready to get down to business. Again, I understand that this was shocking for the 1920s. I still don’t think he had to be THAT in-your-face with his symbolism.
Here’s my video review of The Comet –
I highly recommend buying the book and reading this for yourself!