The Fall of Tartarus

Eric Brown

In myth Tartarus was the lowest region of hell. So low, it was said, that an anvil dropped from heaven having taken nine days and nights to reach earth would take a further nine days and nights to reach Tartarus. In reality . . .

'I'd heard many a tale about Tartarus Major, how certain continents were technological backwaters five hundred years behind the times; how the Church governed half the planet with a fist of iron, and yet how, across scattered islands and sequestered lands, a thousand bizarre and heretic cults prospered too.

I'd heard how a lone traveller was hardly safe upon the planet's surface, prey to wild animals and cut-throats. Most of all I'd heard that, in two hundred years, Tartarus would be annihilated when its sun exploded in the magnificent stellar suicide of a supernova.'

These are the stories of the people who are leaving Tartarus, those have decided to stay and those who are arriving on the planet for the apocalypse.