Collapse of the First World Civilization

The Collapse of the First World Civilization begins with a fuel crisis and becomes a failure of the institutions built to manage it. The First Men discover that their supposedly inexhaustible Antarctic coal is exhausted, but their civilization cannot redirect energy away from its central religious ritual. The attempt to preserve that ritual turns a resource shortage into a crisis of authority, then into political disintegration and the disappearance of civilization across whole continents.

An energy system mistaken for permanence

The collapse had a long material prehistory. The First World State’s civilization had relied first on coal, while oil served as a more convenient fuel until its supplies ran out in less than three centuries. Afterward, electricity generated from coal powered aeroplanes and other essential activity. For thousands of years, the richest remaining coalfields were in Antarctica. Their abundance encouraged the belief that the continent’s deposits could not be exhausted, although even the deepest seams had limits.

Earlier generations had tried to respond to the finite nature of fuel. During the First World State’s first thousand years, concern for future generations supported strict economy and attempts to develop alternatives. Windmills covered buildings and mountain ranges, waterways generated electricity, and engineers sought power from volcanoes and subterranean heat. These sources supplemented rather than replaced Antarctic coal. Tidal power was available in principle, but the Sacred Order of Scientists prohibited its use because the tides were considered sacred. The crisis therefore arrived in a society that had recognized energy limits but had not developed a replacement sufficient to sustain its way of life.

Fuel governance had also been shaped by earlier international conflict. A severe oil famine led the League of Nations to establish cosmopolitan control over existing oil and coal fields and to restrict oil to uses for which no other power source would suffice. The World Fuel Control Board’s system survived the League itself and was regarded as a major achievement. Yet new Antarctic fuel deposits lay beyond the Board’s jurisdiction, and earlier disputes over control of new supplies had helped drive conflict between the United States and China. The policy that had once moderated consumption could not prevent the civilization’s eventual dependence on a finite reserve.

Ritual, faith, and the decision not to adapt

For the First Men, energy was not merely an industrial input. Their faith in Gordelpus, the god of motion, made activity a religious obligation: people were expected to produce movement through bodily exertion or by directing natural forces, and were taught that fulfilling this duty secured eternal preservation in Gordelpus’s spirit. Flying held a privileged place as both a practical means of communication and the swiftest form of worship. Ritual aviation consumed more of the community’s resources than productive industry as a whole.

Scientific authority reinforced this religious order. Science was honored less for disinterested inquiry than for its capacity to transform material life, and its doctrines had hardened into a fixed dogma. The rumored secret of Gordelpus promised access to immense power through the opposition of subatomic charges. Religious traditions presented the Discoverer as a divine or prophetic figure who had entrusted the secret to scientists, while the scientific community’s reluctance to deny possessing it helped sustain public belief. A later formal union of science and religion declared their differences to be differences of expression, joining worship of divine energy to scientific authority.

When news spread that Antarctic borings had found no further coal deposits, the obvious remedy was to reduce the costly ritual flights. The flying aristocracy opposed that course, which threatened both its privileges and the religious order it embodied. It demanded the release of the supposed secret of divine power. The scientists instead described the shortage as a test of faith and urged that ritual flight be increased, not curtailed. Energy was to be withheld from secular uses until the people had proved their devotion and Gordelpus permitted the scientists to save them.

Deception and the fracture of authority

The public initially accepted the scientists’ explanation. Luxury trades were abolished, vital services reduced, and displaced workers assigned to agriculture, where mechanical power was also to be phased out. These changes required more organizational ability than the society retained; serious coordination occurred only in scattered places, including some efforts by Jews. A period of spiritual excitement accompanied the austerity, but hunger and discomfort weakened it. Doubts emerged that people dared not acknowledge, while ritual aviation continued through a mixture of belief and desperate habit.

At the same time, scientists secretly searched old scientific writings and conducted clandestine experiments to recover the lost secret. They followed a false trail laid by an English contemporary of the Discoverer. Researchers died in laboratory accidents and a great college was destroyed; the public interpreted these disasters as evidence of divine power. The scientists exploited that misunderstanding by staging further apparent miracles to quiet unrest. When industrial workers demanded more flour, an explosion at the offices of Cosmopolitan Agriculture killed people in the vicinity. During a strike by Chinese agriculturists seeking electricity for tillage, a lethal atmosphere was attributed to Gordelpus. Such acts restored obedience temporarily, but did nothing to resolve the shortage. Hunger and ill health continued to increase.

As harvests went unreaped for lack of power and people faced scarcity of food and clothing, demands for a new era grew louder. The scientists had found no secret, and the available wind and water power had to be reserved for primary industries. A proposal to halve ritual flying as a compromise prompted a public disclosure: the supposed divine secret was a lie. The disclosure shattered the remaining trust in the scientists and the governing authorities they controlled. Revolts, reprisals, massacres, and civil wars followed. China and India declared themselves free national states but failed to achieve internal unity.

Continental destruction and aftermath

The United States retained its government for a time, but as its authority weakened, its methods became more ruthless. Its use of microbes, in addition to poison gas, unleashed pulmonary and nervous diseases that a deteriorated medical science could not contain. The resulting plague, identified in the account as American madness, devastated the continent. Mobs wrecked water- and wind-power stations associated with authority, and some populations disappeared amid cannibalism.

For a time, parts of Asia and Africa maintained a semblance of order. The American madness spread there as well, however, and the remaining traces of their civilizations soon vanished. Only in the world’s most naturally fertile regions could diseased remnants of the population make a living from the soil; elsewhere, desolation prevailed and the jungle returned.

The catastrophe is not presented as the consequence of fuel depletion alone. The First Men had pursued alternative power and had once imposed controls on fuel, yet their religious hierarchy made the most direct conservation measure politically and spiritually intolerable. Scientific prestige then prolonged that refusal by disguising ignorance as a test of faith, while fabricated miracles converted technical failure into coercion. When the lie became undeniable, neither the energy system nor the political order could hold. A civilization that had organized work, worship, and authority around continuous motion proved unable to change course when its power supply failed.