The Great Race of Yith and the Coleopterous Race

The planned migration between the Great Race of Yith and the Post-human Beetle Race is the Great Race’s answer to a doom it foresees in Earth’s distant future. Rather than endure that catastrophe in its own era, the Great Race intends to send its keenest minds forward into the bodies of the beetle species that will follow humanity. The exchange makes the two races participants in one temporal system: minds from the future can occupy bodies in the Great Race’s age, while the Great Race reserves the beetle age as a refuge for its own collective survival.

A Future Successor Species

The Post-human Beetle Race belongs to the succession of dominant Earth species described in accounts of the Great Race’s immense temporal knowledge. Humanity is one stage in a history extending across hundreds of millions of years, not the final or defining form of life. The beetle civilization is expected to arise after humanity, and the Great Race identifies its members as suitable future hosts for the minds it hopes to preserve. The relationship is therefore not presented as an ordinary alliance between contemporaneous peoples: it is a projected dependence across eras, built around the succession of bodies on Earth.

The Great Race’s plan is selective in emphasis but collective in scale. Its keenest minds are to migrate en masse when the ancient world faces its predicted peril. In the narrator’s account, this prospect makes the beetle species more than a successor civilization: its bodies become the anticipated destination through which the Great Race hopes to survive the end of its own historical age.

How the Exchange Works

The Great Race’s temporal projection operates through minds rather than a journey of physical bodies. With mechanical aid, a mind can reach forward toward a desired period, enter the brain of a representative of that era’s highest life-form, and displace that individual’s mind into the projector’s own time and body. The exchange can later be reversed. This mechanism explains how the Great Race’s relation to the beetles can run in both directions: the future species supplies bodies for Yithian minds, while beetle minds can in turn be carried backward into the Great Race’s era.

The narrator’s dreams furnish a glimpse of that cross-temporal contact. Among the minds he encounters are five from the hardy coleopterous species that will follow mankind, alongside minds from many other periods and forms of life. Their presence in the Great Race’s age does not mean that the planned mass migration has already occurred. Rather, it shows the same projection process operating on individual minds, in advance of the future crisis for which the Great Race intends the larger transfer.

The Threat Behind the Migration

The Great Race’s projected escape is tied to its fear of the Elder Things, an ancient alien species it once subdued and confined beneath the Earth. The Great Race’s visions of the future foretell a final successful irruption by those beings. It expects the attack to be an act of vengeance, although later projections suggest that the invaders will not continue to trouble the surface during the subsequent eras of other species. The feared incursion is thus a crisis facing the Great Race in its own age, not evidence of an ongoing conflict between the beetles and the Elder Things.

Against that threat, the move to the Post-human Beetle Race represents a strategy of survival through time. The Great Race resolves that those who can escape should not face the coming catastrophe. Its caution and preparation give the future migration the character of an evacuation, while the beetle bodies offer a safer later place for the minds it seeks to preserve.

Beyond the Beetle Age

The beetle period is not the final destination in the Great Race’s projected history. The narrator’s dream-derived account describes a later migration, as the Earth’s span closes, from the beetle bodies to bulbous vegetable entities on Mercury. It also evokes still later races clinging to the dying planet and burrowing toward its core. These extensions place the beetle species within a succession of temporary refuges rather than at the end of time.

The relationship between the Great Race and the Post-human Beetle Race consequently unsettles a human-centered view of history. Humanity itself is only an interval between successive dominant forms, and the Great Race’s survival depends on a future species whose age lies beyond human civilization. Yet the account remains mediated by the narrator’s dreams and recovered impressions, even as other evidence in his inquiry gives material weight to the deep-time world associated with the Great Race. The beetle migration is presented as a prediction and a plan, not as an event witnessed in the present.