How The Solar System Dies

Jack Williamson's story "Born of the Sun" (Astounding Stories, March 1934) takes a bizarre premise and plays it completely straight, giving us a gripping story about the death of our Solar System.

That's not a spoiler, by the way. Once an inventor and industrialist named Foster Ross learns that the planets and large moons in our System are actually eggs about to hatch, there's no effort to stop this. In fact, there is no possible way to stop it. The only thing he can do is race to perfect a new motor he's been tinkering with, then use to to build a space ark and save a remnant of the human race.

But this plan isn't a guarentee. Aside from the fact that he might not get the new motor to work right in the limited time left before the Earth splits open and releases a Cthulhuian monster, there's also an anicent cult that believes humanity should die completely along with the Earth. So when earthquakes and flood begin to destroy civilization, Foster's factory is under siege by cultists (armed with ray guns that turn a person's blood into poison) and a panicking populace.

The action in this one really gets intense, with Foster and his engineers desperately trying to get the ship ready to launch while the mob is storming aboard after blowing open an airlock.

"Born of the Sun" is a wonderful combination of Space Opera and Horror. Williamson was a prolific writer who was nearly always good and quite often great. When he was really on his game as a writer, he could turn out some really intense prose.  Here's the scene in which the protagonists watch the Moon break apart and hatch a monster:

They saw the familiar seas and ring craters of the lunar topography dissolve in a network of cracks, black and shining green. They saw the face of the Moon, for the first time in human memory, misty with clouds of its own.

They saw a thing come out of the riven planet--an unthinkable head appeared--

It broke through, in the region of the great crater Tycho. It was monstrously weird. colossal, triangular, a beak came first, green and shining. Behind it were two ovoid, enormous patches, like eyes, glowing with lambent purple. Between and above them was en enigmatic organ, arched, crested; it was an unearthly spray of crimson flame.

Incredible wings--reaching out--stretching--

They pushed through the shattered, crumbling shell, which already had lost all likeness to the Moon of old. Wings, alone, could human beings term them. Yet, Foster thought, they were more than anything else like the eldritch, gorgeous streamers of the Sun's corona, which is seen only at the moment of total eclipse, spreading from the black disk like two wings of supernal light. They were sheets of green flame. They shimmered with slow waves of light, that faded indistinctly at the edges, like the uncanny fans of the aurora. They were finely veined with bright silver. 

A body, both horrible and beautiful--

So that's how the Moon--and soon after, the Earth--dies. It's going to be pretty scary, but at least it will look awesome.

You can find this issue of Astounding Stories online HERE.