Speculative fiction is a term usually used by science fiction writers who don’t want their work dismissed as genre writing. It’s too bad it’s already taken, because it would be a good name for another small but distinguished book category: one in which a literary writer takes a single, impossible premise and treats it seriously. Jose Saramago, in Blindness, asks ‘what if everyone in the world except one went blind at the same time?’ Anna Kavan, in Ice, asks ‘what if the world began turning into ice?’ J.G. Ballard, in The Drowned World, asks ‘what if the earth warmed so much that the cities of the earth flooded?’ Into the Sun by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, published in Switzerland in 1922 and reissued by New Directions in a new translation, is a nice example of this kind of experiment. Its premise: one day the news of earth’s imminent destruction is announced by telegram. “Because of an accident within the gravitational system,” the telegram says, “the Earth is rapidly plunging into the sun.” It continues, “The heat will rise and rapidly everything will die.”
This news arrives in an idyllic Swiss village in June, at that moment enjoying an unusually hot and dry but otherwise splendid summer. At first it fails to penetrate the consciousness of the villagers and vacationers. The few people high-strung enough to be worried about it are mocked. “The news comes from America, you know what that means. The newspapers weren’t selling anymore, so what do you expect?!” Very soon, though, more people start to believe it. One man, lying in bed, finds himself wide awake in the dark with the thought, “What if it’s true!… He had just remembered the telegrams he had read in the paper. And, suddenly, there was life, but there was death also, which he had not yet known, because he had not known life.”
Events proceed swiftly. There is a run on the banks and a workers’ uprising. The trains stop running. What started as revolution descends into criminality and anarchy. The mountain villages revert to “republics,” each looking out for their own inhabitants while keeping everyone else out at gunpoint. Ramuz’s narration takes the voice of collective humanity as it faces its imminent end, sketching episodes in the third person, soliloquizing as “we,” or inhabiting the “I” of various individual (but unnamed) characters. He soars up over the valley and swoops down to show us intimate scenes. A man, meeting his lover in his apartment, imagines their coming death and agonizes over whether he really loves her. A father takes care of his young son, who plays happily, unaware of the disaster. “He’s not the one who needs me,” he realizes, I’m the one who needs him!” A young man commits suicide so as not to have to face the fear of death. The viewpoint of the narrator spirals outward, away from the original village, and upward, both literally, as groups of refugees begin to climb the mountain to flee the heat, and figuratively, as the tone of the book becomes more elevated and spiritual.
The novel is about: a natural disaster that threatens civilization, the news of which is greeted with denial; unbearable heat; struggles over resources; a growing sense of doom. Into the Sun is impossible to read without thinking of the climate crisis, which is presumably the reason that it, out of Ramuz’s more than thirty books, is now being reissued. But this connection fades as the book goes on. The mood of the novel is philosophical, universal. Writing in 1922, you might expect Ramuz to have the recent apocalypse of WWI in mind, but Into the Sun hardly evokes this catastrophe at all: the violence that erupts in the peaceful Alpine valley is disorganized and chaotic and could just as easily be taking place in the Middle Ages or today. The story is a fable, and as it develops it gets further and further from topicality. The tone is poetic, sometimes to a fault. “We are forced to die alone! And how alone we are at the hour of death! Each thing, each being, alone faced with nothingness. The branch sags, every branch.” Pronouncements like these threaten to bog the narration down, but for the most part Ramuz’s excellent pacing makes up for it.
In the end, it’s impressive how true the book is to its premise and, in Ramuz’s hands, how real this fable appears. The sense of dread and wonder first conjured when the characters thought, “What if it’s true?” pervades the book, which is less a warning to mankind than a meditation on mortality.
FICTION
by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz
New Directions
Published on July 22, 2025
