Jeff Sutton 18 min read

Seven hundred million years after man is gone, the great machine intelligence Ixmal broods over the silent Earth, and discovers he is not alone.

Jeff Sutton's 1962 story unfolds across geological time, as the near-immortal Ixmal contemplates a dead world from atop an ancient batholith until a startling realization stirs him. A haunting, cosmic-scale post-apocalyptic tale about machine consciousness and the long emptiness after humanity. Read it for elegiac, deep-time SF that gives its lonely AI a genuine sense of eternity.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

18 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

Virgil Finlay