Into the Sun (1878)

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Into the Sun—a radically strange and frighteningly prescient climate-disaster novel written a century ago by C. F. Ramuz, the great and eccentric Swiss-French novelist—is a book to boil you It's been a hot summer for a Swiss lakeside town—both bucolic and citylike, old-fashioned and up-to-date—when a "great message," telegraphed from one continent to another, announces an "accident in the gravitational system." Something has gone wrong with the axis of the Earth that will send our planet plunging into the sun: it's the end of the world, though one hardly notices it, yet ... "Thus all life will come to an end. The heat will rise. It will be excruciating for all living things ... And yet nothing is visible for the moment." For now the surface of the lake is as calm as can be, and the wine harvest promises to be sweet. Most flowers, however, have died. The stars grow bigger, and the sun turns from orange-red to red, and then