The Last Day of Creation

The Last Day of Creation
US Cover
Author(s)	Wolfgang Jeschke
Original title	'Der letzte Tag der Schöpfung'
Country	Germany
Language	German
Genre(s)	Science Fiction
Publication date	1981
Published in English	1982
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN	0312470614
OCLC Number	10300910
Dewey Decimal	833/.914 19
LC Classification	PT2670.E75 L413 1982

The Last Day of Creation (in original German: Der letzte Tag der Schöpfung) is a science fiction novel by German writer Wolfgang Jeschke, first published in 1981. The English translation was published in 1982 in the USA and Great Britain. In the same year the novel obtained the Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis (Kurd Laßwitz award).

The computer game Original War (2001) is freely based on the novel.

Plot

The book is structured into three different parts. The first part describes several ancient artifacts that turn out to be remnants of modern era items: a part of pilot's breathing pipe worshipped for centuries as a Catholic saintly relic, a clearly recognizable trace of a jeep discovered during archaeological works on Gibraltar, found in the same layer as a skeleton of early hominid and an equally old tube of grenade launcher just introduced in the US Army. William W. Francis, an ambitious officer of the US Navy, gets convinced that time travel is possible and manages to launch a secret project to develop technological device able to transfer people and materiel through time.

The second part describes the project "Chronotron", the successful implementation of a time machine, at the moment able only to move things into the past. It is believed that time transfer into the future will be solved soon.

The American administration decides to move an oil pumping machinery 5 million years into the past, set it up on oil deposits in Near East, and transport the oil through the then dried-up Mediterranean Basin to the shores of North Sea where reverse time machines will push it to the modern era. The massively expensive project is kept strictly secret. Objections of scientists that time transfer into the future may be just a dream, that the project could exhaust the country in a new arm race, and that the history of humankind may be irreversibly changed, are ignored.

The third part introduces Steve Stanley, a military pilot picked up to participate in the project. His task is to protect the installations and specialists transferred into the past. Stanley successfully descends into the prehistoric Mediterranean. Unexpectedly, he arrives into middle of all-out war where newcomers are chased by nuclear artillery. He finds out that the plan went completely wrong. Isolated groups of Americans got scattered within the time more than calculated, the reverse time transfer is impossible and the worst: Arabs had discovered the plan and decided to strike back by sending soldiers into the same period to destroy the American expedition.

Stanley meets people who arrived from various different futures, e.g., one where the USA territory is limited to the east of Mississippi and Mexico is the superpower. Most of the time travellers, unable to accommodate life without modern amenities and without practical skills, have been evacuated to a base on the Bermudas, and the rest try to fend off attackers and to rescue unsuspecting newcomers. Overall, the situation is hopeless and the handful of modern humans has no chance to set up a new civilisation.

Editions

• First edition: 1981, Nymphenburger Verlag, ISBN 3485004030
• English language editions: ISBN 0312470614 (US) / ISBN 0712600426 (UK), 1982.
• Translated into several other languages.
• Last German language edition in 2005.