“Whatever the reason was, the public concerned itself little about the matter, as in all that is gradual and not sudden.” The cooling of the sun begins by being ignored: Tarde was a French sociologist, criminologist and psychologist, and it is because of this background that he had a unique insight into human behaviour and was able to make uncannily prescient observations about the reaction to a catastrophe on a global scale. Of course, the change in the temperature in the book is downward rather than upward, but it remains a catastrophic change in temperature nonetheless. If you replace this catastrophe of ‘solar anaemia’ with global warming, there are parallels to be drawn between the reactions to the fictional disaster described by Tarde and the response to climate change in reality. In Gabriel Tarde’s 1896 utopian novella, “Fragment d’histoire future”, which was translated into English by Cloudesley Brereton in 1905 as “Underground Man”, the last surviving members of the human race are forced to withdraw into the Earth’s interior because the cooling of the sun has turned our planet’s surface into an uninhabitable realm of ice. – “Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.
