Small town sent to furture

[Tchard]

Looking for a book where an entire small town (people, buildings, etc) is somehow transported far, far in to the future where nothing on Earth lives because the sun has changed to a red giant. They discover an abandoned city and move there to survive. The descendants of humans (living in other worlds) notice they are there and visit them.

This is an old book as it was a public domain book.

 

[Tchard]

Never mind, I found it. I guess I should have kept looking for 5 more minutes. It's called City at Worlds End by Edmond Moore Hamilton.

The pleasant little American city of Middletown is the first target in an atomic war - but instead of blowing Middletown to smithereens, the super-hydrogen bomb blows it right off the map - to somewhere else! First there is the new thin coldness of the air, the blazing corona and dullness of the sun, the visibility of the stars in high daylight. Then comes the inhabitant's terrifying discovery that Middletown is a twentieth-century oasis of paved streets and houses in a desolate brown world without trees, without water, apparently without life, in the unimaginably far-distant future.

 

[Clansman]

Problem:

When our sun becomes a Red Giant, it will expand to the point of engulfing Earth, Mars, and perhaps even chunks of the Asteroid Belt.

Still, why let science get in the way of a good story?

 

[PaulMmn]

Maybe it was a dwarf giant....

 

[J-Sun]

Problem:

When our sun becomes a Red Giant, it will expand to the point of engulfing Earth, Mars, and perhaps even chunks of the Asteroid Belt.

Still, why let science get in the way of a good story?

That was a given for a long time and, while up-to-the-minute opinions I'm unaware of may have solidified back to the original conclusion[1], there is or was some debate about that. For instance, a National Geographic article talks about the alternative. It's not the best exposition of it I've come across, but is just something a search turned up. It wouldn't actually help the biosphere much, but at least might not engulf the earth. But, yeah, either way, this is a pretty nifty Hamilton novel.

[1] Actually, the article says its been debated a long time but I always understood the consensus opinion to be that it would be engulfed and that the idea it might not was not given much credence until relatively recently.

 

[Ravensquawk]

Well, none of these authors actually had a time machine that existed outside of their stories, in which they could just jaunt up ahead and see the science of the future.
Because of this, science fiction is written with the science of the time. Only amateurs and snobs would knock a Burroughs story because we now know that Mars has dirt clods and water-filled canals, or the drama of "Brightside Crossing" because we now know that Mercury does not keep one face always sunward. Science fiction writers know this (They would probably say "duh") and appreciate the classic stories. And ours will be outdated someday with new knowledge.

Maybe our knowledge of the star lifecycle was already there in the 1930s through 1950s. Then, I would read Hamilton's lovely writing in the same spirit as Ray Bradbury's Mars. He said himself his Chronicles were fantasy, not science fiction.