Red Giant Sun Apocalyptic Novel

[mcpete]

Hello, this has been bugging me for quite some time.
so I am attempting to find this book which dealt with humanity far flung in the future (not teleported there) where the Sun has become a red giant. It takes place billions of years in the future I believe but it is suitably futuristic but humanity is still a one planet species. The main character is a dude who has a love interest who is getting people off the planet by teleporting them off world at the end. The novel ends by the world being engulfed by the sun. Very fatalistic and I think a mechanic is somehow involved in the plot? There is a car described at one point which has special wheels to handle the heat. The world is very grungy. The heat of earth is described numerous times. Lots of characters talk about how hot it is there. All of the characters wear synthetic clothing and it is not tribal or the novel One In Three Hundred. Wild dogs were a problem but I would not think the novel post-apocalpytic. The cover looked like it was from the 70s or the 80s I think and featured a giant red sun on the cover (it also was not Dahlgren). The guy was wearing sunglasses I think and reminded me of a cyberpunk protagonist. The book was definitely not written after 1995.

Thank you in advance!
- Peter

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

Could it be one of the Tales of the Dying Earth books by Jack Vance?

Cheers, Greg.

 

[mcpete]

Hey thank you for your answer! Unfortunately it was not really in the dying earth subgenre and it wasn't a Dying Earth book. There were no fantasy elements it was more grimy cyberpunk if anything.

Thank you,

Peter

 

[CassFrank]

SOLVED! This is J. V. Brummel’s Deus Ex Machina (1989). It doesn’t actually take place billions of years in the future but only 50(!), however all the other details match. And the cover is a dead lock.

From detailed Amazon review: “It is less than fifty years from now, and the Sun is going nova, soon to engulf the Earth and end all history. This is not spoiling the book; it's the last item in an intriguingly cryptic chronology that is one of the first things in the book.

David Jones is a media author. It is the mid 2030's, and civilization is in the throes of a very slow-motion collapse. There are two types of people to the urban-dweller: those inside the constellation of the "New Cities" and those misfits who dwell in the shambling, largely deserted and somewhat-lawless suburbs. There may be people living in the great, forgotten spaces which once made up the countries of our global society, but those spaces have been forgotten, and have lapsed back into Terra Incognita.

The weather, which is just unbearably warm, continues to heat throughout the novel. The joke on humanity is, they have turned so far inward that they only notice the change in the Sun when it is almost too late to do anything in response. Up just to the end, city life…

The technological response to the Sun's slow explosion is the Rescue Effort. Transmatation-the rendering of one's body into atoms, beaming them to a remote station and reassembling them-has long since been accepted as an everyday, though luxurious technology-think air travel in the early days of the world airlines. The aim of the Rescue Effort is to get as many people off the Earth as possible as soon as possible, and transmatation supplies the means-the ways require some roughing out.

Those running the Rescue Effort make an effort to select as representative a fraction of humanity as meaningfully possible. David Jones comes to the Effort's attention and is enlisted. The central story is how he deals with the knowledge the world is coming to an end and how he deals with being selected as one of those saved.”

Deus Ex Machina: Brummels, J.V.: 9780553279771: Amazon.com: Books

Deus Ex Machina [Brummels, J.V.] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Deus Ex Machina

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