Author Country South Korea Publisher Opus Press | Original title "최후의 마지막 결말의 끝" Language Korean | |
Published in The Final Last of the Ultimate End | ||
"The Final Last of the Ultimate End" (original Korean title: "최후의 마지막 결말의 끝") is a science fiction short story by Korean author Kwak Jaesik, included in his 2015 collection of the same name, "The Final Last of the Ultimate End". In the story, a man, who faces the ultimate fate of the universe, is trying to find what he can do.
Contents
Plot Summary
A man who is a pilot of an experimental project, accelerating a spaceship to the speed of light, reaches extremely far future, due to accidental time dilation. He realizes that the time he is arrived at is the heat death of the universe, which means that he cannot see any person, any living creature, any planet, any star, any reactive atom, nor any active thing what so ever.
Suffering from extreme loneliness and boredom, he tries to discover one meaningful thing, thinking of his own study of time travel, hoping to get back to his old life or solipsism of being god-like-status, since he is the most magnificent being in the universe and the total representation of the universe for the moment. But he soon finds out those thoughts are only megalomaniac fantasy, and not real possibility of solution for his current status, but just being mad.
After a while, he begins to do things that he wanted to do for a long time. He produces his own version of Waiting for Godot by himself and for himself, and he thinks one he has truly loved over and over again. At the end of the story, he asks to the reader, "what will be the end of this story?". The options he suggests are suicide and mental breakdown. However the true end of the story is hearing transmission from his loved one, who has followed him with the same kind of spaceship only to meet him.
Critical response
Seonghun Kim, Editor for Cine 21, praised its sense of realism and easiness as "recalling me The Martian (Weir novel)".