What if we had no choice in our ultimate fate?  What if we were just marking time until an indifferent universe snuffs us out?  Would we be burned by an exploding star?  Dispatched by a natural disaster?  Or would we be devoured by some infinitely more powerful beings who saw us as snacks?

H P Lovecraft

Perhaps the most frightening counterbalance to the Shining City on the Hill school of Future Past was the American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937).   Though Lovecraft's stock in trade was weird tales about eldritch horrors that lurked in the shadows, he did not believe in the supernatural.  In fact, he was a staunch materialist who was a hostile opponent of Einstein's theory of relativity because he felt that it undermined the predictability of the Newtonian world.  For all their bizarre qualities, Lovecraft's creations were never anything other than material beings that obeyed the laws of science.  Trouble is, they were always so powerful that they made a mockery of what we regard as science as being the speculation of infants about the nature of their playpen. 

In Lovecraft's world, all of our science, religion, art, philosophy (the whole of human history, actually) was a fool's paradise.  The universe was ruled by beings and forces so powerful, so malevolent, and so alien, that to catch even a glimpse of reality would drive anyone stark, raving mad.  Our Earth was simply in the middle of a lucky breathing spell, which could not hope to last and the horrible things that once ruled our planet and would soon come again and exterminate us in an orgy of pain, corruption  and insanity.  In the meantime, the best that we could hope to do is to put our blinkers on and ignore the odd nightmare that squirts into our world from the incomprehensible Beyond.

I'm not getting you down, am I?

Douglas Adams

Don't get the idea that this sort of mindset is exclusive to pessimistic American horror writers.  Douglas Adams (1952-2001) had a picture of the universe in his five-part Hitchhiker's "trilogy" that wasn't that far from Lovecraft's.  The difference was that whereas Lovecraft's was horrific, Adams's was absurd.  Sure, the Earth might be the plaything of superintelligent, pandimensional beings, but they turn out to be mice.  And if your planet is destroyed, it's most likely to be due to being pocketed into a black hole during a game of intergalactic bar billiards.

Of course, all of this pales as nothing when compared to the gravitational vortex put out by the incredible mass of Zaphod Beeblbrox's ego, but past this we shall tread lightly.

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