[kj] "Brighter than a thousand suns" passage from Norman Spinrad's story about Armageddon

[B. Oliver Sheppard]

[Excerpt from 1973 story 'The Big Flash" that uses the phrase 'brighter 
than a thousand suns" as an apocalyptic rock group's lyrics. Stunned 
when I read it. Jaz never read this? - Oliver]



"The Big Flash"
by Norman Spinrad, 1973

[...]

"Okay, roll it," Jake said into the intercom mike. "What you're going to 
see," he said as the screening room lights went out, "is the [rock 
band's] last number."

On the screen:

A shot of empty blue sky, with soft, lazy electric guitar chords behind 
it. The camera pans across a few clouds to an extremely long shot on the 
sun. As the sun, no more than a tiny circle of light, moves into the 
center of the screen, a sitar-drone comes in behind the guitar.

Very slowly, the camera begins to zoom in on the sun. As the image of 
the sun expands, the sitar gets louder and the guitar begins to fade and 
a drum starts to give the sitar a beat. The sitar gets louder, the beat 
gets more pronounced and begins to speed up as the sun continues to 
expand. Finally, the whole screen is filled with unbearably bright light 
behind which the sitar and drum are in a frenzy.

The over this, drowning out the sitar and drum, a voice like a sick ting 
in heat: "Brighter than a thousand suns..."

The light dissolves into a close up of a beautiful dark-haired girl with 
huge eyes and moist lips, and suddenly there is nothing on the 
soundtrack but soft guitar and voices crooning low: "Brighter ... Oh, 
God, it's brighter ... brighter than a thousand suns."

The girls' face dissolves into a full shot of the Four Horsemen in their 
Grim Repaer robes and the same melody that had played behind the girls' 
face shifts into a inor key, picks up whining, reverberating electric 
guitar chords and sitar-drone and becomes a dirge: "Darker ... the world 
grows darker ..."

And a series of cuts in time to the dirge:

A burning village in Asia, strewn with bodies --

"Darker ... the world grows darker ..."

The corpse-heap at Auschwitz --

"Until it gets so dark..."

A gigantic auto graveyard with gaunt Negro children dwarfed in the 
foreground --

"I think I'll die..."

A Washington ghetto in flames with the Captiol misty in the background--

"... before the daylight comes ..."

A jump-cut to an extreme close-up on the singer of the Horsemen, his 
face twisted into a mask of desperation and ecstasy. And the sitar is 
playing double-time, the guitar is wailing and he is screaming at the 
top of his lungs: "But before I die, let me make that trip before the 
nothing comes..."

The girls' face again, transparent, with a blinding yellow light shining 
through it. The sitar beat gets faster and faster with the guitar 
whining behind it and the voice is working itself up into a howling 
frenzy: "...the last big flash to light my sky..."

Nothing but the blinding light now--

".. and zap! the world is done..."

An utterly black screen for a beat that becomes black fading to blue at 
a horizon--

"...but before we die let's dig that high that frees us from our binds 
... that blows all cool and ego-drool and burns us from our mind ... the 
last big flash, mankind's last gas, the trip we can't take twice ...."

Suddenly, the music stops dead for half a beat. Then:

The screen is lit up by an enormous fireball--

A shattering rumble--

The fireball coalesces into a mushroom-pillar cloud as the roar goes on. 
As the roar begins to die out, fire is visible inside the monstrous 
nuclear cloud. And the girl's face is faintly visible superimposed over 
the cloud.

A soft voice, amplified over the roar, obscenely reverential now: 
"Brighter ... great God, it's brighter ... brighter than a thousand suns."

[...]


[From the _Beyond Armageddon_ collection of stories, on Amazon]


So Killing Joke never read this eh?


-Oliver