Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet

The Guardian commissioned Atwood to write this story to contribute to the paper’s efforts to combat climate change. “Time Capsule” is part of a larger body of work by many authors thematically connected, but narratively standalone.

Atwood’s story has an implied framing narrative: The paragraphs within it are an metal artifact from a long-gone civilization, while the title—a label placed upon an ancient object by researchers—makes it clear that some alien beings have come across this record of a now-extinct people. Framing devices are a common feature of fiction: 18th and 19th century writers often framed work as found letters and manuscripts, while modern horror movies rely on this strategy to create the found footage genre. Atwood herself has used the technique before: For example, The Handsmaid’s Tale is revealed to be a manuscript being discussed in a scholarly seminar, while Alias Grace (1996) is the testimony of a young woman accused of murder trying to recall past events. Framing devices make the story feel more real; additionally, here, as in the case of The Handsmaid’s Tale, the frame gives the bleak ending an optimistic note—maybe the people at the heart of the story have been wiped out, but all life in the universe has not ceased.

Atwood limits exposition. Her plural and singular narrators are anonymous, and they don’t provide any information about their society or world beyond the information needed to understand the story’s theme. This sparse style magnifies the danger of climate change, creating an apocalyptic narrative that reads like a parable with a moral: Greed heedless of environmental degradation will lead to annihilation. The inclusion of a moral and a root cause for the crisis that kills the planet in her story makes Atwood narrative prescriptive—that is, one that assigns blame for a problem and argues that steps need to be taken to mitigate it. In this case, money-hungry people industrialize the world until it is a barren desert that can no longer sustain life.

The poetic, elevated language suggests the narrator is educated. This is significant considering the author mentions how wise men contributed to the destruction of the planet (Paragraph 6). The singular narrator’s position as the designated chronicler and the last of the species suggests they were part of the group responsible for the catastrophe—something also suggested by dread, hopelessness, and rueful regret of the last line: “Pray for us, who once too, thought we could fly” (Paragraph 8).

In the planet’s first age, pre-industrial societies create gods that mimic the natural world. These gods have “horns on their heads, or moons, or scaly fins, or the beaks of eagles” (Paragraph 2). The imagery suggests that in this stage of evolution, people are in awe of the animals and natural phenomena around them, elevating aspects of these creatures to the divine. The vague descriptions of these first gods have echoes in real human history, alluding to pantheons from ancient cultures like the Egyptians, whose gods often had animal heads, Greeks and Romans, some of whose gods represented celestial objects, or Native Americans, whose gods channeled the totemic power of animals. The people who created these first-age gods had few illusions about them, recognizing that “Sometimes they were cruel” (Paragraph 1)—a balanced understanding that will disappear in future ages. The people of this age saw continuity between the divine and the earthly—they were surrounded by the same animals that inform their divinities, and the planet was a fertile and welcoming place, almost itself like a ripe fruit: “We smelled the earth and rolled in it; its juices ran down our chins” (Paragraph 2).

In the second age, people developed money as a medium of exchange that meant they no longer connected directly to nature. Instead, civilization, in the form of trade and commerce, replaced the lush land’s former richness with money. Rather than understanding the process of growing and harvesting food, people now relied on an obscure and complex process: “We could not eat this money, wear it or burn it for warmth; but as if by magic it could be changed into such things” (Paragraph 3). The new money was made out of the same “shining metals” (Paragraphs 1, 3) that sculptures of the gods used to use, and one side of each coin featured an image of nature that used to symbolize the gods. The balance of power between people and gods shifted—the other side of each coin carried “a severed head, that of a king or some other noteworthy person” (Paragraph 3). Money thus killed the gods and elevated people, who began to hoard it in the conviction that enough money could make people fly.

The third age exacerbated this loss of connection to nature. Money gained godlike, exploitative powers “to create on its own” (Paragraph 4)—a reference to the Book of Genesis from the Old Testament, in which God creates the world. The text underscores money’s new abilities by personifying money in terrifying, unnatural ways that again reference actual human history. Money could now “talk”—a metaphorical way of describing the US Supreme Court’s decision to designate individual campaign contributions to as free speech, and thus make them unlimited. Money also created “feasts and famines, songs of joy, lamentations” (Paragraph 4)—a list of opposites that brings to mind inequalities between developed and developing nations, as well as extremes of wealth and poverty. In this age, money became a voracious consumer of the environment—a hunger that metaphorizes industry’s unrelenting depletion of natural resources. Here, because nothing regulates industrialization or development, money ate up “forests, croplands and the lives of children […] armies, ships and cities” (Paragraph 4)—allusions to the destruction of the rainforest and the logging industry, child labor, and wars waged for control of oil or other raw materials. Possibly the most damning quality of this third age was the worship of the rich. Rather than curtailing money’s power, people believed that wealth conferred an aspect of the divine: “To have it was a sign of grace” (Paragraph 4).

If “Time Capsule” is an allegory of human history, then modern society exists somewhere between Atwood’s third and fourth ages—greed and unrestrained capitalism has led to tremendous environmental devastation. The next elements of the story are a vision of our possible future.

In the fourth stage, money is no longer the primary actor. Rather than ascribing all the evils happening to this abstract force, the narrator now admits that people were responsible for changing the natural world so much that deserts dominated the planet: “Some were made of cement, some were made of various poisons, some of baked earth” (Paragraph 5). The “cement” deserts are cities, sometimes described as concrete jungles. The deserts of “various poisons” are deserted and destroyed land where industrial pollution has rendered the ground, air, and water uninhabitable—real life analogues range from rivers toxic from runoff, algae-choked seas, or even nuclear fallout zones like Chernobyl. Finally, the deserts of “baked earth” are the result of global warming making previously fertile land arid. By valuing endless, unchecked growth over environmental preservation, “wise men” rationalized the deserts (Paragraph 5). Rather than taking “Wars, plagues, and famines” as a sign to pull back, the “industrious” people made deserts until no food could grow anywhere. Shockingly, the response to this catastrophe was absurd philosophizing. The same wise men now aestheticized the deserts, describing the arid landscape as a sublime and orderly place in which to “apprehend the absolute” (Paragraph 6). Still unwilling to concede their mistakes, they instead elevated a new power—cynical nihilism: “the number zero was holy” (Paragraph 6).

The story ends with the last person making a sad recording of their planet’s former existence in the hope that someone at some point will stumble on the brass cylinder they’ve buried in a cairn (a burial mound). This image of a last vestige of a once-great civilization is an echo of Percy Shelley’s famous poem “Ozymandias,” in which a traveler finds a similar remnant of a formerly mighty ruler. However, while Shelley’s past tyrant lacked the self-awareness to know that whatever he created would be eventually destroyed, here, the last remaining person is alive long enough to see the destruction of their world. After all the advancements and accomplishments of humans, the only thing they leave behind is a grave marker to themselves. The now first-person singular narrator, the writer of the time capsule, asks whoever finds the marker for prayers and offers them a warning not to repeat the same mistakes.