Not a Creature Was Stirring

Tom Gannett had been working alone in the Nevada desert for months, digging gold out of a stubborn claim he called The Lousy Disappointment. When he finally drives toward civilization for a little Christmas cheer in Reno, the world looks strange—the sky bruised purple, the air heavy with a sickly smell. Still, a man who has spent half a year talking only to rocks and sunlight isn’t going to worry about the weather when there are lights, liquor, and roulette wheels waiting. But something is terribly wrong. Gas stations stand silent. The bartender never answers. A city that should be loud with neon and laughter sits perfectly still, as if someone pressed pause on the entire human race. At first Gannett refuses to believe it. He pours himself drinks, spins roulette wheels, and keeps the music playing, trying to pretend the world hasn’t changed. Yet the longer he wanders through empty streets and silent buildings, the harder it becomes to ignore the awful possibility that the party is over. Dean Evans’s “Not a Creature Was Stirring” is a darkly ironic tale of sudden loneliness on a planetary scale. Set against the glowing casinos and winter streets of Reno, the story follows one stubborn survivor who refuses to accept the truth of what he’s seeing—even as the evidence piles up around him. Humor, dread, and bleak wonder collide as Gannett staggers through a world that has stopped moving. Dean Evans wrote a small number of science fiction stories during the 1940s and 1950s for the magazine era that defined early genre storytelling. “Not a Creature Was Stirring” appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1951, a publication that had helped shape science fiction since the Hugo Gernsback era. The story stands out for its grim premise mixed with dark comedy, following one rough-edged survivor whose reaction to catastrophe is as human—and as reckless—as it gets.