Second Ending is an older science fiction novel by the late author James White. Released in 1961 it follows the story of a young man, who in a near future gets placed in a state of clinical death due to him being afflicted with a rare form of blood cancer, in the hope that the future will yield a treatment.

The state of the world at the outset of the novel is that of being affected by the consequences of a nuclear war that has left the world’s population increasingly sterile and at one tenth of its original size. Therefore there is a huge shortage of manpower everywhere on the planet. The underground hospital that the protagonist, named Ross, is being treated at is also being affected by this.

When Ross awakes from his sleep, being cured from his cancer, believing to have been asleep for only a few hours, he is baffled by the hospital seeming to be deserted. Upon searching the hospital this happens to be the truth. The only inhabitants of the hospital are revealed to be advanced robots taking care of the maintenance of the hospital, providing him with medical assistance and company.

It is revealed that the entire world’s population and life in itself has been killed off by a second nuclear war and he is probably the only still living inhabitant of the planet. In fact, Ross has been asleep for three hundred years.

The rest of the novel chronicles his desperation to find still existing humanity. Unable to leave the hospital he orders the robots to develop themselves further in order to search the world for life and raw materials to produce even more robots. After giving these orders he once again goes to sleep in a state of clinical death to only be awakened by the robots when progress has been made. Not aging when sleeping, Ross believes he has the advantage of eternity at his disposal to fulfill his task of finding life.

What I have been describing is only the outset of the novel.

The novel is intriguing in trying to express the desperation one man feels when being faced with an entirely complete loneliness. However advanced the robots are they cannot replace the feel of human warmth that man is in need of. This is at least the case for the protagonist.

The story also expresses the desire for the robots to be fully able to understand and serve the last living human. This being the nature of their programming, the robots seem to express a form of terror at the prospect of being useless, of not serving any purpose, therefore they try their utmost to evolve from their original form.

The novel itself is short and an easy read with a constantly flowing narrative, without any bottlenecks in the plot that has to be passed through by the reader.

I fully enjoyed this novel and its ability to give the reader the feel of aeons passing during the struggles of the protagonist and it discussing the nature of life when describing the interaction between one human and robots that try to act, feel and behave as ordinary human beings.

This novel might be very hard to find though. I was lucky to find a swedish copy from 1975 in a second hand store for 1$. The english language version seems to be available through stores on the net although at price points of 99$!!