Shall the Dust Praise Thee?

"Shall the Dust Praise Thee?" is a science fiction short story by American writer Damon Knight. It was first published in the anthology Dangerous Visions (1967). His agent refused to publish it and suggested the Atheist Journal in Moscow might buy it, but no one else would.[1] The title comes from Psalm 30:9 in the Bible.

"Shall the Dust Praise Thee?"
AuthorDamon Knight
LanguageEnglish
Genre(s)Science fiction
Published inDangerous Visions
Publication typeAnthology
Publication dateDecember 1967

Summary

God arrives on Earth, ready to inflict the Day of Wrath on humankind, but finds that all life has already disappeared. The angels tell God that there has been a great war between England, Russia, China, and America which has wiped out all life on earth, and that the true end of days had already occurred through nuclear warfare. No living creatures, no water, no grass, nothing but dust and brittle stone remain on the world. All that remains of humanity is the phrase left by the last humans as a message to God, saying, "WE WERE HERE. WHERE WERE YOU?"

gollark: Wokerer: modulate some kind of neutrino generation thing, and have a detector on the other end, so you can just send signals straight through the earth.
gollark: Really? That would be better, then.
gollark: I do wonder how well they're actually going to work in practice, though. I heard that each satellite could handle 6Gbps or so of traffic, and there are maybe 500 of them, which means if they roll it out to 100 000 people they'll get an amazing 4MB/s each.
gollark: SpaceX is apparently going to provide its own hardware.
gollark: Starlink transceivers will apparently be too large to conveniently fit in phones.

References
  1. Damon Knight (1967). "Afterword". Dangerous Visions. p. 343.
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