Arthur C. Clarke
1917–

(Full name Arthur Charles Clarke; has also written under the pseudonyms E. G. O'Brien and Charles Willis) English novelist, short-story writer, essayist, editor, critic, autobiographer, and nonfiction writer.

The following entry presents an overview of Clarke's career through 2005.

INTRODUCTION

Renowned not only for his science fiction, which has earned him the title of Grand Master from the Science Fiction Writers of America, Clarke has also developed a reputation for his first-rate scientific and technical writing. Perhaps best known in this field for "Extraterrestrial Relays," the 1945 article in which he first proposed the idea of communications satellites, Clarke has published works on such diverse topics as underwater diving, space exploration, and scientific extrapolation. Nevertheless, Clarke is most recognized for his accessible and dynamic portrayals of the scientific aspects of astronomy and physics in his novels and short stories. In addition, he is noted for his optimistic views regarding the uses of technology, which contrast sharply with the prevailing mood of distrust and uneasiness found in much of the science fiction genre. Many of his novels, including Childhood's End (1953) and Rendezvous with Rama (1973), have earned critical acclaim, but his most famous works are his screenplay and subsequent novel 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which has been consistently hailed as the most important science fiction film of the twentieth century.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Clarke was born on December 16, 1917, in Mine-head, Somersetshire, England, to Charles Wright and Norah Willis Clarke. He began to read science fiction around the age of twelve and quickly became enamored with the genre. He wrote for his school publication until economic circumstances forced him to secure a position as an auditor for the British government. While living in London, Clarke joined the British Interplanetary Society, a science fiction and space enthusiasts club, where he was introduced to other science fiction writers and editors. Soon after, he began to publish short stories as well as scientific articles addressing the feasibility of space travel. In 1941 Clarke enlisted in the Royal Air Force, serving as a radar instructor. During this period, Clarke published an article in Wireless World, advocating the use of synchronous satellites for communication, a revolutionary idea at the time. After the war, Clarke earned degrees in physics and in pure and applied mathematics from King's College at the University of London. Clarke won critical praise for his nonfiction tome The Exploration of Space (1951), which some have argued is one of the first books to present an accurate scientific discussion in a manner accessible to average readers. After the success of The Exploration of Space and his novel Childhood's End, Clarke was able to pursue writing full-time. During the 1960s and 1970s, Clarke continued to build on his reputation and developed an avid following, publishing a new novel almost every year. In collaboration with famed film director Stanley Kubrick, Clarke co-authored the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, which has since become one of the canonical works of science fiction cinema. The film earned four Academy Award nominations, including best picture and best screenplay for Clarke and Kubrick. Clarke followed the film with a novel of the same name, a text that expands upon events in the movie. His 1973 novel Rendezvous with Rama earned him four of the highest honors in science fiction literature: the Nebula, Hugo, John W. Campbell Memorial, and Jupiter Awards. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Clarke continued his "Odyssey" series with three additional novels, concluding with 3001: The Final Odyssey in 1997. Clarke has also been recognized for his involvement in television, beginning with his co-broadcast of the Apollo space missions and for his work on several space exploration documentaries. In addition, he has published numerous nonfiction books about deep sea diving and operates a diving school in Sri Lanka, where he has resided since the 1950s. In 1988 Clarke was diagnosed with post-polio syndrome, forcing his continued reliance on a wheelchair. While Clarke has struggled with health issues, he has since co-authored several novels and accepted a wide array of awards and accolades, including a Nobel Peace Prize nomination in 1994. Recognized as a Knight Bachelor by the British Empire in 2000, he has also served as the honorary head of the Institute for Cooperation in Space, the Chancellor of the International Space University, and the head of Moratuwa University in Sri Lanka. In 2005 he was presented with the Lankabhimanaya Award, the highest civilian honor in Sri Lanka.

MAJOR WORKS

Throughout his lengthy career, Clarke has been a prolific writer of both fiction and nonfiction. In Clarke's early works, which primarily consist of nonfiction accounts of theoretical science and juvenile short stories, several critics have identified a thematic undercurrent, which Thomas Clareson regards as "strongly didactic, reflecting Clarke's desire to sell astronautics to the public." For Clarke, however, the "prime function of a story is to entertain—not to instruct or preach," a philosophy that may account for his noticeable attempts to use clear expressions of manifest and real-world descriptions to convey his personal vision of the future, as opposed to normative science fiction conventions. In regards to his nonfiction writing, Clarke has been admired for his lucid, dynamic prose and his ability to explain complicated scientific ideas. This same skill carries over into his fiction, where his plots are routinely based upon factual scientific information culled from the fields of astronomy and physics, prompting Clarke to incorporate new ideas and theories into his books as time progresses. His early works can be divided into two categories: works in which he concentrates on technology and space adventure and novels in which he focuses on metaphysical themes. One of his most highly regarded novels, Childhood's End, falls into the second category. Throughout the narrative, Clarke describes an alien life force that creates a utopia on Earth, only to destroy the planet before abducting all of the world's children. The novel treats the potentially negative consequences of human contact with aliens, while additionally examining transcendental philosophy and the nature of utopias. Clarke's speculative fiction encompasses a broad scope of thematic subtexts, including British colonialism in Childhood's End, environmentalism in Dolphin Island (1963), and the threat of runaway technology in The Light of Other Days (2000). The interaction between science and religion is another of Clarke's most common recurring motifs and can been seen in The Nine Billion Names of God (1967), Rendezvous with Rama, and the short story "The Star" (1955). In "The Star," a space traveler discovers the remains of a great civilization destroyed by the same star that guided the Magi—or Three Wise Men—to the newborn Jesus in Biblical history. The miracle of Jesus and his revelation to the world is juxtaposed against that of an apocalypse for another civilization, creating frightening hypotheticals about the nature of God.

Possibly the author's most famous work, 2001 is based upon Clarke's earlier short story "The Sentinel," in which aliens place giant black monoliths on the Earth and moon to aid humans in their further evolution as a species. While traveling through space to investigate the forces responsible for creating the monoliths, HAL 9000—a super-computer powered by a sentient artificial intelligence—attempts to take control of its spacecraft in order to sabotage the mission, leaving the sole surviving astronaut, Dave Bowman, to stop HAL's machinations. The text focuses on the relationship between man and technology, illuminating the dangers of total human dependence upon machines as well as the tenuous uncertainty of human life in the universe. Clarke's later work includes the novels Rendezvous with Rama and The Fountains of Paradise (1979). The former centers upon the human investigation of an alien spacecraft and the resulting impact of extraterrestrial life on mankind. In The Fountains of Paradise, Clarke depicts a God-like man who combines his near-omniscient intelligence with modern technological developments. In the subsequent novels of the "Odyssey" series, Clarke advances the story of the monoliths through several generations of astronauts, examining their difficulties in comprehending the scope of the galaxy that they have spent their lives exploring. In the last novel of the "Odyssey" series, 3001: The Final Odyssey, Clarke introduces the concept that the aliens who created the monoliths in 2001 were not acting for the benevolent good of humanity, but rather were working toward the sinister aim of controlling the evolution of mankind.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Clarke has been recognized as one of the three deans of twentieth-century science fiction, along with his fellow masters Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, and his writing has attracted favorable comparisons to such nineteenth-century science fiction legends as H. G. Wells. Though critics have been generally less enthusiastic about the work Clarke has published since the 1970s, he is still widely regarded as among the most influential science fiction writers of all time—one who helped set the parameters of the science fiction genre and who consistently introduced new concepts and ideas in his work. Reviewers have noted his strong interest in technological advancements and his accurate depictions of new developments in space exploration. In addition, many have argued that Clarke depicts an unusually varied and complex portrayal of alien life throughout his fiction. Such supporters have been quick to applaud Clarke for rejecting the science fiction stereotype of threatening alien life forms that are vastly different from humans and bent on destruction and, instead, choosing to illuminate the nature of humanity through a juxtaposition of benevolent human and alien life. Although most science fiction scholars have almost universally criticized the subsequent "Odyssey" novels published after 2001, several have asserted that, while the books fail to measure up to Clarke's earlier works, even the author's later fiction still surpasses the efforts of many contemporary science fiction authors. Speaking of Clarke's unique ability to present ambitious philosophical and technological speculation throughout his reader-friendly texts, Donald L. Lawler has stated that, "no reader of Clarke will want to ignore the outstanding success with which the author manages his special effects and the skill with which he again brings together scientific symbols and mythic patterns to give expression to his vision of both a possible and hopeful future."

PRINCIPAL WORKS

Science Fiction

Prelude to Space (novel) 1951; also published as Master of Space, 1961, and The Space Dreamers, 1969
The Sands of Mars (novel) 1951
Islands in the Sky (novel) 1952
Against the Fall of Night (novel) 1953; revised as The City and the Stars, 1956
Childhood's End (novel) 1953
Expedition to Earth (short stories) 1953
Earthlight (novel) 1955
Reach for Tomorrow (short stories) 1956
The Deep Range (novel) 1957
Tales from the White Hart (novel) 1957
The Other Side of the Sky (short stories) 1958
*Across the Sea of Stars (novels) 1959
A Fall of Moondust (novel) 1961
†From the Oceans, from the Stars (novels) 1962
Tales of Ten Worlds (short stories) 1962
Dolphin Island: A Story of the People of the Sea (novel) 1963
Glide Path (novel) 1963
‡An Arthur C. Clarke Omnibus (novels) 1965
§Prelude to Mars (novels) 1965
The Nine Billion Names of God: The Best Short Stories of Arthur C Clarke (short stories) 1967
The Lion of Comarre and Against the Fall of Night (novel) 1968
‖A Second Arthur C. Clarke Omnibus   (novels) 1968
2001: A Space Odyssey (novel) 1968
2001: A Space Odyssey [with Stanley Kubrick] (screenplay) 1968
The Lost Worlds of 2001 (novel) 1972
Of Time and Stars: The Worlds of Arthur C. Clarke (short stories) 1972
The Wind from the Sun: Stories of the Space Age (short stories) 1972
The Best of Arthur C Clarke. 2 vols. [edited by Angus Wells] (novels and short stories) 1973
Rendezvous with Rama (novel) 1973
Imperial Earth: A Fantasy of Love and Discord (novel) 1975
The Fountains of Paradise (novel) 1979
2010: Odyssey Two (novel) 1982

The Sentinel: Masterworks of Science Fiction and Fantasy (short stories) 1983
The Songs of Distant Earth (novel) 1986
2061: Odyssey Three (novel) 1987
Cradle [with Gentry Lee] (novel) 1988
A Meeting with Medusa [bound with Green Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson] (novella) 1988
Rama II [with Gentry Lee] (novel) 1989
Tales from the Planet Earth [illustrations by Michael Whelan] (novel) 1989
Beyond the Fall of Night [with Gregory Benford] (novel) 1990
The Ghost from the Grand Banks (novel) 1990
The Garden of Rama [with Gentry Lee] (novel) 1991
The Hammer of God (novel) 1993
Rama Revealed [with Gentry Lee] (novel) 1994
Richter 10 [with Mike McQuay] (novel) 1996
3001: The Final Odyssey (novel) 1997
The Trigger [with Michael Kube-McDowell] (novel) 1999
The Light of Other Days [with Stephen Baxter] (novel) 2000
The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (short stories) 2001
Time's Eye: Book One of a Time Odyssey [with Stephen Baxter] (novel) 2004
Sunstorm: Book Two of a Time Odyssey [with Stephen Baxter] (novel) 2005

Nonfiction

Interplanetary Flight: An Introduction to Astronautics (nonfiction) 1950
The Exploration of Space (nonfiction) 1951
The Young Traveller in Space (nonfiction) 1953; re-published as Going into Space, 1954; revised by Robert Silverberg as Into Space: A Young Person's Guide to Space, 1971
The Exploration of the Moon [illustrations by R. A. Smith] (nonfiction) 1954
The Coast of Coral [with Mike Wilson] (nonfiction) 1956
The Making of a Moon: The Story of the Earth Satellite Program (nonfiction) 1957
The Reefs of Taprobane: Underwater Adventures around Ceylon [with Mike Wilson] (nonfiction) 1957
Boy beneath the Sea [with Mike Wilson] (nonfiction) 1958
Voice across the Sea (nonfiction) 1958
The Challenge of the Spaceship: Previews of Tomorrow's World (nonfiction) 1959
The Challenge of the Sea (nonfiction) 1960
The First Five Fathoms: A Guide to Underwater Adventure [with Mike Wilson] (nonfiction) 1960
Indian Ocean Adventure [with Mike Wilson] (nonfic-tion) 1961
Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible (nonfiction) 1962
Man and Space [with the editors of Life magazine] (nonfiction) 1964
The Treasure of the Great Reef [with Mike Wilson] (nonfiction) 1964
Voices from the Sky: Previews of the Coming Space Age (nonfiction) 1965
Time Probe: The Science in Science Fiction [editor] (nonfiction) 1966
The Promise of Space (nonfiction) 1968
Beyond Jupiter: The Worlds of Tomorrow [with Chesley Bonestell] (nonfiction) 1972
Report on Planet Three and Other Speculations (non-fiction) 1972
The View from Serendip: Speculations on Space, Science, and the Sea, Together with Fragments of an Equatorial Autobiography (essays and autobiography) 1977
Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World [with Simon Welfare and John Fairley] (nonfiction) 1980
Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers [with Simon Welfare and John Fairley] (nonfiction) 1984
Ascent to Orbit: A Scientific Autobiography—The Technical Writings of Arthur C. Clarke (essays and autobiography) 1984
1984, Spring: A Choice of Futures (nonfiction) 1984
The Odyssey File [with Peter Hyams] (nonfiction) 1985
Arthur C. Clarke's July 20, 2019: Life in the Twenty-First Century (nonfiction) 1986
Arthur C. Clarke's Chronicles of the Strange and Mysterious [with Simon Welfare and John Fairley] (nonfiction) 1987
Astounding Days: A Science Fictional Autobiography (essays and autobiography) 1989
How the World Was One: Beyond the Global Village (nonfiction) 1992
By Space Possessed (nonfiction) 1993
The Snows of Olympus: A Garden on Mars (nonfiction) 1994
Arthur C. Clarke and Lord Dunsany: A Correspondence (correspondence) 1998
Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!: Collected Essays, 1934–1998 [edited by Ian T. Macauley] (essays and criticism) 1999

*Includes Childhood's End and Earthlight

†Includes The Deep Range and The City and the Stars.

‡Includes Childhood's End, Prelude to Space, and Expedition to Earth.

§Includes Prelude to Space and The Sands of Mars

‖Includes A Fall of Moondust, Earthlight, and The Sands of Mars.

GENERAL COMMENTARY

Thomas D. Clareson (essay date 1976)

SOURCE: Clareson, Thomas D. "The Cosmic Loneliness of Arthur C. Clarke." In Voices for the Future: Essays on Major Science Fiction Writers, edited by Thomas D. Clare-son, pp. 216-38. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1976.

[In the following essay, Clareson offers a critical introduction to Clarke's body of work, noting the author's early nonfiction advocacy of space travel and his thematic preoccupation with the philosophical ramifications of man's first contact with extraterrestrial life.]

Since the publication of Interplanetary Flight: An Introduction to Astronautics (1950) and The Exploration of Space (1951)—the latter a Book of the Month Club selection in the summer of 1952—Arthur C. Clarke has undoubtedly become the most widely known spokesman for those advocating space travel. Indeed, he has been called "one of the truly prophetic figures of the space age."¹ Yet despite such early awards as the 1961 Kalinga Prize in recognition of his success in popularizing space flight, the incident best measuring the impact of his dream of man's journeys to the Moon, the planets, and—ultimately—the stars did not occur until 1971. Then, during the Apollo 15 missions, astronauts David Scott and James Irwin named a crater near Hadley Rille for Earthlight, Clarke's early novel (1951, 1955)² in which he used a twenty-first-century lunar colony as setting and suggested that the Moon will become the hub of the habitable solar system because of its mineral wealth.

Acknowledging that "the explosive development of astronautics" during the 1960's had made some of his books "very out of date," Clarke declared that The Promise of Space (1968) was "an entirely new book" which replaced many of the earliest ones and should remain "largely valid through the 1970's"; similarly, Report on Planet Three and Other Speculations (1972) contained his "later thoughts on a number of subjects."³ As a result his nonfiction has a special value for the student of his fiction because in it one can trace the persistence and evolution of his themes as he continually explores and reworks ideas and situations which inform his short stories and novels. As in The Challenge of Space (1959),⁴ one may learn that he has used "much of the material" in three essays "to provide the background" of three early novels, Earthlight, The Sands of Mars (1951, 1952), and Islands in the Sky (1952).⁵ In one of those articles, "Vacation in Vacuum," one discovers the "Sky Hotel," which develops into the resort hotel on Titan in "Saturn Rising" (F&SF, March 1961) and, finally, into the hotel satellite of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Again, much later, Clarke pointed out that in the essay "The Star of the Magi" (1954) readers of his fiction would "recognize … the origins" of his prizewinning story, "The Star" (Infinity, November 1955).⁶

Although it is everywhere apparent that his main concern involves man's encounter with alien intelligence, at the heart of his vision—most obvious throughout his nonfiction and early novels—remains the certainty that the exploration of space and the colonization of the planets of innumerable suns will bring a new Renaissance freeing mankind from the shortsighted prejudices and limitations of earthbound, modern civilization. Repeatedly he invokes images fusing his voyagers "Across the Sea of Stars" with those explorers who opened up the Earth, as he does in Prelude to Space (1951), which celebrates preparations for the voyage of the Prometheus to the Moon and climaxes with the departure of that first ship. In an epilogue, some years after the establishment of a lunar colony, the narrator muses:

… Once more the proud ships were sailing for unknown lands, bearing the seeds of new civilizations which in the ages to come would surpass the old. The rush to the new worlds would destroy the suffocating restraints which had poisoned almost half the [twentieth] century. The barriers had been broken, and men could turn their energies outward to the stars instead of striving among themselves.

Out of the fears and miseries of the Second Dark Age, drawing free—oh, might it be forever!—from the shadows of Belsen and Hiroshima, the world was moving toward its most splendid sunrise. After five hundred years, the Renaissance had come again. The dawn that would burst above the Apennines at the end of the long lunar night would be no more brilliant than the age that had now been born.⁷

Or again, in The Challenge of Space, in a different but frequent mood:

… For a man 'home' is the place of his birth and childhood—whether that be Siberian steppe, coral island, Alpine valley, Brooklyn tenement, Martian desert, lunar crater, or mile-long interstellar ark. But for Man, home can never be a single country, a single world, a single Solar System, a single star cluster. While the race endures in recognizably human form, it can have no abiding place short of the Universe itself.

This divine discontent is part of our destiny. It is one more, and perhaps the greatest, of the gifts we have inherited from the sea that rolls so restlessly around the world.

It will be driving our descendants on toward a myriad unimaginable goals when the sea is stilled forever, and Earth itself a fading legend lost among the stars.⁸

Although Clarke spreads the human drama across future millennia, he often strikes a contrapuntal note by warning that "Everyone recognizes that our present racial, political, and international troubles are symptoms of a sickness which must be cured before we can survive on our own planet—but the stakes may be higher than that…. The impartial agents of our destiny stand on their launching pads, awaiting our commands. They can take us to that greater Renaissance whose signs and portents we can already see, or they can make us one with the dinosaurs…. If our wisdom fails to match our science, we will have no second chance."⁹ Out of the conflict revealed by these admonitions came one of his finest short stories, "If I Forget Thee, O Earth" (1951), in which a son of the lunar colony witnesses for the first time the rising of an Earth poisoned for centuries to come by a nuclear holocaust.

And when Clarke wonders whether or not the Solar System will, indeed, "be large enough for so quarrelsome an animal as Homo sapiens,"¹⁰ one conjures up the second of his stories to be published in America, "Rescue Party" (Astounding, May 1946), in which alien representatives of a galaxy-wide Federation come to save mankind just before the Sun goes into nova. Finding an empty Earth, they learn that man has built a fleet of ships to save himself. The captain muses about such "very determined people" and jests that one must be polite to them because they are outnumbered only "about a thousand million to one": "Twenty years afterward, the remark didn't seem funny." Both narratives bear one of the distinguishing marks of Clarke's story-telling. Not unlike O. Henry, he likes a quick climax—often a single punchline—which may surprise but always opens new perspectives.

Any misgivings that Clarke may have, rise from his doubts concerning the uses made of the new technologies. As early as 1946 he wrote:

We must not, however, commit the only too common mistake of equating mere physical expansion, or even increasing scientific knowledge, with 'progress'—however that may be defined. Only little minds are impressed by sheer size and number. There would be no virtue in possessing the Universe if it brought neither wisdom nor happiness. Yet possess it we must, at least in spirit, if we are ever to answer the questions that men have asked in vain since history began.¹¹

Somewhat later he approached this basic theme more affirmatively when he asserted that "mere extension of the life span, and even improved health and efficiency, are not important in themselves…. What is really significant is richness and diversity of experience, and the use to which that is put by men and the societies they constitute."¹² Still in the 1950's, while speculating about man's encounter with alien intelligence, he used that central concern to say something of man himself:

… Most disconcerting of all would be the discovery that Man alone is a myth-making animal, forever impelled to fill the gaps in his knowledge by fantasies. (Yet if this be the price we have had to pay for the whole realm of art, which is always an attempt to create the nonexistent, we need not be ashamed. We will be better off than beings who possess all knowledge, but know nothing of poetry and music.)¹³

This emphasis upon both man's humanity and the need for it to shape the workings of society leads to Clarke's judgment of H. G. Wells, a judgment which seems a valid appraisal of Clarke himself:

… Wells saw as clearly as anyone into the secret places of the heart, but he also saw the universe, with all its infinite promise and peril. He believed—though not blindly—that men were capable of improvement and might one day build sane and peaceful societies on all the worlds that lay within their reach.¹⁴

When he adds that "we need this faith now, as never before in the history of our species," he has completed the context which gives importance to that "greater Renaissance" brought about by the advent of space flight. In 1951 Clarke captured the significance of that awakening when he concluded The Exploration of Space with the imagined verdict that "an historian of the year 3,000" might pass on the twentieth century:

It was, without question, the most momentous hundred years in the history of Mankind…. To us a thousand years later, the whole story of Mankind before the twentieth century seems like a prelude to some great drama, played on the narrow strip of stage before the curtain has risen and revealed the scenery…. Man realised at last that the Earth was only one of many worlds; the Sun only one among many stars. The coming of the rocket brought to an end a million years of isolation. With the landing of the first spaceship on Mars and Venus, the childhood of our race was over and history as we know it began….¹⁵

"… the childhood of our race was over …": there is a delightful irony in that line because of the widespread popularity of Childhood's End (1953), Clarke's only work—fiction or nonfiction—in which "The stars are not for Man."¹⁶ Billed as "a towering novel about the next step in the evolution of man," it belongs, most simply, to that group of stories in which vastly superior aliens intrude into the affairs of men—a plot having perhaps its widest vogue during the decade or so after World War II. In this instance the Overlords, who possess the form of Satan, terminate the Soviet-American race for the Moon, end the threat of nuclear holocaust, and in fifty years bring about a seeming utopia. (At their appearance one hears briefly what has become for Clarke an ever more important theme: "… the stars—the aloof, indifferent stars—had come to him…. The human race was no longer alone.") Creating an 'Earthly Paradise,' is not, however, the final purpose of the Overlords; they were sent, their leader explains, to act as midwives while the human race evolved psychically preparatory to uniting itself with the cosmic Overmind. The most dangerous threat to this development, he continues, lay in the scientific investigation of "paranormal phenomena." Left to itself, such study might have unleashed forces capable of spreading "havoc to the stars." The Overlords are racially incapable of taking this evolutionary step and do not comprehend the forces at work; yet while the Over-mind triggers and guides the change, they must act as guardians, protecting man from himself, until the last generation of children is ready for the transformation.

The novel ends as a solitary adult watches the children, now joined into a single intelligence, undergo a metamorphosis which not only releases them from their human form but dissolves the Earth itself into the energy necessary to complete the change. All of this in the presence of what seems to be "a great cloud … a hazy network of lines and bands that keep changing their positions … a great burning column, like a tree of fire … a great auroral storm … the great misty network …"¹⁷ Like other galactic races which have completed their probation, mankind has become a part of the Overmind. Although David Samuelson questions the artistic effectiveness of much of Childhood's End, he notes that "we feel the tug of the irrational, in familiar terms. The Overmind clearly parallels the Oversoul, the Great Spirit, and various formulations of God, while the children's metamorphosis neatly ties in with mystical beliefs in Nirvana, 'cosmic consciousness,' and 'becoming as little children to enter the Kingdom of God.'"¹⁸ One might add that its resolution recalls—but does not duplicate—stories by the followers of Madame Blavatsky and John Fiske in the late nineteenth century which sought reconciliation between traditional beliefs and new scientific data, thereby often insisting that the next step in evolution must involve some higher potential of the human spirit. The essentially traditional mysticism of that resolution, as well as the emphasis upon the children as "successors" to mankind with whom their parents would "never even be able to communicate," may well account for much of the appeal of the novel, particularly in the classroom. A typical academic reading, that of L. David Allen, concludes that "basically, Childhood's End is a religious vision of the way that mankind might develop and the desirability of that direction."¹⁹

Apparently many individuals have felt that such a transformation—"apotheosis"²⁰—more than compensates for the loss of the stars. Clarke did not. He prefaced the original, paperback edition with the warning that "The opinions expressed in this book are not those of the author," and in a recent letter explained that he had inserted the "disclaimer in CE [Childhood's End] so people wouldn't think I'd recanted the views expressed in The Exploration of Space, etc!"²¹ In view of his continuing attack upon orthodox religion—it surfaces frequently in Childhood's End itself—such a disavowal suggests a deep conflict in Clarke which may even have affected the artistry of the novel, leading, for example, to Samuel-son's inference that "not fully in control of his materials, Clarke has attempted more than he can fulfill."²² In contrast, Allen believes that Clarke brought to the "sweeping vision" of the novel "a sense of detailed reality … more concrete, detailed, and complex" than 2001: A Space Odyssey. ²³ Most importantly, the disavowal emphasizes the uniqueness of Childhood's End in the canon of Clarke's work. Its final sequence contradicts all else that he has said about the future of humanity.

"Earth and the Overlords," the first of the three parts of Childhood's End, was originally published as a magazine novelette, "Guardian Angel" (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, April 1950); it alone appeared separately. The basic action of the two ver-sions remains the same, although in a climax typical of so many of Clarke's stories, the novelette ends upon the suggestion that man's "Guardian Angel" is, indeed, the Devil. Not yet satisfied, Clarke closed the narrative with fragments of an earlier dialogue telling something of Karellen and thereby opened an otherwise closed incident:

"… and he put up a terrific fight before they made him take this job. He pretends to hate it, but he's really enjoying himself."

"… immortal, isn't he?"

"Yes, after a fashion, though there's something thousands of years ahead of him which he seems to fear—I can't imagine what it is."

Armageddon?²⁴

Clarke ignored that ending in the subsequent development of Childhood's End. Thus in the novelette it simply provided an amusing—startling?—twist on another story of the first contact between humanity and aliens. Once again, as so often occurs in science fiction, an idea rather than the quality of human experience, had fascinated the author.

Variations in language and detail show Clarke's eye for revision, but the most significant difference between the versions of the story occurs because of the omission of a single speech originally in the novelette. In sketching the long-term plans of the Overlords, Karellen remarks:

"Then there will be another pause, only a short one this time, for the world will be growing impatient. Men will wish to go out to the stars, to see the other worlds of the Universe and to join us in our work. For it is only beginning—not a thousandth of the suns in the Galaxy have ever been visited by the races of which we know. One day, Rikki, your descendants in their own ships will be bringing civilization to the worlds, that are ripe to receive it—just as we are doing now….

"It is a great vision," he said softly. "Do you bring it to all your worlds?"

"Yes," said Karellen, "all that can understand."

                                          (p. 128)

Here, then, is the basic dream: man will one day become an active participant in the galactic community. Yet nothing of this passage remains in the finished novel. For whatever reasons, sometime between 1950 and 1953, even while he was popularizing space flight and advocating the journey to the stars in his other writing, both fiction and nonfiction, Clarke set aside that dream while completing Childhood's End in a fashion that could not be predicted from the text of "Guardian Angel."

In light of his immediate disclaimer, his production of one of the generally recognized "classics" of modern science fiction speaks well for his ability to be convincing despite any personal disbelief in what he portrays. (Its reception also says something about his audience. While the majority continue to see it as a religious vision, surely one may read that final transformation as an escape from, a denial of the human condition. Nor should one forget that the metamorphosis solves a basic problem which Clarke raised in a number of his early works. Not only do the Overlords bring about utopia, they also close off the promise of space except for a few flights to the Moon to establish a lunar observatory. For Clarke, when the abolition of armed forces increases "the world's effective wealth," when standard of living rises to a point where the necessities are provided free as a public service, when neither the arts nor science contributes anything fresh or expands man's knowledge, and when the earth becomes a vast playground as humanity attempts to escape the boredom of utopia, only a single question remains: "Where do we go from here?" Not coincidentally the "Earthly Paradise" of Childhood's End calls to mind those decadent societies of the far future against which his young protagonists rebel in works like Against the Fall of Night (1948, 1953) and The Lion of Comarre (1949, 1968). Indeed, Jan Rodricks' stowing away aboard a flight to the home planet of the Overlords echoes that rebellion. With the challenge of interstellar space eliminated by the Overlords, Clarke provides in the metamorphosis of the children an alternate answer—one with which he apparently was never in sympathy intellectually. Thus its uniqueness.)

Other than Childhood's End, the longer narratives among his early works divide themselves into two groups, the first strongly didactic, reflecting Clarke's desire to sell astronautics to the public. Prelude to Space, written within three weeks during the summer of 1947, celebrates preparations for the voyage of the Prometheus to the Moon in 1978 and, as noted, climaxes with the departure of that ship. In the "Epilogue" Dirk Alexson, the historian who must produce an enduring record of that flight, reflects upon the successful colonization of the Moon and the coming of a new Renaissance. Wisely the shifting narrative focus stays primarily with Alexson, thereby making more acceptable the introduction of an abundance of technical detail as he learns about the project. This includes far more than the mechanics of the technology, however, for he readily understands the importance of the program to the future. He discerns, for example, that the men who are "not ashamed of wanting to play with spaceships" are "visionaries, poets if you like, who also happen to be scientists"; in the course of their play, they "will change the world, and perhaps the Universe." They are the Space Dreamers.²⁵

Another character summons up what has become a familiar image in Clarke's rebuttal to those who would spurn the venture into space because, properly run, there is no better world than Earth: "The dream of the Lotus Eaters … is a pleasant fantasy for the individual—but it would be death for the race." (p. 89). Finally, on the eve of the flight as the Director-General of the project muses over a book of poetry, one senses that the fictional mask has dropped and that Clarke speaks for himself as much as any imagined character. The passage ends on an elegiac tone out of keeping with the optimism of the novel but anticipatory of a chord which has sustained Clarke's finest fiction:

The eternal night would come, and too soon for Man's liking. But at least before they guttered and died, he would have known the stars; before it faded like a dream, the Universe would have yielded up its secrets to his mind. Or if not to his, then to the minds that would come after and would finish what he had now begun.

                                (p. 151)

Prelude to Space has little plot action because there are too many things to describe and talk about, including overviews imagining the ship's departure from the atmosphere and summarizing the diverse, essentially uninformed public attitudes toward space flight. It is on the eve of the launching, through the Director-General that Clarke insists, "We will take no hunters into space." The principal incident involves the failure of a religious fanatic to sabotage the Prometheus. In contrast, Earthlight (1951, 1955) introduces a spy from Earth into the Moon colony of the twenty-second century on the eve of an interplanetary war between Earth and the Triplanetary Federation. (That name alone underscores his intimacy with the older magazine science fiction.) Earth's ex-colonies on Mars, Venus, Mercury, and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn comprise the Federation; the issue concerns raw materials, for only Earth has access to the heavy elements essential to the technologies of all the worlds. Clarke has explained that Earthlight had its beginning as early as 1941 when he wondered whether or not he could outdo "the splendid battle sequence in E. E. Smith's classic space opera Skylark Three [1930]."²⁶ So much attention is given to descriptions of the Moon colony and the lunar surface and to an extended account of a battle between spaceships and a lunar fortress that the spy does not reveal who had been leaking information to the Federation until twenty years afterward.

The battle is not an end in itself because the fortress masks a mining operation which, for the first time, obtains heavy elements from the deep interior of the Moon; thus, as noted, the Moon becomes the hub of the solar system, her "inexhaustible wealth" supporting all of the inhabitable planets. Again idea dominates. One incident, the sinking of a tractor beneath surface dust—related to the main story line only in that it allows characters with whom the reader is familiar to observe the battle—served as the genesis of A Fall of Moondust (1961). All of this is played out against the backdrop of Nova Draconis, the first supernova in this Galaxy since the Renaissance. Its appearance permits reflections upon the fragility of life, but unfortunately it does not attain a unifying symbolic value. Its presence, however, does emphasize how long the phenomenon has teased Clarke's imagination.

The Sands of Mars (1952) makes use of familiar patterns. Its protagonist, a famous science fiction writer, has been invited to be the sole passenger aboard the new spaceliner Ares so that he can write a book about its initial voyage. One journeys with him from a space station to Port Lowell, the principal domed city of the Martian colony. When he decides to throw in with the Martian pioneers rather than to return to Earth, his task becomes that of selling the colony to an Earth already weary of supporting it. The novel gains a unity because the point of view remains almost entirely with the protagonist, but apparently in an attempt to make the characters more complex, Clarke has added to the plot the contrived romance between the protagonist's protégé (actually his son by a young woman he loved at the university) and the daughter of the "Chief Executive" of the colony. More appropriate adventures occur: discovering a project so secret that most of the colonists know nothing of it; crashing into a geological fault in an unexplored area after a sandstorm of hurricane force; finding an unknown species of animal life which brings to mind Tweel of Stanley Weinbaum's "A Martian Odyssey." Project Daw, as it is called, detonates Phobos, the Martian moon, transforming it into a miniature sun. Not only does it bring heat to the barren world, but its light will promote the growth of a recently discovered plant capable of releasing the oxygen from those metallic oxides which form the Martian sands. In short, Mars has been reborn.

However readable these novels are, beyond the circle of science fiction aficionados they have their chief importance, as Clarke suggested of Prelude to Space, as a means of spreading the "Zeitgeist of Astronautics."²⁷ They are as much propaganda pieces as is The Exploration of Space. Yet they may also say something of the essential nature of science fiction. Even in Prelude to Space, the protagonists leave familiar settings to venture into unknown worlds, whether extraterrestrial or not. As in Earth-light and The Sands of Mars especially, much attention may be given to their technologies. (One recalls Clarke's frequently cited remark that a sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.) However, the true sense of wonder spoken of by him and many others lies in the exploration of those exotic, often hostile worlds. The protagonists may return or not—often they have come home; often they have created new homes. In Clarke intellectual curiosity may replace such reliable devices as those devastating catastrophes so popular with a writer like John Wyndham, but the result is the same. The issue is man's ability to survive in and comprehend those far lands, whether they are beyond Eden or beyond Jupiter. This mixture of familiarity and otherness, reality and fantasy, has led David Young to refer to science fiction as "our most viable version of the pastoral."²⁸

The degree to which he is correct may be seen even more clearly in a second group of Clarke's early narratives. In an introduction to The Lion of Comarre and Against the Fall of Night (1968), while acknowledging the emotional impact of Olaf Staple-don's Last and First Men (1930), and John W. Campbell's "Twilight" (1934), upon him as an individual and subsequently upon his early fiction, he wrote:

… And, undoubtedly, much of the emotional basis came from my transplantation from the country (Somerset) to the city (London), when I joined the British Civil Service in 1936. The conflict between a pastoral and an urban way of life has haunted me ever since.

He went on to say of the two stories:

Though they are set eons apart in time, they have much in common. Both involve a search, or quest, for unknown and mysterious goals. In each case the real objectives are wonder and magic, rather than any material gain. And in each case the hero is a young man dissatisfied with his environment.²⁹

One discerns an indebtedness to Stapledon, but Against the Fall of Night (1948) and The Lion of Comarre (1949) are the earliest of those works in which Clarke responds to Campbell's melancholy vision of the twilight of humanity seven million years in the future. Having been served and cared for too long by perfect machines which will operate flawlessly until the end of time, the childlike remnant of mankind awaits extinction because it has forgotten the knowledge behind those machines and has lost the intellectual curiosity needed to learn again. Taken as a group, these works are restatements of Clarke's refusal to accept Campbell's pessimism.

Begun in 1937, the year after Clarke's move to London, and not completed until 1946—after five drafts—Against the Fall of Night has retained a devoted audience, although flawed by its brevity and a reliance upon unembellished conventions from magazine science fiction. Clarke's feeling for it led him to expand it as The City and the Stars (1956), the only instance in which he has completely revised a published story. Its point of departure echoes Campbell. The immortal populace of Diaspar, the only city remaining amid the deserts of Earth, lives contentedly amid wondrous machines which fulfill their every need and desire. The people have never viewed the world beyond the walls of the city and know of the desert—the nothingness—only by legend; indeed, they are afraid to venture out of Diaspar. Much of their fear stems from a supposed fact of history: half a billion years ago the Invaders drove man from the stars; since then he has confined himself to his dying planet. (Like Triplanetary Federation, the term Invaders links Clarke to the space opera of the 1930's.)

Only Alvin, the young protagonist, the only child born to the immortals in seven thousand years, possesses curiosity and a desire for knowledge. Refusing to accept the "gracious decadence" of Diaspar, he seeks and finds a way into the outer world, where he finds the "Land of Lys," a vast oasis of forest and grass-covered plains protected by mountains from the desert. When asked why he left the city, he explains that he was lonely. The tall, golden-haired inhabitants—very unlike the people of Diaspar—are both mortal and telepathic; they welcome him because during the four hundred million years since communication between the two cultures was ended by mutual consent, they have aided the handful of individuals who escaped from the closed city, seeking to "regenerate" mankind. His discovery precipitates a crisis, for he wishes Lys and Diaspar to cooperate, and they are unwilling to do so.

To suggest that Against the Fall of Night is an account of Alvin's search for self-identity is to read the novel as another exercise in psychological realism. It is instead an attempt to make a symbolic statement about the destiny of mankind. Alvin functions to destroy man's false concept of history—his fear of the Invaders and their supposed blockade of Earth—thereby liberating both cultures from their self-imposed confinement. As soon, however, as the escape from the prison of the city becomes a quest for meaning, the narrative surrenders to an assortment of conventions and devices from magazine science fiction. Too much happens too quickly. Whereas Alvin largely controls the action of the first half of the story, one feels that from this point onward he is manipulated by his discoveries. Nothing is fleshed out. To summarize briefly: he learns that from space, accompanied by marvelous robots, came a mystic who taught his followers to await the return of the "Great Ones." Since the robots survive, one helps Alvin discover the interstellar ship left near Diaspar and now buried beneath the sands. Seeking the "Great Ones," they fly to the central sun of the Galaxy, but find its planet devoid of life. Although there are ruins, Alvin, lonely and filled with despair, does not know where else to search for intelligence; he has observed the "stars scattered like dust across the heavens," but realizes "that what is left of Time is not enough to explore them all."₃₀ Only then does Clarke intrude a solution.

The "burst of power" of Alvin's ship summons the creature Vanamonde "across the light-years." He is "a pure mentality"—a mind free from physical limi-tations—whose creation by the "Empire" (the "Great Ones") consumed the efforts of all the races of the Galaxy for half a billion years. He sets straight the record of history. Man never battled with Invaders for control of the stars. Before he passed the orbit of Persephone, "the stars reached him"—with devastating effect, for everywhere he found "minds far greater than his own." In dismay he turned in upon himself, studying genetics and the mind. Only after he had mastered such things as telepathy and immortality did he return to space to take his place in the "Empire," whose supreme achievement was the creation of Vanamonde. Yet Vanamonde was a second effort; the first had been the so-called "Mad Mind," which, for whatever reasons, ravaged—destroyed—portions of the universe until brought under control and imprisoned in an artificial star. It will one day gain its freedom; thus, after the creation of Vanamonde, the Empire abandoned this Universe for another.

Here may well be a vision comparable to that of Stapledon's Last and First Men, but so sudden is the revelation, so vast the time span (how many billion years?) and cosmic sweep of the Empire, that all which has gone before in the novel dwindles in significance. Alvin, Diaspar, the Earth: "I have made no reference to the Earth itself, for its story is too small a thread to be traced in the great tapestry" (p. 207). Nevertheless, because of the cooperation of the two cultures and the coming of Vanamonde, a Renaissance is assured. "Man had rediscovered his world," reflects Alvin, "and he would make it beautiful while he remained upon it. And after that—" (p. 212). Clarke undoubtedly improved upon the artistry of the work when he revised it as The City and the Stars, but the theme remains the same.

Similarly, in The Lion of Comarre, the young protagonist, who wishes to be an engineer and dreams of flight to the stars, rebels against a world grown stagnant. Just as Alvin was the only child born to the immortals in seven thousand years, so Richard Peyton III is the genetic reincarnation of Rolf Thordarsen, the builder of legendary Comarre, associated with the Decadents. Weary of "this unending struggle for knowledge and the blind desire to bridge space to the stars," these men believed that the aim of life was pleasure and chose to build cities "where the machines will care for our every need as soon as the thought enters our minds….": "It was the ancient dream of the Lotos Eaters … the cloying promise of peace and utter contentment" (pp. 15, 61). Peyton finds the city in the Great Reserve of Africa, resists the attempt of the "Thought Selectors" to entrance him in a dream world while he is asleep, and encounters a master robot which has a will and consciousness of its own. From that meeting will come "The Third Renaissance," when man and machine will share the future as equals. Peripheral to the group, "The Road to the Sea" (1950) projects a future in which mankind has retained the use of a few wonderful machines, although forgetting the knowledge behind them. Man has forsaken the great cities and "returned to the hills and forest."³¹ Seeking to learn something of the new country into which his village has been required by law to move, as it must every three lifetimes, a young artist searches for the ancient city of Shastar. There he encounters descendants of those men who long ago had traveled to the stars; they have returned only in order to evacuate Earth—which faces destruction from a force reminiscent of the "Mad Mind" of Against the Fall of Night. Even a cursory glance indicates how closely these narratives are interrelated at all levels from imagery and incident to theme.

To emphasize the creative relationship of science and mankind, however bright a future it may portend, may well overlook those concerns which lead to Clarke's finest fiction. In The City and the Stars, while embellishing an early description of the mystic who came from the stars, Clarke accuses him of suffering from a disease that afflicted "only Homo sapiens among all the intelligent races of the Universe … religious mania." He then declares:

The rise of science, which with monotonous regularity refuted the cosmologies of the prophets and produced miracles which they could never match, eventually destroyed all these faiths. It did not destroy the awe, nor the reverence and humility, which all intelligent beings felt as they contemplated the stupendous Universe in which they found themselvess.³²

Unlike those nineteenth-century writers, like John Fiske, who protested the astronomical difficulties they encountered in maintaining their beliefs, Clarke, obviously, is not afraid of the distances between the stars. Nor does he need to impose some deductive system upon the nature of things because, for him, the interaction of life, intelligence, and the galactic universe itself is mystery enough. However else one interprets these early stories, they celebrate intelligence per se, and in so doing anticipate his essay, "Science and Spirituality," in Voices from the Sky (1965):

Of all these questions, the place of intelligence in this gigantic universe of a hundred thousand million suns is the most important, the one that most teases the mind. During the past decade, the idea that life was a very rare and peculiar phenomenon, perhaps existing only upon our planet, has been completely demolished; within ten years we may know.³³

Throughout Clarke's fiction there is no want of life or intelligence; they abound in a multitude of forms on a multitude of planets: "For what is life but organized energy?"³⁴ In Against the Fall of Night and The City and the Stars, while wandering the blighted universe, Vanamonde had found "on countless worlds … the wreckage that life leaves behind"; in Childhood's End, the first child to travel psychically goes beyond the range of the Overlords' ships and finally travels in another universe to a planet lighted by six colored suns—a planet that never repeats the same orbit: "And even here there was life."³⁵ But there is the other side of the coin, those stories like "Tran-science" (Startling Stories, July 1949) which are dominated by a note of sadness.

In "Transcience" —whose indebtedness to the mood of Campbell's "Twilight" Clarke has acknowl-edged—an omniscient narrator paints three scenes. A hominid encounters the ocean for the first time. While building castles in the sand, a small boy from a village watches the departure of the last great ocean liner, not yet realizing that "tomorrow would not always come, either for himself or for the world." In the far-distant future, another child is interrupted at play to be taken aboard a spaceship into exile from Earth, for "something black and monstrous eclipsed the stars and seemed to cast its shadow over all the world." During what time is left only the sea and the sand will remain: "For Man had come and gone."³⁶

Most often Clarke has maintained an omniscient narrator so that he can, as noted, switch the perspective quickly in order to gain some desired effect. Consistently, however, he has achieved his highest artistry in those stories unified by a first-person narrator recalling personal experience, as in "The Star" (1955). A Jesuit, the astrophysicist of an expedition returning to Earth from the so-called Phoenix Nebula, finds himself troubled by the report he must make of what was actually a supernova. The "burden of our knowledge" has caused his faith to falter. On the farthest planet of what was a solar system, the crew of his ship found a Vault prepared by a people who knew that they were doomed and were trapped because they had achieved only interplanetary flight, not starflight. "Perhaps," he writes, "if we had not been so far from home and so vulnerable to loneliness, we should not have been so deeply moved":

Many of us had seen the ruins of ancient civilizations on other worlds, but they had never affected us so profoundly. This tragedy was unique. It is one thing for a race to fail and die, as nations and cultures have done on Earth. But to be destroyed so completely in the full flower of its achievement, leaving no survivors—how could that be reconciled with the mercy of God?

… There can be no reasonable doubt: the ancient mystery is solved at last. Yet, oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?³⁷

Or again, "Before Eden" (1961), in which the first astronauts to land on Venus discover a responsive, though mindless, plant. After conducting appropriate tests, Graham Hutchins, "the happiest biologist in the solar system," reflects:

… This world around them was no longer the same; Venus was no longer dead—it had joined Earth and Mars.

For life called to life across the gulfs of space. Everything that grew or moved upon the face of any planet was a portent, a promise that Man was not alone in this universe of blazing suns and swirling nebulae. If as yet he had found no companions with whom he could speak, that was only to be expected, for the light-years and the ages still stretched before him, waiting to be explored. Meanwhile, he must guard and cherish the life he found, whether it be upon Earth or Mars or Venus.³⁸

Pressed by the inexorable deadline for their departure, Hutchins and his companion postpone a little longer—for a few months until they can return to Venus with a team of experts and with the eyes of the world upon them—this meeting which "Evolution had labored a billion years to bring about." The mindless plant absorbs their wastes collected into a plastic bag and thereby contaminates the planet so that Hutchins' pictures and specimens are the "only record that would ever exist of life's third attempt to gain a foothold in the solar system. Beneath the clouds of Venus, the story of creation was ended".

For Clarke, these stories give expression to the central drama of the universe. He might be speaking for himself when he says of the alien visiting prehistoric Earth in "Moon-Watcher" (1972): "Centuries of traveling through the empty wastes of the universe had given him an intense reverence for life in all its forms."³⁹ Yet as the very language of these stories indicates, this reverence is accompanied by an anxiety which reechoes through his finest fiction, perhaps reaching something of a climax in his essay, "When Aliens Come," in Report on Planet Three:

… perhaps the most important result of such contacts [radio signals] might be the simple proof that other intelligent races do exist. Even if our cosmic conversations never rise above the 'Me Tarzan—You Jane' level, we would no longer feel so alone in an apparently hostile universe.⁴⁰

Such a view surely echoes something of that horror felt especially during the decades at the turn of the century when science told man that he dwelt alone in an alien universe. That is why the apocalyptic moment of first contact is so important to Clarke; it dramatizes—resolves—what may be called his cosmic loneliness.

"The Sentinel" (1951) captures the melancholy of that loneliness. Perhaps more than any other single story it has proved seminal to the development of his artistry. That it provided the symbolic monolith which structures 2001: A Space Odyssey measures but does not determine its importance. Once again Clarke makes use of a first-person narrator, one who recalls a discovery which he made twenty years earlier. From the first he fuses vividly his memories of the lunar landscape and what it was like to live aboard a surface vehicle in Mare Crisium during the summer of 1996. Because he is reflecting upon past action, one soon realizes that what is important is the implication of such a discovery on a moon proved barren by twenty years' further research. He guesses that early in prehistory Earth was visited by "masters of a Universe so young that life as yet had come only to a handful of worlds. Theirs would have been a loneliness we cannot imagine, the loneliness of gods looking out across infinity and finding none to share their thoughts."⁴¹ And so they left a sentinel—a signaling device to let them know when man had reached the Moon.

In November 1950, Clarke first dramatized that "Encounter in the Dawn." ⁴² An alien astronaut gives various tools, including a flashlight of some kind, to a prehistoric man already possessing a flint-tipped spear. This may be called the astronauts' story. That their own worlds are being destroyed by a series of explosions—whether supernovae or atomic bombs, one cannot be finally certain—well illustrates how a number of ideas and images wove themselves through Clarke's imagination. As he is about to depart, the astronaut muses:

… In a hundred thousand of your years, the light of those funeral pyres will reach your world and set its people wondering. By then, perhaps, your race will be reaching for the stars…. One day, perhaps, your ships will go searching among the stars as we have done, and they may come upon the ruins of our worlds and wonder who we were. But they will never know that we met here by this river when your race was very young.⁴³

Despite the increasing number of references in his nonfiction to a possible meeting during some period of the Earth's past, he did not rework the plot until 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), where it becomes the first section of both the film and the novel. This version may be called Moon-Watcher's story, the story of the man-apes, particularly since the "super-teaching machine"⁴⁴—the monolith—is substituted for the physical presence of the astronauts. The emphasis upon the education—the awakening—of Moon-Watcher and his companions completely submerges the sense of cosmic loneliness. Thus, not until the four short tales—"First Encounter," "Moon-Watcher," "Gift from the Stars," and "Farewell to Earth" —first published in The Lost Worlds of 2001 (1972) did Clarke give the encounter its fullest development thematically.

Again the narrative focus is upon one of the astronauts, Clindar. A member of one of ten landing parties making a census of the Earth, he finds a small group of hominids. Possessing no tools and living "always on the edge of hunger," they have not yet been "trapped in any evolutionary cul-de-sac"; "they could do everything after a fashion." Whether because Clindar "looked straight into a hairy caricature of his own face" or because he saw one of the young males contemplating the moon in a manner suggesting "conscious thought and wonder," he decides to intervene in an attempt to tip the scales "in favor of intelligence." Left to themselves the near-apes would have little chance of survival, for "the universe was as indifferent to intelligence as it was to life." And so he gave them an "initial impetus" by teaching them to hunt and use clubs.

As his ship departs, he realizes that nothing may come of his efforts because many factors could destroy "the glimmering pre-dawn intelligence, before it was strong enough to protect itself against the blind forces of the Universe." Nevertheless, he and his companions install a signaling device on the moon to inform them if the descendants of Moon-Watcher reach their satellite. Then they will be worthy of a second visit. For "only a spacefaring culture could truly transcend its environment and join others in giving a purpose to creation": Clarke makes no more succinct statement of his central dream. Yet it is a dream hard-pressed by anxiety, "for if the stars and the Galaxies had the least concern for mind, or the least awareness of its presence, that was yet to be proved."⁴⁵

Without exception Clarke's recent major works—2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), "A Meeting with Medusa" (1971), and Rendezvous with Rama (1973)—have dealt with the concept of first contact, but none has significantly modified the philosophical stance presented in the encounter between Clindar and Moon-Watcher. 2001: A Space Odyssey suggests that those who left the Sentinel have now evolved into beings "free at last from the tyranny of matter," thereby bringing to mind Vanamonde.⁴⁶ Bowman journeys to the eighth moon of Saturn, Japetus, an artificial satellite which proves to be a kind of "Star Gate" through which he passes; he finally undergoes a metamorphosis changing him into a "Star-Child"—certainly an echo of the visions of Olaf Stapledon. In Rendezvous with Rama, Clarke pays explicit tribute to H. G. Wells's "The Star," adapting its basic plot to his own ends, for the new celestial body plunging through the solar system proves to be a giant spaceship. Most attention is given to its exploration, although there is opportunity for political confrontation in the General Assembly of the United Planets when the citizens of Mercury launch a missile at Rama because it invades their solar space and supposedly threatens to become another planet. Instead it draws energy directly from the sun and departs, leaving the protagonist indignant because "the purpose of the Ramans was still utterly unknown":

They had used the solar system as a refueling stop, a booster station—call it what you will; and then had spurned it completely on their way to more important business. They would probably never know that the human race existed. Such monumental indifference was worse than a deliberate insult.⁴⁷

Because the Ramans seem always to do things in threes, there is the final suggestion of further flights.

In contrast, "A Meeting with Medusa" attains the highest artistry of his recent works; it combines an innovative plot with an effective character study, and it gains unity by focusing solely upon Howard Falcon, though not told from the first person. He is a cyborg who flies a hot-air balloon through the upper atmosphere of Jupiter. And he discovers life in the form of a gargantuan creature like a jellyfish, a medusa. When it begins to handle his balloon, he flees. There is the final suggestion that he will act as an ambassador between humanity and the "real masters of space," the machines; the awareness of his destiny makes him take "a somber pride in his unique loneliness."⁴⁸ Certainly "A Meeting with Medusa" suggests that Clarke may have found a new perspective from which to consider the old concerns.

For Clarke, man has chosen the right path, employing his intelligence and technology to reach out toward the stars. "Though men and nations may set out on the road to space with thoughts of glory or of power," he wrote in 1965, "it matters not whether they achieve those ends. For on that quest, whatever they lose or gain, they will surely find their souls."⁴⁹ Somewhere amid the blazing suns and swirling nebulae, if only in the artifacts of a civilization long dead in the vastness of time, man will find that he has become part of a community of intelligence which alone gives meaning to the indifferent splendor of the Universe. Until then he must dream of the stars and, like Clarke, be haunted by a sense of cosmic loneliness until he finds the Sentinel.

Notes

1. Jeremy Bernstein, "Profiles: Out of the Ego Chamber," New Yorker, August 9, 1969, p. 40.

2. Arthur C. Clarke's Earthlight was first published in Thrilling Wonder Stories (August 1951), but not issued in book form until the Bal-lantine edition (1955).

3. Clarke, "Introduction," Report on Planet Three and Other Speculations (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. xi.

4. Clarke, "The Challenge of Space," The Challenge of Space: Previews of Tomorrow's World (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), p. 16.

5. Clarke, The Sands of Mars (New York: Gnome Press, 1952); Islands in the Sky (New York: New American Library).

6. Clarke, "The Star of the Magi," Report on Planet Three, p. 32. "The Star of the Magi" was first published in Holiday (December 1954), and then included in The Challenge of Space, pp. 77-86.

7. Clarke, "Epilogue," Prelude to Space (New York: Ballantine, 1976).

8. Clarke, "Across the Sea of Stars," The Challenge of Space, p. 130.

9. Clarke, "When the Aliens Come," Report on Planet Three, p. 107.

10. Clarke, "The Challenge of the Spaceship," The Challenge of Space, p. 8.

11. Ibid., p. 11.

12. Clarke, "Across the Sea of Stars," The Challenge of Space, p. 127.

13. Clarke, "Of Space and the Spirit," The Challenge of Space, p. 211.

14. Clarke, "H. G. Wells and Science Fiction," Voices from the Sky: Previews of the Coming Space Age (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).

15. Clarke, The Exploration of Space (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951), p. 195.

16. Clarke, Childhood's End (New York: Ballan-tine, 1976), (14).

17. Ibid., (24).

18. David N. Samuelson, "Clarke's Childhood's End: A Median Stage in Adolescence?" Science Fiction Studies, 1 (Spring 1973), 7. This essay, in a slightly revised version, appears as Chapter 8 in this book.

19. David Allen, "Childhood's End: Arthur C. Clarke (1953)," SF: An Introduction (Lincoln, Nebraska: Cliffs Notes, 1973), p. 55.

20. Ibid., p. 47 ff.

21. Unpublished letter from Arthur C. Clarke to Thomas D. Clareson, dated January 1, 1974.

22. Samuelson, 1:11. (See also Chapter 8 in this book.)

23. Allen, p. 47.

24. Clarke, "Guardian Angel," Famous Fantastic Mysteries, 11 (April 1950), 129.

25. Clarke, Prelude to Space (New York: Ballan-tine, 1976), (6).

26. Clarke, "Preface," Earthlight (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1955), p. ix.

27. Clarke, Prelude to Space, (9).

28. David Young, The Heart's Forest: A Study of Shakespeare's Pastoral Plays (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 199. My thanks to Professor Raymond G. McCall of the College of Wooster for pointing out this passage to me.

29. Clarke, "Introduction," The Lion of Comarre and Against the Fall of Night (New York: Har-court, Brace & World, Inc., 1968), pp. viii-ix.

30. Ibid., p. 189. The passage is absent from The City and the Stars.

31. Clarke, "The Road to the Sea," Tales of Ten Worlds (New York: Signet, 1973).

32. Clarke, The City and the Stars, (New York: Signet, 1973), (13). Yet Clarke later says of the Master, "He was a good man, and much of what he taught was true and wise. In the end, he believed his own miracles, but he knew that there was one witness who could refute them. The robot knew all his secrets: …" (17). On one of the worlds they visit, Alvin and his companions find an obelisk honoring the Master (20).

33. Clarke, "Science and Spirituality," Voices from the Sky.

34. Clarke, "Out of the Sun," The Other Side of the Sky (New York: Signet, 1973).

35. Clarke, Childhood's End, (18).

36. Clarke, "Transcience," The Other Side of the Sky.

37. Clarke, "The Star," The Other Side of the Sky, pp. 118-119.

38. Clarke, "Before Eden," Tales of Ten Worlds, p. 148.

39. Clarke, "Moon-Watcher," The Lost Worlds of 2001 (New York: Signet, 1972).

40. Clarke, "When Aliens Come," Report on Planet Three and Other Speculations (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

41. Clarke, "The Sentinel," Expedition to Earth (New York: Ballantine, 1975).

42. Clarke, "The Dawn of Man," The Lost Worlds of 2001. Clarke explains that he wrote "a short story about a meeting in the remote past between visitors from space and a primitive apeman." It was given the title "Expedition to Earth" when Ballantine published it in 1953. Clarke preferred the title "Encounter in the Dawn"; it was also entitled "Encounter at Dawn." Significantly, the alien astronaut has retained the name Clindar through all of the stories dealing with this encounter. Significantly, too, in that it suggests the importance of the theme, Clarke had already written "The Sentinel" in 1948. The Lost Worlds of 2001, p. 18.

43. Clarke, "Expedition to Earth," Expedition to Earth.

44. Clarke, "The Dawn of Man," The Lost Worlds of 2001, p. 51.

45. The quotations have been taken from the four stories in The Lost Worlds of 2001.

46. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (New York: Signet, 1972), (37).

47. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama (New York: Har-court Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1973), (46).

48. Clarke, "A Meeting with Medusa," The Wind from the Sun (New York: Signet, 1973).

49. Clarke, "Science and Spirituality," Voices from the Sky.

David N. Samuelson (essay date 1982)

SOURCE: Samuelson, David N. "Arthur C. Clarke." In Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the Major Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day, edited by E. F. Bleiler, pp. 313-20. New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1982.

[In the following essay, Samuelson assesses Clarke's broad canon of science fiction and speculative nonfiction, paying particular attention to his early short stories.]

One of the three best-known "hard" science fiction writers of the mid-twentieth century, Arthur Charles Clarke, was born on 16 December 1917 in Minehead, Somerset, England, in farming country. His early love of astronomy coincided with his introduction to science fiction and fantasy, in the pulp magazines of Hugo Gernsback and via the more literary tradition of H. G. Wells, Lord Dunsany, and especially the novelist-philosopher Olaf Stapledon.

In high school Clarke contributed science fictional sketches of his own to The Huish Magazine (1934–1936) before leaving for London to become a government auditor. Disliking his job, he felt more at home with other science fiction fans and members of the British Interplanetary Society (BIS), then in its infancy. To fanzines and BIS publications, Clarke contributed reviews, articles (some on science fiction), and stories before and during World War II. In technical journals he also published some papers resulting from his work as a Royal Air Force instructor in the new technology of radar, including his now famous 1945 suggestion for communications satellites in stationary orbits.

After the war Clarke attended King's College, London (1946–1948), to earn his Bachelor of Science degree in physics and mathematics. Active in the British Astronomical Association, he also served for three terms (1946–1947, 1950–1952) as chairman of the revived and growing BIS, and he seized every opportunity to propagandize for space travel, in the assumption that Britain would play a significant role in it. This phase of his career culminated in his first book, Interplanetary Flight (1950), and its successor, The Exploration of Space (1951), a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, which made him the foremost popularizer of space travel. Nine more books and many articles on space would follow.

Clarke's professional debut as a science fiction writer also took place right after the war, with nineteen stories (sometimes under pseudonyms) preceding his first book of fiction, the novel Prelude to Space (1951). Although several of his short stories and four early novels took place in science fiction's "consensus history" of man's expansion into space, overseen by the presence of Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr., Clarke also wrote stories of a more somber, even melancholy tone—far future tales in which man's science and technology seemed to lead to a dead end, or in which contact with alien intelligence cast doubt on naïve ideas of progress. Some of his early stories also were essentially jokes, of the "shaggy dog" variety, or "ghost stories" as Eric Rabkin calls them. This whimsical streak climaxed with the 1957 publication of Tales from the White Hart.

The jokes continued after the mid-1950's, as did the near future scenarios and the more mythic tales, but this period marked a break in Clarke's career. A marriage in 1953, to Marilyn Mayfield, did not last long (a divorce officially came about in 1964), but his fascination with Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and the sea did. Introduced to the undersea world by the young photographer Mike Wilson, with whom he would collaborate on six books and a film, Clarke also discovered the Indian Ocean "island paradise," which has been his home since 1956. After publication of another sixteen short stories and The Deep Range (1957), his science fiction production slackened, and the sea and the East began to play a somewhat larger role in his work, beyond the facile Odyssean parallel with space already evident.

Making the movie of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) with Stanley Kubrick probably earned Clarke his greatest fame and widest audience, but other honors have not been lacking. The science fiction community awarded him prizes for the short story "The Star" (1956); the novella "A Meeting with Medusa" (1971); and two novels Rendezvous with Rama (1973) and The Fountains of Paradise (1979). UNESCO's Kalinga Prize for "the popularization of science" in 1962 was the first of several honors resulting from his "invention" of Comsats, numerous lecture tours, and nonfiction works now surpassing twenty books. By the 1970's, academic critical interest in science fiction virtually guaranteed that Clarke would be the subject of numerous books and articles delving into his fiction, science writing, and those autobiographical snippets that can be drawn from his many prefaces and forewords and from a miscellaneous assemblage of nonfiction, The View from Serendip (1977).

Most studies of Clarke focus on his "mythic" stories and novels of alien contact and/or the far future, in which there appears an attempt to transcend the biological and technological limits of the human condition. But the Clarke canon consists almost equally of "scenarios" and "jokes," the latter mainly being restricted to shorter forms.

Algis Budrys once complained about Clarke's predilection for scary stories with surprise endings, which often failed either to scare or to surprise. Rabkin's description of these as "ghost stories" may be more apt, indicating that it is all in fun and connecting them to the more explicitly humorous tall tales. Certainly the scare-potential of ants ruling the world ("The Forgotten Enemy," 1948), of a traditional bogeyman on a distant planet ("A Walk in the Dark," 1950), or of a kitten in a spacesuit ("Who's There?" 1958) depends on reader naïvete.

Interspecies miscomprehension is a subject for humor in other Clarke tales, ranging from paranoid fantasies of possessed people ("The Parasite," 1953) and lemmings ("The Possessed," 1953) to a bare awareness of each other's existence between humans and beings below the Earth's surface ("The Fires Within," 1947). The failure to understand humans is dangerous to aliens only in Clarke's first two professional sales (1946), "Loophole" and "Rescue Party." In the better-known "Rescue Party" (written prior to "Loophole" ), a mixed-species alien rescue mission finds that the sun is about to go nova—an impossibility, according to contemporary astronomical theory—and Earth is deserted. Even contrasted with the aliens' numbers and technological sophistication, this future Earth is still notable, by our present standards, for its accelerated development, culminating in an Exodus fleet, which the aliens deem unprecedentedly large as well as technologically primitive, relying on mere rocket power. Adrift and in need of rescue themselves, after a swift departure from the Solar System, the aliens jest about the potential danger these newcomers may pose to the vast Federation, leading to the low-key punch line: "Twenty years afterward, the remark didn't seem funny."

Typical of Clarke's explicit jokes are Harry Purvis' tales of implausible inventions, from anti-gravity ("What Goes Up," 1956) and intimidated carnivorous plants ("The Reluctant Orchid," 1956) to aphrodisiac recordings ("Patent Pending," 1954) and insanity-producing music ("The Ultimate Melody," 1957) in Tales from the White Hart (1957), allegedly told to a pub full of science fiction aficionados. Not every reader's palate may be sensitized to this special form of humor, but Clarke's predilection for it has been evident from his schoolboy days to the present.

Clarke's scenarios for man's exploration and development of the Solar System are noteworthy for their transparent style and matter-of-fact handling of technical details fully familiar from his contemporaneous nonfiction writing. "Hide and Seek" (1949) demonstrates the flexibility, superior to an incomparably faster and heavily armed enemy cruiser, of a spy in a spacesuit, if he chooses as his terrain a satellite as small as Mars's Phobos. Other rescues of helpless astronauts are made possible by flimsy sunshades inside the orbit of Mercury ("Summertime on Icarus," 1960), by the weak gravity of the Moon ("Maelstrom II," 1965), and by a battery of abacuses when computers break down ("Into the Comet," 1960).

Two cycles, each consisting of six short-short stories, best illustrate Clarke's public-relations work. In the first cycle, "Venture to the Moon" (1956), the commander of the British spaceship Endeavour chronicles a joint expedition of the United States and Russia, while the second cycle, "The Other Side of the Sky" (1957), gives an insider's view of the building of space stations. Each story is a vignette illustrating a single point—such as the Moon's potential uses for advertising, archery, and vegetation; the value of canaries for detecting bad air; the favorable chances of surviving a brief exposure to vacuum; and the evanescent glimpse of what might be the hulk of an alien spaceship. Like his other contributions to the "consensus future," these human-interest stories have little or no plot complication.

The static situation of an astronaut abandoned on Mars is charged with memories and allusions to previous explorers, Captain Cook and Admiral Byrd, in "Transit of Earth" (1971). Equally static is the elegiac "'If I Forget Thee, O Earth …'" (1951), in which a ten-year-old boy gets his first trip outside the base on the "dark side" of the Moon to get his first glimpse of radioactive Earth and learn the lesson of exile. In "Death and the Senator" (1961) a dying opponent of American space stations refuses a lifesaving offer by the Russians' orbital hospital. Even the obvious potential for drama of a race to the Moon between sun-powered sailing ships is short-circuited by a solar flare in "Sunjammer" (1964), and in Clarke's best-selling novel, A Fall of Moondust (1961), the drama consists largely of doing one's best to survive until rescuers can devise and execute a plan to release the passengers of a sightseeing tour trapped in a pocket of lunar dust. The characters are stereotyped, but the narrative crackles with wit, and the reader's fun is partly in trying to solve the problems posed before the rescuers do.

Clarke's reluctance to tell a traditional action-adventure story in the pulp tradition may be credited to his literary allegiances and a desire to downplay the thoughtless romanticism evident in such tales of derring-do. Whatever the reason, his few attempts at melodrama are not very successful—from two Venus-bound astronauts deciding who will survive on their limited air supply ("Breaking Strain," 1949) and an expedition to an artificial Jovian satellite ("Jupiter Five," 1953) to the kidnaping of the UN Secretary-General ("Guardian Angel," 1950; Childhood's End, 1953).

He is more clearly in his element in those novels that attend to the first stages of settling the Solar System, as seen from an outsider's point of view. A historian of contemporary events observes preparations for the launching of the first Moon-rocket, a predominantly British effort from an electromagnetic launching track in Australia, in Prelude to Space (1951). A science fiction writer accompanies a ship to Mars just in time to see the colony approach self-sufficiency, in The Sands of Mars (1951). In Earthlight (1955; shorter magazine version, 1951), an accountant turned ineffective spy investigates the lunar observatory in time to see a fruitless battle—between an impromptu fleet of the interplanetary Federation and a hurriedly erected Terran fortress—presage the independence of the Moon, which is rich in mineral resources. All three works are lowkey and antiromantic, except in such lyrical passages as point upward, outward, and toward further technological progress, and in the effective dwarfing of man's puny battles by the discovery of a supernova, in Earthlight. With their deliberately distanced central characters, all three are debilitated by the necessity for long lectures and flashbacks and by awkwardly motivated departures from the primary viewpoint.

Technically superior is Clarke's first juvenile novel, Islands in the Sky (1952), in which a teenaged TV contest winner visits the "Inner [space] Station." As George Slusser points out, this is virtually a parody of the teen-age space-adventure story that was then coming into popularity, with Clarke's protagonist typically passive, having things explained and happening to him, and with a brief scare at being lost in space. Unabashedly a sightseeing story, this book rehearses propaganda pieces about low-gravity environments, and ends like its predecessors with the protagonist's yearning to participate in further colonization of the planets.

Not inconsistent with this consensus future, Clarke's stories of exploring the sea run in tandem with those concerned with space. The protagonist of The Deep Range (1957; expanded from a short story, 1954) is himself a grounded astronaut, Walter Franklin, with a wife and children permanently separated from him on Mars. In one of Clarke's rare attempts at a love story, Franklin's new Eurasian wife is wooed, won, and retired to homemaking from a potential career in ichthyology, but the major interest in the story is in the details of underwater farming and whale-herding. Remarkable also is the Scottish-born leader of a world-sweeping Buddhism, the Mahanayake Thero of Ceylon, who successfully puts an end to the butchering of whales, in part from his conviction that extraterrestrials may well judge mankind by its actions toward other creatures.

Communication with "aliens"—dolphins—is the object of the research base in Dolphin Island (1963), Clarke's second juvenile, in which an orphaned teenager is adopted by dolphins and dolphinologists near the Great Barrier Reef, one of the author's favorite skin-diving areas. The mechanics of getting Johnny Clinton to the island from the newly grown "forests" of Oklahoma (by stowing him away on a hovership!) are no more believable than the quiz-show prize of his predecessor in Islands in the Sky; but Johnny is a more active hero, working with the dolphins and, with their assistance, going for help when the island is cut off by a tropical storm and his mentor is seriously ill. Other "people" of the sea, in a follow-up to Franklin's questing in the deep, include the giant squid of "The Shining Ones" (1964), whose methods of electronic communication point toward the Jovians of "A Meeting with Medusa" (1971).

Clarke's joke-stories do not lack for aliens. Even some of his scenarios feature extraterrestrial life forms and artifacts. But Clarke's aliens seem more at home in stories with a mythic cast, often suggesting an advancement over man, which is technological, spiritual, or both. Here his acknowledged debt to the British philosopher Olaf Stapledon is most pronounced. A hint of this may be gleaned from "Before Eden" (1961), in which primitive life on Venus is wiped out by the detritus of human visitors; from "Castaway" (1947) and "Out of the Sun" (1958), with their barely conceivable energy life forms; and from "History Lesson" (1949), in which Venusian explorers find man's last "time capsule" and identify human life and culture with the antics of a Walt Disney cartoon.

Human beings of the far future have something alien about them, too. In "The Lion of Comarre" (1949), an advanced scientific society is rescued from stagnation by a young hero. He must first overcome the mechanized "dream-factory" of Comarre a previous rebel had set up, and separate its knowledge of the mind from its deleterious effects. Closely related to this fairy tale is Clarke's fine novel, Against the Fall of Night (magazine version, 1948; book form, 1953; revised expansion in 1956 as The City and the Stars ). Beginning with a vision of urban stasis in the "perfect" city of Diaspar—London as Clarke first saw it—Fall/City follows young Alvin on a quest through the post-urban pastoral perfection of Lys, and contacts with aliens (including the immature "mental energy creature," Vanamonde), to recapture his people's forgotten space-faring history. As he returns to Earth to digest what he has learned, the ending suggests the coming of a new equilibrium of city and country, mechanical and mental, past and future, human and alien, Earth and space, in keeping with the fairy-tale construction of the novel.

This book has more than a little in common with the classic Childhood's End (1953), in which devil-shaped Overlords act as midwives to the transformation of man's last generation of children into part of the mature "energy-state," the Overmind (a concept borrowed from Olaf Stapledon). The last stages of recognizably human existence are spent in varieties of utopia, short-range kin to stagnant Diaspar and Lys. But where the ambivalence of Fall/City leads to a fairy-tale equilibrium, that of Childhood's End leads to a radical split between the path of the human children and the path of the proud, individualistic, scientific Overlords. Clarke prefaced the narrative with a disclaimer, "The opinions expressed in this book are not those of the author," as well he might, since Ouija boards, telepathy, the end of space travel, and aliens keyed to traditional human religious concepts are foreign to his consistent overt positions. But many readers have trusted the tale more than the teller, among them film director Stanley Kubrick, who enlisted Clarke's collaboration on another tale of transformation.

Clarke's contribution to 2001: A Space Odyssey was anchored not only in his earlier "mythic" or "visionary" novels, but also in two low-keyed short stories. "The Sentinel" (1951, as "Sentinel of Eternity") posited, originally in the shape of a pyramid, an alien transmitter on the Moon, whose broadcast signal was broken when man reached the threshold of space. "Encounter at Dawn" (1953) broached the idea of prehistoric tutoring of early man by alien visitors. Clarke's novel tends to be explicit where the film is elliptical, displaying less mysticism than Kubrick's vision. But the film and the novel both include alien-tutored apemen, the lunar transmitter, a sentient computer that deliberately kills the spaceship's astronauts before it can be dismantled, rectangular monoliths, and astronaut Bowman's transformation into a superhuman baby.

Clarke critics find in these stories a mythic core for his fiction, sscontextualizing both his scenarios of space travel and his satires of technological complacency. According to this interpretation, achieving space travel is a necessary but not sufficient condition for man to transcend his human limitations. Certainly Clarke has sought imaginatively to transcend man's Earthbound condition; he has alluded approvingly to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's dictum that man "can not live in the cradle [Earth] forever" and to J. D. Ber-nal's provocative suggestion in The World, The Flesh, and The Devil (1929) that star travel may demand experienced human minds in what might be called "post-human" bodies. Traditional symbolism drawn from religion and literature is also at home in Clarke's fiction, along with astronomical and technological figures, as is particularly evident in two of his best-known stories.

"The Nine Billion Names of God" (1953) is an end-of-the-world "joke" in which, to the utter astonishment of the pragmatic Western computer salesmen and technicians involved, their help enables Tibetan monks to count all of God's names more efficiently, thus fulfilling the purpose of man and triggering the end of the world. There is little characterization and not much story, but the contrast and complementarity of Eastern goals and Western means effectively questions our complacency once again. The ending is a marvelously quiet punch line to a low-key story of technical detail: "Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out." But it clearly has not taken place outside the world of the fiction. Clarke may sympathize with the lamas, as he does with the Buddhist veneration of life, but it is not evident that he takes the ending of this tall tale seriously.

Beginning with "it is three thousand light-years to the Vatican," the Jesuit astrophysicist who narrates "The Star" (1955) reflects in that story on the findings that have troubled his faith. From all the evidence the crew have gathered, it seems inescapable that this nova, which destroyed a civilization except for remnants left in a vault on the star's outer-most planet, guided the Wise Men's way to Bethlehem. Putting aside the problem of a star's always being "in the east," as in the biblical story, Clarke's narrative shows astrophysics confronting Christianity with a difficult question: what kind of God would use such means to achieve such ends? Although the narrator's faith is troubled, his trust in science—like Clarke's—is not.

Overt dependence on "Grace" is difficult to demonstrate in a writer who consciously opposes mysticism and organized religion in favor of the individual's quest for scientific knowledge and enlightenment. Clarke may seek to speak for the human race's "cosmic loneliness," as Thomas Clareson asserts, but he also speaks for the loneliness of the individual mind. When a man nicknamed "Ego" since his youth maintains an office called his "ego chamber," and writes largely cerebral adventures, in which close human relationships play almost no significant role, we should take him at his word, as Jeremy Bernstein reports, "that he has always been more interested in things and ideas than in people." Like George Bernard Shaw, of whom Clarke is fond, he may aspire to an ideal state "above" biological concerns. Those giant stairways (often spiral), pyramids, towers, or monoliths no doubt have Freudian connotations, as Rabkin points out, but they are also obstacles, challenges, stages in ascent along a "great chain of being."

Transcendence, in his latest works at any rate, is more explicitly naturalistic, even as its expression is more elaborately artistic. Howard Falconer, in "A Meeting with Medusa" (1971), moves in the direction charted by Bernal, from man to cyborg, after a dirigible disaster, which has made him uniquely suited for an expedition into Jupiter's atmosphere. That he is losing contact with other humans and is at the same time unable to establish contact with the electrically communicating squidlike Jovians is ironically emblematic of Falconer's position "between two worlds."

Transcendence seems totally beyond man in Rendezvous with Rama, when an asteroid-sized, hollow cylindrical alien spaceship passes through the Solar System to the curiosity and consternation of twenty-second-century mankind. The sexually mixed, English-speaking crew of the Endeavour, the only ship near enough, explore the alien craft, while experts fuss at a distance and the Mercury colony, fearing attack, sends an automated bomb. The reader puzzles with the crew over specifics of Rama's construction, appropriating what our scientific knowledge is capable of, baffled by the rest. Utterly insignificant to the ship and its "biots" (biological robots), they disembark just before it closes in on the sun to refuel for the next leg of its journey. Dwarfed by the ship's scale, with its three gigantic stairways, its central "Circular Sea," and its (phallic) electric thunder-generating needles, Captain Norton nevertheless compares himself with the intrepid Captain Cook. With comparable equanimity he accepts the fact of his two wives (cf. The Deep Range ) and the attentions of Medical Officer Laura Ernst. Other variations from traditional monogamy are also hinted at. Part myth (advanced aliens), part scenario (planetary colonization), part joke (a "ghost story" ending suggests more alien ships will follow), Rama with its intense visual and stylistic precision reflects a new artistic peak for Clarke at age fifty-six.

The transcendence of history may be a subtheme of Imperial Earth (1975), the closest he has come to a traditional utopia. Twenty-third-century Earth has at least lived up to Clarke's nonfiction forecasts, having eliminated such present-day features as overpopulation, pollution, energy shortages, urban blight, war, even farming, almost government. Duncan Makenzie, second-generation clone of his "grandfather," Malcolm (a founder of the Titan colony), visits Earth in 2276. He meets some Earth politicians; an "old flame" who was more interested in his older friend and rival, Karl Helmer; and Karl himself, whom Duncan's guards inadvertently kill (atop a communications tower with a spiral staircase). Duncan finally returns to Titan with Karl's plan for an alien-listening network to maintain Titan's importance and economic function when its atmosphere is no longer needed for spaceship refueling. Called "Project Argus," it will be one to ten thousand kilometers in diameter (an immense engineering job looking forward to Clarke's next novel). Consisting of thousands of stiff wires projecting from Titan's neighboring Saturnian satellite, Mnemoysyne, it resembles a sea urchin Duncan has killed, convincing him that he has had "a momentary glimpse in the Mirror of time" (in turn recalling Clarke's explanation for mankind's "racial memory" of devils in Childhood's End ). But rather than clone himself according to plan, dark-skinned Duncan brings home a clone of the blond Karl, to replace dynastic stasis with a more random succession. (Breeding could have been just as effective, but normal biological ties seem to get in Clarke's way.)

The narrative is sometimes tedious; connections between parts and between actions are often schematic rather than clearly motivated. This structural peculiarity of Clarke's, explicit also in Childhood's End and 2001, is given metaphorical justification by the "pentominoes" puzzle explained in Chapter 7. The loose construction, moreover, allows for digressive descriptions of Earth's surprises for Duncan, which have attracted professional futurists to the book.

Clarke claims that The Fountains of Paradise (1979) is his last novel; if so, it is a fitting culmination of his career. Centrally it is the tale of "master-builder" Vannevar Morgan, who erects the "ultimate bridge" from Earth to a space station in synchronous orbit. Morgan's daring impinges on hubris, and his luck is tantamount to fate; even his demise is that of a hero, risking his weak heart on a successful rescue mission up the incomplete tower. Metaphorically, he stands for the active side of his creator; the observer side is Johan Rajasinghe, famous diplomat retired to his eyrie on "Taprobane" (Sri Lanka moved southward to straddle the Equator). Clarke effectively employs the lore and local color of his adopted homeland, including a Buddhist monastery that must give way before the forces of technological progress, thanks to some ill-advised meteorological meddling by one of its own members.

Clarke's geometrical conception of novelistic structure is also effective, as he brackets Morgan's story with interwoven chapters set in the past and future. King Kalidasa (second century A.D.), who ordered the building of Taprobane's famous shrines and fountains, is an obvious precursor of Morgan, while the coming of Starglider, an extraterrestrial probe, brings irrevocable change to human civilization. In changing man's relationship to the universe, it demolishes his uniqueness, and questions his "religious" behavior. But it is only a precursor of the Starholmer, who arrives after a ring around the globe has been extended from the Tower of Kalidasa, and most of Earth's population has retreated to the inner planets during a time of solar cooling. To the Starholmer's question as to why the people did not resist, as did the colonists on Mars, rather than sending only their children to Earth, the world-brain Aristotle begins its reply with a line from Ecclesiastes, "For every thing there is a season." "Childhood's end," this time, is a temporary acceptance of things as they are, a time to pause and reflect.

That may be symptomatic of Clarke's overall contribution to science fiction. Less hectoring than Heinlein, less trivializing than Asimov, he has shared his vision in a lucid, sometimes poetic, resolutely anti-melodramatic style. He conceives of man as on a continuous odyssey, facing that giant stairway as a challenge his heritage demands that he accept, and in doing so, to live in such a way that neither aliens nor his descendants need be ashamed. Bridging East and West in his lifework, as well as all those gaps bravado patched over in his first novel, Clarke has proved a worthy successor to Wells, Dunsany, and Stapledon.

John Hollow (essay date 1983)

SOURCE: Hollow, John. "Against the Night…." In Against the Night, the Stars: The Science Fiction of Arthur C. Clarke, pp. 1-19. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1983.

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Patricia Ferrara (essay date summer 1987)

SOURCE: Ferrara, Patricia. "'Nature's Priest': Establishing Literary Criteria for Arthur C. Clarke's 'The Star.'" Extrapolation 28, no. 2 (summer 1987): 148-58.

[In the following essay, Ferrara attempts to create a standard of literary criteria for Clarke's novels and short fiction—particularly through a textual analysis of his short story "The Star"—by which to judge his overarching canon.]

Much of Arthur C. Clarke's fiction is oriented towards rapid and simplistic plot development in the way that most pulp fiction is, frequently to the detriment of any other literary values; yet his fiction deserves more critical attention than its faults warrant. Noting this, Michael Thron has argued that we should judge the value of Clarke's fiction, not by literary standards, but by the value of the ideas it contains (82-83), and many of the other critics in Joseph Olander's collection of essays seem to agree implicitly with this judgment, mixing esthetics with scientific and philosophic appeal as criteria in applied criticism. But T. S. Eliot points out that great or even good fiction of any genre is not remarkable for the quality of the ideas embodied in it; King Lear and the Divine Comedy, he says, do not offer much in the realm of abstract thought, and their power does not come from the strength of the reader's shared belief in the social and religious philosophies presented in the works. Clarke varies only slightly from this norm in offering somewhat new scientific ideas as well as elaborating on old philosophical ones. Certainly, his value as a popular scientific thinker who can help the reader understand the implications of space travel and research is without question. His "Death and the Senator" (1961) is a good hypothetical scenario of what could happen if the United States did not continue its space research. It is one of his most reprinted stories largely because of this aspect of relevancy (or even propaganda). The scientific ideas in the story are significant enough for it to have been read before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Astronautics on March 14, 1972. But as literature, it is sentimental and predictable: a man finds that his imminent death can ennoble him. The theme is not new, nor is it particularly well-realized, and the work suffers from a lack of character development and imagery.

The science fiction story's lack of traditional literary merit is often dismissed on the basis of generic criteria. Asimov's defense of the genre's poor characterization is typical:

Science fiction stories are notoriously weak on characterization as compared with mainstream stories. At least, so the critics say.

I am always struck with impatience at such cavils. Even if it be true, there happens to be a good reason for it. The characters are a smaller portion of science fiction than of the mainstream….

The double task of building the background society and developing the foreground plot is extremely difficult, and it requires an extraordinary amount of the writer's attention. There is that much less attention that is, or can be, paid to the characters. There is, physically, less room in the story for character development.

                                             (60)

Surely a critic must allow for generic strengths and weaknesses. Yet defenses such as Asimov's seem to justify science fiction's independence not only from one, but from nearly all of the traditional literary qualities of other narrative genres: the compelling imagery, characterization, verbal beauty, and control which are common to epic, drama, and the novel. In defending this independence, Asimov takes the extreme (and, I think, untenable) stance that all perennially popular narratives from the Iliad on down endure only because of well-developed plotting (which is, not surprisingly, Asimov's own strong suit as a creative writer) (32-35). But this sole criterion cannot explain why the works of Shakespeare and Chaucer are popular, while their similarly plotted sources are forgotten by all but scholars. And C. S. Lewis's view seems to fit the facts better, given the transience of most plot-oriented popular fiction: works whose appeal rests solely on plot are ephemera, cast aside and replaced by new (and often similar) narratives as soon as the story is known (2). Much science fiction falls into this category, as the majority of works in any genre must.

Lewis describes only one kind of narrative which can succeed on plot alone: a mythical story, which he defines for his purposes as any narrative which has "a value independent of its embodiment in any literary work" (41). But it would be dangerous indeed to set up mythological significance as the main esthetic criterion for any serious fiction, for as Lewis suggests, one man's myth is another man's silly story. Lewis uses this criterion mainly to explain why otherwise undistinguished fiction, such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, may have enduring appeal. While individual science fiction stories may achieve mythological significance, the majority of good science fiction does not—even the bulk of what anthropologists term myths do not meet Lewis's test. And most science fiction, including Clarke's, opts for the opposite end of the spectrum, for suspense or surprise, for identification or empathy with characters, and often for comedy, all of which Lewis sees as antithetical to the mythic mode (43-44). Only occasionally can mythic appeal explain the quality of a science fiction story.

Asimov's and other current defenses of science fiction on generic grounds exceed what other serious genres claim in denying traditional literary criteria. This is deplorable because it mitigates against recognizing traditional literary merit when it occurs, as it does more and more frequently in science fiction today; and because it works both to trivialize and to isolate the genre from serious fiction. Lately, critics attempting to analyze the question have begun to perceive that solely generic criteria are a problem, but they have been leaning precariously toward nonliterary criteria as a solution. While George Slusser, for example, has recognized the difficulty in adopting unusual criteria, he nonetheless takes a stance which emphasizes Clarke's sociocultural relevance as an esthetic standard of criticism. He has named Clarke a significant writer because he follows Lucien Gold-mann's dictum:

To Goldmann "the great writer is precisely that exceptional individual who succeeds in creating in a given domain—that of the literary work—an imaginary universe which is rigorously coherent or almost so, the structure of which corresponds to that toward which the group he represents is tending." The group then is changing, evolving, the work more or less coherent…. Great writing … is alive to the point of actually being a "constitutive factor" in shaping … [the group's] consciousness.

                                             (7)

Slusser does not suggest that this is genre-specific criticism, although it clearly favors science fiction. Yet according to this theory, Brave New World and Animal Farm edge out Othello as major works of art; indeed, any fiction which predicts accurately becomes major as long as it is influential and "more or less coherent." What, then, can be made of nineteenth-century dime novels about the West, Horatio Alger stories, and Mao's little red book as literature? This is perhaps an overstatement of the case, but it exemplifies the well-known difficulty in attempting to combine a sociological evaluation of literature with an esthetic one.

These and other critics have written much practical criticism of value about Clarke; but their special criteria for judging Clarke seem unable to pinpoint his literary merits. Indeed, much of Clarke's work may have little exceptional literary merit, a circumstance which is surely one root of critical gymnastics on his behalf. And while in practice each literary work or genre may invite the reader to attune standards to its particular merits, Thron and Slusser suggest entirely nonliterary criteria by which to judge science fiction. However, like most science fiction apologists, they do not take Marxist or other non-formalist stands. Instead, both critics speak of ideas or sociological relevance as if they were formal or esthetic aspects of Clarke's work. Yet a reading of "Death and the Senator" will confirm that interesting scientific ideas alone do not provide an esthetically enriching experience. While Thron and Slusser have isolated several generic characteristics of science fiction which may account for its popularity as a throwaway genre, both critics define these characteristics as cri-teria which, if adopted as a measure of quality, would be as limiting as judging a mystery story by whether it has an unguessable ending. Some science fiction will predict the future accurately, some will predict inaccurately, and some will predict little at all (e.g., Star Trek). But accurate social or technological prophecy is a generic peculiarity that has no inherent relation to the literary quality of the piece, something which even hard-science fiction proponent Asimov recognizes (19, 48).

Science fiction cannot become widely recognized as serious literature unless we can evaluate it by literary criteria, preferably the same criteria applied to other serious genres. This should not be troublesome in Clarke's case, for his best writing is effective as traditional literature. He can use traditional literary techniques skillfully, and does use them to form intertex-tual relationships with himself and with other authors. This places him in the mainstream, not only of genre fiction, but of the English literary tradition. It is these techniques and relationships I propose to examine in "A Meeting with Medusa" (1972), "The Awakening" (1942), and "The Star" (1955).

Critics such as Thron have surprisingly mentioned Clarke's lack of imagery (82-83), while others such as Thomas Clareson have gone on to praise Clarke's remarkable descriptions of outer space. But imagery and structure are closely interwoven. Clarke's imagery is developed well and abundantly in thematically resonant ways consistent from text to text, frequently in passages which appear to be straightforward description or narration. For example, alien beasts resembling sea creatures flourish in Clarke's fiction, and they represent both the fascination of the stars and their unknowability. A typical meeting with seemingly oceanic life-forms takes place in Clarke's "A Meeting with Medusa." On Jupiter, the narrator finds alien beings of great beauty and enormous size. At first he is uncertain whether they are alive or not. When he decides they are, he begins likening them to Earth creatures he is familiar with: mantas and a forest of mushrooms. Later, he decides the forest of mushrooms is animal, not vegetable, and so christens it a jellyfish, a medusa. The appellation also alludes to the Greek hag who turned all who looked at her to stone, thus defying human sight and knowledge. Clarke's medusa can do the same; she lives on Jupiter, where no man dares to go because of the extreme temperatures, and even the reconstructed metal body of the explorer, Falcon, allows him only a tantalizing glimpse of her mysteries. Like the mythical medusa, the jellyfish also represents a hazard to the curious.

Although the analogies the narrator makes about the medusa help him in comprehending what he sees, they also prove dangerously false. When the mantas prey on her, he convinces himself to side with the mantas, since only predators develop brains, and are therefore closer to being human than the jellyfish is. Just as he resigns himself to her death, the medusa upsets his predictions: she strikes a manta with an electrical charge, something no Earth jellyfish could do; and she shows an alarming curiosity about the narrator's ship, perhaps indicating intelligence (Clarke 2:176). The narrator leaves, never having noticed that his propensity to draw analogies has failed him as often as not.

The cosmos as sea is one of Clarke's recurring metaphors, and the sea creature is a corresponding metaphor for the unpredictable and dangerous alienness of the stars. Clarke's development of this image-pattern is a literary device rather than a novel idea. The trope is emotionally effective and thematically resonant; but the idea, that it is dangerous yet inevitable to try to understand the unknown by making it analogous to the known, is trite.

Throughout his descriptions of space, Clarke uses simile, metaphor, and simple comparison in much the same way his narrator in "Medusa" uses analogy to understand the unknown. One can get a clear image of the monstrous jellyfish which is "like a forest of pallid trees, like giant mushrooms that had never seen the Sun" (Clarke 2:164), and mantas that burn to a crisp and take nosedives like downed bombers (Clarke 2:176); but these similes must constantly shift as any one comparison to earth proves inadequate. The landscape of Jupiter is visible because of Clarke's constantly shifting direct and indirect references to earth: "The creatures were simply huge black deltas, rippling over hills and valleys that, in reality, were little more substantial than the clouds of Earth. Though they looked solid, Falcon knew that anyone who stepped on those white mountains would go crashing through them as if they were made of tissue paper" (Clark 2:163). The descriptions of space which form the bulk of "The Star" and other stories are filled with similes that make the cosmos visible: "The pylon must have been a mile high when it was built, but now it looked like a candle that had melted down into a puddle of wax" (Clarke 2:129). In his best work, he does not use the common practice in science fiction of comparing one unknown to another to give a sense of conviction to the story (e.g., "the food smelled like Denebian slime worms"). Instead, his similes are partly Homeric in function, though not form, juxtaposing the homely with the grand to emphasize the grandeur and strangeness, but also making them graspable to the ordinary man. Both the disjunction and continuity of man's world and the cosmos are emphasized in this method. The alternative method argues total disjunction from man's present world, and self-containment, a refusal to refer to the present without exaggerated emphasis on the difference between the two eras ("Yes, they had only nuclear power back in the twentieth century. How could people live like that?"). Such techniques usually remind us of the fictionality of the science fiction world, and Clarke uses the latter method extensively in his less effective fiction, particularly in his earlier writings. But Clarke's mature method links our world to what is to come, making it believable. His vivid descriptions of space depend heavily upon literary tropes for their beauty and effectiveness.

Clarke's "The Awakening," contains another typically evocative description of vastness, not of space, but of time. The first paragraphs of the story set up a situation in which a dictator decides to hibernate until a cure for his heart disorder is found. Then follows this description of time passing quietly and massively in geological eons which dwarf the human concerns which they counterpoint:

After what by some standards would have been a little while, the earth's crust decided that it had borne the weight of the Himalayas for long enough. Slowly the mountains dropped, tilting the southern plains of India towards the sky. And presently the plateau of Ceylon was the highest point on the surface of the globe, and the ocean above Everest was five and a half miles deep. The Master would not be disturbed by his enemies, or his friends.

Slowly, patiently, the silt drifted down through the towering ocean heights on to the wreck of the Himalayas. The blanket that would some day be chalk began to thicken at the rate of not a few inches every century. If one had returned some time later, one might have found that the sea bed was no longer five miles down, or even four, or three.

                                           (1:36)

Personification combined with the biblically simple vocabulary and tone form here what Clareson calls the "mixture of familiarity and otherness" (62) which informs Clarke's vision of time, much as simile and comparison elsewhere convey the same mixture in his unique vision of space. These descriptive paragraphs are by far the best thing in the story, greatly overshadowing the twist ending in which the man awakens and immediately dies of a heart attack upon discovering "that the long war between Man and Insect was ended—and that Man was not the victor." (Clarke 1:38). The scientific and philosophic ideas in the story are not profound and were not new when the story was written; and literarily the ending seems tacked on. It is impossible to ignore the lucid and evocative descriptive passages which shine out above the grinding mechanics of the plot. Even with its momentary brilliance, however, the story is fairly routine.

Yet more than once Clarke has managed to make all the elements in his story work together, as he does in "The Star." This story brings up perhaps the trickiest and most important criterion to apply to Clarke: his intertextuality with other writers. If his novels and short stories are important as literature, they should somehow contain narrative patterns and literary tropes which form the basis of other important literature. Despite arguing for new criteria, Slusser's examination of the voyage pattern in the Space Odysseys of Arthur C. Clarke places Clarke clearly within a literary tradition. John Hollow has also noted Clarke's roots in such poets as Tennyson and Houseman, and Slusser has mentioned his similarity to Keats. However, we can go one step further and find a highly developed relationship between Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations" and Clarke's "The Star" which shows clearly the value of applying literary, rather than sociological, scientific, or philosophical criteria to Clarke's fiction. One of the central tropes of Clarke's work, that of children on a beach in juxtaposition with a vision of eternity, seems to come, not from Houseman or from H. G. Wells, or from Keats, but from Wordsworth's ode. The debt is particularly strong in "The Star," in which Clarke places his narrator in circumstances ironically parallel to those of Wordsworth's narrator, gives him a vision of children on the beach which is similar to Wordsworth's, yet turns Wordsworth's tropes inside out to defy and reverse Wordsworthian meaning. This parallel may seem extraordinary, simply because no one thinks of looking for such a connection between a mainstream work and science fiction. And this is probably why no critic has seen it previously. Yet given Clarke's education in English schools in the early part of the century, he must have read a considerable amount of Wordsworth, including this famous poem. This virtual certainty combined with strong textual parallels would make a convincing argument that one mainstream author was ringing changes on another mainstream author's score. And as Stanley Fish points out, to discover that a recognized work is better than anyone thought it was should be a sure way of gaining acceptance for one's views (351). The parallels between Clarke's story and Wordsworth's poem are strong enough to persuade the reader of the possibility that the two works interact in this fashion, and open the door to the consideration of other such parallels between science fiction and the mainstream.

For the Wordsworthian narrator, the child's "first affections" will allow the man he has become to transport himself metaphorically:

         Hence in a season of calm weather
           Though inland far we be,
    Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
           Which brought us hither,
         Can in a moment travel thither,
    And see the Children sport upon the shore,
    And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.
                                             (2: 161-67)

The similarity to Clarke's vision speaks for itself:

One scene is still before my eyes—a group of children on a beach of strange blue sand, playing in the waves as children play on Earth. Curious whiplike trees line the shore, and some very large animal is wading in the shallows yet attracting no attention at all.

                                          (1:130)

Many writers have described figures on a beach, but several key features point to a clearly Wordsworthian basis for Clarke's passage: the plural rather than singular number of figures; the circumstance of their being children rather than adults; the circumstance of both groups playing, rather than looking at the stars; and the narrator seeing them only once, and then remembering them in tranquility as he works out his spiritual difficulties. The achingly nostalgic context of the vision is much different from Keats or Houseman; and the lack of a progressive vision at different points in time eliminates Wells as a primary source. This vision and many other correlations between Wordsworth's poem and Clarke's story lay the groundwork for Clarke's final disruption of Wordsworth's metaphor.

Both works introduce us to troubled narrators, the source of whose mental turmoil is at first unclear, but becomes clear as the works progress. "Ode: Intimations" relates the narrator's subjective search for the faded glory of nature, which derives from "our life's Star," the soul. The narrator mourns that only the youth, "Nature's priest," has contact with the light of this Star, which has "elsewhere had its setting/And cometh from afar." Clarke literally sends "Nature's priest," a Jesuit-astrophysicist, off to look for a real star, turning Wordsworth's metaphors into plot realities. In the process of his investigation, he finds the vision of eternity, the filmstrip of the children on the beach, just as Wordsworth's narrator discovers the metaphor of the children during his progress. But this vision is not the end of the Jesuit's discoveries, any more than it is the end of Wordsworth's discoveries in his poem. Wordsworth's narrator finds new ways of placing himself within nature, as nature's center. Clarke's narrator finds unexpected confirmation of Wordsworth's anthropocentric universe which is morally insupportable: God did favor mankind above all races, blowing this star into destruction in order to signal to man the birth of the Christ child. "Our life's Star" did indeed "set" or die, taking with it an entire civilization, before it could shine briefly for man.

Wordsworth deliberately confuses nature-as-metaphor-for-self with nature and self as two separate entities. The poem's narrator makes a metaphorical search through his subjective universe for the light of "our life's Star." Clarke objects to such subjectivity because it assumes that man is the center of the universe. It is this pathetic fallacy turned into a principle of philosophy which Clarke turns topsy-turvy. The idea of anthropocentrism which is unquestioned and comforting in Wordsworth is questioned and dis-comfortable in its morality in Clarke.

Clarke's objective universe parallels Wordsworth's subjective one. This reversal of Wordsworth's tropes de-anthropocentrises nature without removing its wonder and emotional impact. Because Wordsworth's narrator searches for some way to feel immortal by regaining a state of mind, his vision of the seashore is undetailed and almost entirely metaphorical; there is no sense of a remembrance of an actual occurrence. In Clarke's story, the vision of the children on the seashore is detailed and concrete. Clarke's children, like the nature which surrounds them, cannot be appropriated as metaphors for the self. They are (or were) real, and the narrator remembers them only because he actually saw them on a filmstrip. Clarke underlines the otherness of the vision: these children are not human, and the concrete details of the "strange blue sand" and "curious whiplike trees" and the unknown "large animal" indicate the narrator's distance from the children and nature. Clarke's narrator empathizes with the dead race with painful acuity, but recognizes them as irretrievably alien. He is not even momentarily tempted to project his own changed view of nature onto the universe. The stars shine with "undiminished brilliance" throughout his spiritual difficulties. The glory remains in the flower. And despite his strongly emotional and subjective response to nature, no pansy will ever ask this man a question. Instead, he asks himself why a civilization had to be destroyed when it was in "full flower." In Wordsworth's universe nature creates questions, images, and metaphors; Clarke's Jesuit clearly recognizes that he invents the metaphor and the question. The universe cannot speak, yet continually demands to be recognized as the foundation of ideas about God and man. Both narrators struggle to resolve a newly felt estrangement from nature; the Jesuit leaves the question unresolved because he sees a comfortingly subjective nature as emotionally irreconcilable to morality, requiring a cold-hearted acceptance of man's right to primacy in the universe. Clarke implicitly rejects Wordsworth's metaphoric approach to nature as a philosophy, and hence he also rejects his resulting resolution, leaving instead an open ending. The Jesuit's painful moral paralysis is the result of realizing that these beings with whom he and the reader empathize will remain forever separate from us because our only way of retrieving unity with the cosmos requires us to assume a philosophical stance which rejects our brotherhood with the beings who inhabit it.

Clarke's overall strategy in "The Star" is intertextual. The method of its intertextuality is also clearly literary—a reversal of tropes—and it is extremely well done. In a very Bloomian manner, Clarke has disrupted Wordsworth's text with his own, thus moving into the mainstream of fiction. The story also has a definitely literary structure of some sophistication. It carefully embodies its stance in literary tropes, such as in the journey towards the star and the truly poignant, rather than merely sentimental, vision of the children on the beach. Other sheerly literary values abound. The juxtaposition of the coldly beautiful objectivity of space with the intensely subjective vision of the narrator is powerful in a literary way, unrelated to the values of the ideas it embodies. The first person narration vividly conveys the disembodied, alienated voice of the main character, the Jesuit; and in this story the cardboard nature of the other characters on the spaceship is a literary merit, since it enhances the intense subjectivity and isolation of the Jesuit, who feels closer to the cosmos and the dead civilization than to his own shipmates (Clareson 67ff.).

It could be argued that "The Star" is important because it presents Clarke's idea of God, and much attention has focussed on this aspect of the story and of Clarke's fiction in general. However, the story presents no definite image of God, but rather a challenge to the morality of viewing God and the universe as man-centered, a challenge to the Romantic view. Other critics interpret the work variously. Slusser and Hollow disagree entirely on the nature of the Jesuit's problem. Hollow thinks the supernova does not prove the Christian God's existence (18), while Slusser feels that proof of the existence of a Christian God coincides with proof of cosmic indifference (16). Roger Bozzetto suggests that science has taken on God's comforting and humanistic moral validity (320). The basic disagreement about Clarke's ideas result from literary ambiguity rather than philosophical brilliance. As the narrator points out, the problem of God's power and man's questions appears in the Book of Job. There is nothing philosophically new here. And Clarke himself had already treated the scientific aspect of the Star of Bethlehem in an essay entitled "The Star of the Magi" before he wrote the short story, making a second statement scientifically redundant. While the scientific bent of Clarke's imagination is a necessary element in his fiction, if he and other science fiction writers are going to receive serious critical attention, critics should judge the genre by accepted literary criteria. Being a science fiction writer does not entitle one to special nonliterary criteria. And despite Clarke's many failings, his work at its best has more than sufficient merit to warrant such attention.

Works Cited

Asimov, Isaac. Asimov on Science Fiction. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1981.

Bozzetto, Roger. "L'Image de dieu dans la science-fiction: Analyse de L'Etoile de A. C. Clarke." In Mythes, Images, Representations. Ed. Jean-Marie Grassin. Paris: Didier Erudition, n.d.

Clareson, Thomas D. "The Cosmic Loneliness of Arthur C. Clarke." In Arthur C. Clarke. Ed. Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg. Writers of the 21st Century Series. New York: Taplinger, 1977. 52-71.

Clarke, Arthur C. The Best of Arthur C. Clarke. Ed. Angus Wells. 2 vols. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1977.

Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980.

Hollow, John. Against the Night, the Stars: The Science Fiction of Arthur C. Clarke. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976.

Lewis, C. S. An Experiment in Criticism. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1961, rpt. 1978.

Slusser, George Edgar. The Space Odysseys of Arthur C. Clarke. Popular Writers of Today 8. San Bernardino, California: Borgo Press, 1978.

Thron, E. Michael. "The Outsider from Inside: Clarke's Aliens." In Arthur C. Clarke. Ed. Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg. Writers of the 21st Century Series. New York: Taplinger, 1977. 72-86.

Wordsworth, William. "Ode: Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood." In Selected Poems and Prefaces. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Riverside ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.

TITLE COMMENTARY

CHILDHOOD'S END (1953)

Alan B. Howes (essay date 1977)

SOURCE: Howes, Alan B. "Expectation and Surprise in Childhood's End." In Arthur C. Clarke, edited by Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg, pp. 149-71. New York, N.Y.: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1977.

[In the following essay, Howes discusses how readers' expectations are both met and simultaneously defied in Clarke's science fiction novel Childhood's End, arguing that this dichotomy is one of the primary reasons for the novel's enduring popularity.]

When I bought a paperback copy of Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End in 1973, it was from the twenty-sixth printing. And when my next door neighbor saw my copy of the book, she still remembered how "overwhelming" she had found it when it first came out twenty years before. Professional critics have also praised Clarke: he is "the colossus of science fiction"¹ or the "distinguished dean of science fiction writers";²Childhood's End is "a fascinating switch on the utopian gambit"³ or "a real staggerer by a man who is both a poetic dreamer and a competent scientist."⁴ Clarke's fellow science fiction writers also respect him: James Blish, for example, finds Childhood's End "as serious and as rewarding as anything [its author] might have attempted outside our field."⁵ Furthermore, the popularity of Childhood's End has increasingly gained momentum—there had been only nine printings between 1953 and 1968; there were seventeen between 1968 and 1973, when I bought my copy from the twenty-sixth printing. What is the key to the book's power, its durability, its vitality?

Clarke's own test for a successful story is simple. "The prime function of a story is to entertain—not to instruct or preach," he says. "No writer should ever forget Sam Goldwyn's immortal words: 'If you've gotta message, use Western Union.'" Clarke goes on to say that the "acid test" of a story comes with rereading, "preferably after a lapse of some years. If it's good, the second reading is as enjoyable as the first. If it's great, the second reading is more enjoyable. And if it's a masterpiece, it will improve on every rereading." At the same time Clarke speaks of science fiction as "one of the many bridges to culture," testimony that he believes the story that entertains and is worth rereading must have, if not a "message," at least some intellectual substance.⁶ The trick, of course, is to challenge the mind without preaching a specific message—to walk somewhere in the middle ground between escapism and didacticism.

Most fiction aims at that middle ground, at the joining of "a good story" with some new insight into the human condition. But it also counts on the reader to help in that joining by responding in certain ways to the author's imaginative use of conventions. A literary convention, as I am using the term, simply represents a means for reaching a working agreement, explicit or implicit, between author and reader. The author uses a set of shorthand signals and the reader responds in appropriate ways. He may add information to the hint the author has given him about a character or a situation. He may suppress his knowledge that the "Once upon a time" story couldn't really have happened, in order to enter and enjoy that story's fictional world. He orients himself in general to the genre and its particular conventions and also to any distinctive subgeneric characteristics.

Thus he knows that the story which begins "Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess who lived in a large dark forest …" will develop in a very different way from the story that begins "In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains," or one that starts with "Customs of courtship vary greatly in different times and places, but the way the thing happens to be done here and now always seems the only natural way to do it." Notice that each of these openings can—and in fact does—lead to a love story,⁷ but, more importantly, each suggests the kind of love story that will follow. One can appreciate this by switching the openings around: "Once upon a time …" would not do to introduce Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar (though there are some resemblances to fairy tale in its situation), "Customs of courtship vary greatly …" would be an inept opening for Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (though there is a kind of courtship between Henry and Catherine), and "In the late summer of that year a beautiful princess lived in a house in a large dark forest …" wouldn't do for a fairy story (though it might convey the setting accurately). In each case the reader would be frustrated by the author's failure to develop the kind of story which the opening had led him to expect.

What conventions do, then, is to set up a series of expectations in the reader. The formula story fulfills those expectations in wholly predictable ways—one might say it consists mainly of conventions. It gives us the somewhat limited pleasure of filling in the blanks and seeing ourselves proved right in virtually every expectation. The good story that uses conventions more imaginatively is more complicated. It fulfills our expectations, but often in unpredictable ways. We have the richer pleasure of seeing patterns completed, but in ways we couldn't have foreseen. The conventions are bent, revised, perhaps even violated as they are revitalized. The really inferior story raises expectations that it cannot or does not fulfill.

Part of the secret of the durability and popularity of Childhood's End lies in its imaginative use and blending of conventions, in its setting, situations, characters, style, and themes. Another way to put it is to say that the book succeeds by virtue of the number and kinds of surprises and challenges that it presents. Some of the surprises, like the revelation of Karellen's resemblance to Satan, do not have as much force on a second reading; others, like the revelations, late in the book, of the Overlords' weaknesses, remain powerfully ironic on subsequent rereadings. Let us look at the ways the reader's expectations are met in three main aspects of the book—genre and subgenre, character, and theme.

Our knowledge of a genre or subgenre enables us to predict the ultimate outcome of a story or at least to narrow the possible outcomes to a few alternatives. In a love story boy will get girl or girl will get boy; in a bildungsroman the hero will mature through a series of experiences; in a detective story we will discover who committed the crime, and so on. The author usually alerts us early on—if indeed not in the title—to the fictional subgenre in which he is working. Part of the fascination of Childhood's End is that we can't make predictions of this sort as easily or as certainly—or, to put it more accurately, Clarke combines a number of subgenres in his book and keeps presenting us with more alternative directions in which the story may develop than a writer usually does. Each section does develop a major mystery to be solved: in section one it is the question of what the Overlords look like, in section two it is the question of where the answer at the seance came from, in section three it is the question of what is happening to Jeff. And interwoven with these narrative threads are a number of others which are also developed, often with a rich ambiguity in their situations, and then resolved, often with surprising developments that a reader could not have predicted.

Childhood's End starts out in the Prologue with the race between two scientists, one American, one Russian, to launch a spacecraft. But scarcely have we prepared ourselves to follow that rather clichéd rivalry when ironically—and before the end of the Pro-logue—the story veers in a new direction with the arrival of aliens in giant spaceships. The situation is ambiguous: "This was the moment when history held its breath, and the present sheared asunder from the past as an iceberg splits from its frozen, parent cliffs, and goes sailing out to sea in lonely pride. All that the past ages had achieved was as nothing now …" Thus Clarke leaves a number of possibilities open at the end of the Prologue—struggle with the aliens, peaceful coexistence, education of earthlings by superior beings, to name the three alternatives which seem most likely to a reader at that point. The only certainty is that "the human race was no longer alone," and that life will be drastically changed.

All of the possibilities—which at first seemed conflicting—come to pass. The struggle with the aliens is over with one abortive attempt to bomb one of the Overlord's ships and a brief resistance by the government of South Africa.

Meanwhile, we have seen that the real struggle is between humans like Stormgren, who trust the Overlords and accept their rule, and those, like Wainwright, who don't. Again the situation is ambiguous: Wainwright's protest that Karellen is trying to "wipe out a thousand years of history at the stroke of a pen" with his forcing of world federation on mankind is countered by Stormgren's assertion that the Overlords are merely completing what humans have started and that "their outlook … is more mature than ours" (2).⁸ We soon find out more about what has been happening in the five years since the arrival of the Overlords: after the two brief struggles, humans have coexisted peacefully with the Overlords, learning ways of bringing a better civilization to Earth through cooperation. Earth now enjoys "security, peace, and prosperity," though these may be double-edged blessings, if, as Wainwright asserts, the Overlords "have taken our liberty" (2).

The possibility of education of earthlings through the influence of the Overlords—only hinted at in the first section of the book—is fully developed in the second section: the changes brought by the Overlords are more drastic than they first appeared to be and human civilization is evolving into a kind of utopia. Now a whole set of different expectations is raised in the reader. Mankind seems destined to a life of comfort, peace, and prosperity but one in which no adventures or discoveries will be possible and spiritual decay will set in. "Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of all utopias—boredom" (6). But, the reader feels, that development may not be very long in coming. At the same time we see Jan developing his plan for stowing away on the Overlord ship—at least one human being is still eager for adventure and dissatisfied with the static perfection of utopia. We finish section two wondering what the outcome of Jan's adventure will be and what will happen to the rest of mankind, caught in its web of peace and plenty, for we are told that "with … inexorable swiftness the Golden Age was rushing to its close" (14).

In the final section we see another kind of utopia in New Athens, and attempt to regain part of what has been lost, as the Golden Age nears its close and the children come closer and closer to Total Breakthrough. And then comes the final apocalyptic scene. The destruction that seemed one possible outcome when the Overlords first landed has indeed taken place, though in a manner different from what we could have foreseen, for no reader could predict the particular collection of narrative threads I have been tracing, though one might hit upon some of them. Further, the ending leaves us with different feelings about the destruction of the Earth than we could have imagined, as "Everything we ever achieved has gone up there into the stars," and "the last atoms" of Earth's substance have nourished the children "through the fierce moments of their inconceivable metamorphosis, as the food stored in a grain of wheat feeds the infant plant while it climbs towards the Sun" (24).

Characterization in Childhood's End is not at first glance so complicated as narrative, but here too there are intricacies and surprises. The conventions associated with characterization help us to identify types and stock figures—and also to appreciate ways in which a type has been individualized. Characters who are truly "conventional" usually have interest only as they help to develop narrative, but characters who vary from the type hold our interest for their own sake.

Clarke has his share of stock figures: Maia Boyce is one example. Described as "distracting," she has "Grecian" features and "her hair was long and lustrous…. Her voice was a rich contralto that sent little shivers running up and down George's back, as if someone was playing on his spine like a flute." And she says things like "Rupert is doing something complicated with the drinks—come along and meet everybody" (7). This is close to the stock sophisticated and charming lady of the formula story (who is often little more than a projection of male erotic fantasies), though it is perhaps difficult to get away from formula when describing a cocktail party.

Other basic types are individualized through unexpected, sometimes humorous touches. Thus Joe, Stormgren's kidnapper, is not the stock villain. Stormgren thinks him "altogether more complex" than his gangster assistants, and is reminded of "an overgrown baby." Joe has "never thought seriously about the causes for which he was fighting. Emotion and extreme conservatism clouded all his judgments." Yet, Stormgren thinks, "When his type vanished, if it ever did, the world would be a safer but less interesting place" (p. 39). He produces a deck of cards since he has heard that Stormgren likes to play poker, but then asks in a worried voice if Stormgren has plenty of cash. "After all, we can hardly accept checks," he says (3).

Stormgren himself is in many ways a typical statesman and civil servant, though he is partially individualized, particularly through his friendship with Karellen. In the latter part of the book George and Jean are also part types, part individuals. Jean's paranormal powers separate her from the other characters, though otherwise she is a typical wife and mother. George doesn't have much to distinguish him: his rather conventional lechery is alluded to but not developed (and is presumably not unusual in an age of much freer sexual mores brought on by "a completely reliable oral contraceptive" and "an equally infallible method … of identifying the father of any child") (6). Jan is the restless young man who dreams of exploring new frontiers in space, the typical space adventurer who is interesting more for what happens to him than for his own sake. In general, the individual human beings, though sometimes not strictly types, are not very memorable.

Clarke's aliens are more interesting than his humans and more imaginatively developed. Only occasionally are they in situations which sound like formula stories, as when Rashaverak says to Karellen that they "must transfer Jean to Category Purple" (9), or Wainwright's angry crowd shake their fists at the Overlord fleet fifty kilometers above them, "as pygmies may threaten a giant" (2). We are reminded from time to time of the aliens' unusual size, but on the whole Clarke plays down any physical details. This is of course partly because he wishes to develop mystery and suspense about their physical form in the first section of the book: it is fifty-five years and more than that number of pages before Karellen reveals himself. There are hints that he has something to hide through his secretiveness, there is something faintly ominous about his "cavernous laugh" (2), and the mystery and suspense are continually heightened throughout the first section, partly through Stormgren's plan to "see" Karellen. With the climactic revelation at the beginning of the second section we can understand why mankind was not ready earlier to be allowed to see the embodiment of some of his most terrifying legends. Nor would the reader have been ready earlier for the revelation. If we had known at once that Karellen had the shape of the Devil, we would not have accepted what he said at its face value and our whole concept of his character would have been distorted.

Even after the revelation of the Overlords' physical appearance, their physical characteristics are not emphasized. We are told later that they are all alike—"all seemed duplicates from a single, master mold" (17). They have a "peculiar … acid odor," described as "not so much unpleasant as puzzling" (7). George thinks that Rashaverak's tail looks "like a piece of armored pipe" and sees that "the famous barb was not so much an arrowhead as a large, flat diamond … to give stability in flight, like the tail feathers of a bird." The body "was neither like that of a man nor that of any animal Earth had ever known…. It was not even certain that they were vertebrates…." (7). But in spite of these details given soon after Karellen's appearance to the public, it is another fifty-odd pages before we get a good look at his face with "the twin breathing orifices on either cheek—if those fluted, basalt curves could be called cheeks …" and the "inflexible, lipless mouth" (14). And we are not usually made particularly aware of physical details (except perhaps for their wings) in most of the scenes with the Overlords.

There is a good reason for this lack of emphasis on the Overlords' physical appearance: throughout the book Clarke, while noting ways that they differ from human beings, obviously also wishes to humanize them and bring them closer to the reader. And there is the frequent implication that they are really more human than they first appear to be. Karellen is truly Stormgren's friend, and their conversations are appropriate for friends. The "final proof … of Karellen's affection" is given when the Overlord allows Stormgren to catch a glimpse of him through the screen, and Stormgren "hoped that … Karellen … would one day … stand beside the grave of the first man ever to be his friend" (4). Rashaverak—"Rashy" to Rupert Boyce—is likewise a friend to humans. The Overlords are further humanized and made less awesome through humor. Karellen can laugh at human speculation about his form—"I'd rather be a mass of electron tubes than a thing like a centipede …"—and Jean Morrel can summon up a "mental picture … too comic to be comfortable" of Rashaverak reading a book with each eye and another in Braille with his fingers.

The Overlords inspire less awe than many typical aliens do, but they are not merely human beings with different bodies either, for they represent the reasoning side of man, extracted from his other parts, purified, and magnified many times. Their mental powers represent a climax in their evolution. Their "hatred of cruelty," and "their passion for justice and order" are the bases of their character, and it is of course these qualities which enable them to help human beings develop a utopia (3). In Karellen's words they "represent reason and science" (2). A logic blind to all else but itself governs their every act and leads to some surprising as well as amusing perspectives. Jan reflects that "there were things beyond logic that the Overlords had never understood" (23), and Karellen cannot imagine why human beings want to engage in the "primitive behavior" of descending into the Grand Canyon by mule train when they "could reach the bottom of the canyon in a fraction of the time, and in far greater comfort, if they chose" (9).

Thus the more obvious and sensational possibilities about the Overlords—those that the formula story about aliens might capitalize on—are minimized and their resemblances to human beings are insisted upon. Yet perhaps the most interesting and certainly the most moving thing about the Overlords lies in the ironic contrast with human beings which has been gradually developed by the time of the apocalyptic ending.

Our first impression of the Overlords is of their complete superiority to human beings—their minds "ten—perhaps a hundred—times as powerful as men's" (23), their greatly advanced technology, their complete control over human beings through their awesome powers. The Overlords are, in fact, so powerful that Karellen can afford to ignore the attempted bombing of the Overlord ship (2), and let Stormgren's kidnappers go free so that they can be watched (3). And he need use his vast powers only sparingly—a thirty-minute blocking out of the sun from South Africa is enough to bring that government around (2), and a brief infliction of pain upon ten thousand spectators is enough to put an end to bullfighting on earth.⁹

There is only a hint or two of any limitations to the Overlords' omnipotence: early in the book Karellen does refer to himself as "only a civil servant trying to administer a colonial policy in whose shaping I had no hand" (2), and Stormgren believes that though Karellen is "immortal … by our standards,… there's something in the future he seems to fear" (2). But fear, or indeed any emotion, seems to be of negligible consequence to the Overlords: it is human beings who are subject not only to fear but to other kinds of weakness and inferiority as well, in comparison to the Overlords.

Just as the narrative threads lead in unexpected directions, so the further development of the Overlords' characters in the third section leads to a reversal of our perspective on the differences between Overlord and human. When George asks for an interview with the Overlords to talk about the changes taking place in Jeff, he is surprised that Rashaverak is also "trying to understand"; "in some ways," Rashaverak tells him, "my ignorance is as great as yours." The Overlords are not mankind's "masters," Rashaverak continues, but only its "guardians." They could be thought of as "midwives attending a difficult birth…. But we ourselves are barren," he says. George then realizes he is "in the presence of a tragedy transcending his own…. Despite all their powers and their brilliance, the Overlords were trapped in some evolutionary cul-de-sac. Here was a great and noble race, in almost every way superior to mankind; yet it had no future …" (18). Karellen's speech, when he is making his final disclosures of the Overlords' purpose to mankind, underscores the same points: the Overlords do not possess mankind's "potentialities" and "latent powers." "Our intellects are far more powerful than yours," he says, "but there is something in your minds that has always eluded us." The two races "represent the ends of two different evolutions. Our minds," Karellen says, "have reached the end of their development. So, in their present form, have yours. Yet you can make the jump to the next stage, and therein lies the difference between us." Humans have not realized "the irony of their title" for the Overlords, since above the Overlords is the Overmind, exerting its power on them¹⁰ (20). And even the Overlords' intellects have limitations: "They were equally helpless," Jan thought, "equally overwhelmed by the unimaginable complexity of a hundred thousand million suns, and a cosmos of a hundred thousand million galaxies" (23).

Earlier, when Jeff's transformation was beginning, Karellen had said, "I grow more and more sorry for these people" (17). When he makes his speech disclosing the Overlords' purposes he says, "We shall always envy you;" (20) and just before the final destruction of Earth Jan says, "Good-by, Karellen, Rashaverak—I am sorry for you" (24). Homeward bound in his ship, Karellen "did not mourn for Man: his sorrow was for his own race, forever banned from greatness by forces it could not overcome" (24). So Man becomes the hero after all, and if the individual human beings do not draw our full interest, Mankind does. In a sense Everyman is the hidden hero of Childhood's End.

"Good science fiction," according to James Blish, is neither "comfortable" nor "safe." "It is precisely the science fiction story that rattles people's teeth and shakes their convictions that finds its way into the mainstream," he says.¹¹ And there is a parallel here in the development of theme with what I have been saying about the development of narrative and of character. Themes, like narrative lines and characters, are hinted at through conventions that set up expectations in a reader, and their success depends upon the writer's ability to fulfill those expectations in imaginative and surprising ways. The good science fiction writer (as opposed to the good fantasy writer), sets up thematic expectations which are based upon sci-entific fact, principle, or possibility (while the good fantasy writer starts with an anti- or non-scientific premise of some sort and then follows it to its logical conclusions).

The good science fiction story which "rattles people's teeth and shakes their convictions" must do so within further limitations, for theme must not only be based in science: it must arise from narrative line and characterization—it cannot be imposed upon them arbitrarily.

Clarke is both scientist and storyteller. As Clifton Fadiman says, "Mr. Clarke is no more dreamer. If he roves space, it is with slide rule in hand."¹² And the subtitle of Clarke's nonfictional exploration of the future, Profiles of the Future, is revealing: "An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible." Yet in his Introduction to Profiles Clarke says he hopes "the charge will not be leveled against me" that "this book seems completely reasonable and all my extrapolations convincing." For then he would "not have succeeded in looking very far ahead; for the one fact about the future of which we can be certain is that it will be utterly fantastic." Elsewhere in this Introduction Clarke expresses an admiration for H. G. Wells who "very sensibly did not allow himself to be shackled by mere facts if they proved inconvenient."¹³ But in the body of the book Clarke is likely to preface his speculation about a future possibility with the phrase that it "contradicts no known scientific principle" or "does not … involve any scientific absurdities." And in the Preface to The Exploration of Space, a work of nonfiction written two years before Childhood's End, Clarke says, "I have tried to base all my speculations firmly upon facts, or at least upon probabilities…. Space-travel is a sufficiently sensational subject to require no additional embellishments, and in the long run we can be sure that our wildest flights of fancy will fall far short of the facts—as has always happened in the past history of scientific prediction." At the same time, Clarke says, "I have … not been afraid to use my imagination where I thought fit."¹⁴ All this evidence, at first glance perhaps partially contradictory, in fact points to a fairly subtle distinction that Clarke makes in fiction and nonfiction alike: he does not hesitate to use his imagination, but it is an educated imagination, ranging within the limits of the possible, and it rejects for both fiction and nonfiction anything he believes to be an absolute contradiction of known scientific fact or conceivable scientific possibility.

Clarke doubtless applies this test a bit more rigorously to nonfiction than to fiction, yet there is little if anything in Childhood's End that is flatly impossible or that strains credulity to the breaking point in the context in which it occurs. This statement may seem startling: let us examine it. Part of the secret is that human achievements, on the whole, are held to the limitations of possibilities presently envisioned by science (indeed some, like an oral contraceptive or flight to the Moon, have come to pass since Clarke wrote the book—these give a kind of accidental realism to Clarke's picture of the future, similar to that created by some of Jules Verne's inventions). The principle of the effect of time dilation that works on Jan's flight to the Overlords' planet to age him only a few months during eighty terrestrial years is now accepted by scientists as a consequence of Einstein's theory of relativity. Even mankind's recognition of the Overlords' form from the heritage of man's legendary past—which is "not precisely a memory … but a premonition" from the future—is paralleled by Clarke's statement in Profiles that "we cannot rule out even such outrageous possibilities as limited access to the future," since "even the theory of relativity may only hint at the ultimate queerness of time."¹⁵ The peace and plenty flowing from factories manned by robots are of course within the reach if not quite the present grasp of human technology. And mankind is already near or even past the stage of "something like five hundred hours of radio and TV … over the various channels" every day with "the average viewing time per person … three hours a day."¹⁶

The technological accomplishments of the Overlords are harder to reconcile with presently known scientific principles, and here fiction perhaps tends to take precedence at least over present fact, though not with any violation of fictional probability. Coming from a distant star with a different evolutionary history, they can logically be supposed to have developed powers that are beyond the reach of human science. And even the light trail of their Stardrive (in Profiles Clarke speaks of "space-drive," the term "coined for … nonexistent but highly desirable propulsion systems" which are "certainly beyond the present horizon of science," but will probably become possible in the future¹⁷) is presented as "a visible proof of relativ-ity—the bending of light in the presence of a colossal gravitational field" (8). The speed they achieve in their ships—"more than 99 percent of the speed of light" (12)—is just within the theoretical limit possible according to scientific theory.¹⁸ Their television-like machine which, "operating on principles that no one could imagine," opened "a window into the past" and made five thousand years of human history instantly accessible (6), could not be built with our present technologies, but Clarke says in Profiles that "the idea of observing the past does not involve any logical contradictions or scientific absurdities, and … only a very foolish man would claim that it is impossible."¹⁹

The Overmind itself is no harder to believe in than other metaphysical realities. And Clarke's factual description of the vastness of our galaxy and the immensity of space beyond prepares us to accept Karellen's statement that there are "powers and forces that lie among the stars—forces beyond anything that you can ever imagine" (14). Forces among which the Overmind is entirely credible.

Perhaps Clarke's explanation of his stance in The Exploration of Space can serve as well as an appropriate statement for Childhood's End: "I do not expect all my readers to accept unreservedly everything I suggest as a possibility of the future," he says. But those who question should try to imagine what their great-grandfathers would have thought "if, by some miracle, they could have visited London Airport or Idlewild on a busy day and watched the Constellations and Stratocruisers coming in from all corners of the earth."²⁰

Thus Clarke makes subtle distinctions between fiction and nonfiction (in Profiles he speaks of the "boundary posts … which mark the border between science and fantasy"²¹), yet in both he exercises a disciplined imagination. In both he is also interested in many of the same concepts and ideas. The doubts arising from the static nature of the utopia in Childhood's End are paralleled by his statement in Profiles: "Civilization cannot exist without new frontiers; it needs them both physically and spiritually…. We do not live by bread alone; we need adventure, variety, novelty, romance." Exploration of space will thus "trigger a new renaissance and break the patterns into which our society, and our arts, must otherwise freeze."²² Sometimes even the phrasing suggests the closeness of the parallel between Profiles of the Future and Childhood's End. Consider these passages, the first from the chapter in Profiles on "Space, the Unconquerable," the second from Karellen's speech disclosing that Jan has been discovered as a stowaway:

The detailed examination of all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world is a far smaller task than the exploration of the universe.

                               (Profiles, p. 121)

In challenging [space], you would be like ants attempting to label and classify all the grains of sand in all the deserts of the world.

                            (Childhood's End, 14)

Both books emphasize the fact that in space there are many wonders. The concept of the Overmind is paralleled by this passage in Profiles: "There may be intellects among the stars as vast as worlds, or suns … or solar systems. Indeed, the whole galaxy, as Olaf Stapledon suggested long ago, may be evolving toward consciousness, if it has not already done so. It contains, after all, ten times as many suns as there are cells in a human brain."²³ And, says Clarke in Profiles, "One can imagine a time when men who still inhabit organic bodies are regarded with pity by those who have passed on to an infinitely richer mode of existence, capable of throwing their consciousness or sphere of attention instantaneously to any point on land, sea, or sky where there is a suitable sensing organ. In adolescence we leave childhood behind; one day there may be a more portentous adolescence, when we bid farewell to the flesh." This transformation may involve the replacement of our species as we know it: "No individual exists forever; why should we expect our species to be immortal? Man, said Nietzsche, is a rope stretched between the animal and the superhuman—a rope across the abyss. That will be a noble purpose to have served."²⁴ Karellen's metaphor, when he explains mankind's fate, substitutes a bridge for Nietzsche's rope, but the idea is the same.

Clarke the scientist who assesses the possibilities of the future is never far from Clarke the storyteller, telling a story that indeed "rattles people's teeth and shakes their convictions," that surprises because—to adapt Clarke's remarks about space travel quoted above to science itself—"scientific possibilities are sufficiently sensational to require no additional embellishments."

The limits of the possible and the probable also apply to the relationship between theme, narrative line, and characterization. The reader expects only certain themes to emerge in a particular kind of story. Childhood's End it seems to me, though it has many sub-themes, is primarily about different kinds of evolution. We are alerted to this through the narrative movement from utopia and golden age to the utopia of New Athens to the Total Breakthrough by the children and the destruction of the old world, as well as by the contrast in the development of the characters of the Overlords and the humans. But we could not have predicted ahead of time the exact form that theme of evolution would take.

The first kind of evolution—a human social and technological one—leads, with the Overlords' help, to the establishment of utopia and the golden age of peace and plenty. It is apparently achieved with a minimum of interference or direction from the Overlords. They simply abolish the possibility of war and push men toward a true world federation, while leaving a variety of existing governments to carry this out. Mankind can then use the resources that went into war and defense in more productive ways to develop new technologies and create a better standard of living. The Overlords give few direct orders, though they do issue an edict against cruelty to animals, and they ban nuclear weapons and space travel beyond the moon. In his speech to mankind at the time of the children's Total Breakthrough, however, Karellen reveals the true purpose of the Overlords; and we realize their influence has been more direct and pervasive than it first appeared to be: "We interrupted your development on every cultural level, but in particular we checked all serious work on paranormal phenomena." Improvement of the human standard of living, the bringing of justice and peace—"all that vast transformation diverted you from the truth," Karellen says. The truth, of course, was that the Overlords were sent by the Overmind to save man from destroying himself either through nuclear holocaust or through opening the "Pandora's box" of paranormal forces he was not yet able to understand. ("For the physicists could only have ruined the earth: the paraphysicists could have spread havoc to the stars.") Thus the Overlords made mankind "mark time while those [paranormal] powers developed" which would eventually enable mankind to "make the jump to the next stage" (20). Ironically, what has appeared to be an advance into utopia has in fact been only a kind of holding operation.

The utopia that was being developed also had its ambiguities. On the positive side were a constantly rising standard of living. "Ignorance, disease, poverty, and fear had virtually ceased to exist." "Crime had practically vanished." The "face of the world had been remade" and the "cities that had been good enough for earlier generations had been rebuilt." The "extreme mobility of the new society" had "washed away the last barriers between the different tribes of mankind" (6). No one "worked at tasks they did not like" (7); the average work week was reduced to twenty hours—and machines did all the work "of a routine mechanical nature" (10). All the "ordinary necessities of life were virtually free" (6). At the same time, education had helped men to know how to spend their leisure: "the general standard of culture was at a level which would once have seemed fantastic," and "everyone was given the fullest opportunity of using what brain he had" (10). Boredom, "the supreme enemy of all utopias," was not yet, at least, a problem; for "a well-stocked mind is safe from boredom" (6, 10). "The age of reason … had now really arrived" (10)—a fitting and triumphant conclusion brought about through the influence of those infinitely reasonable beings, the Overlords.

Yet we have had numerous hints that all was not well. Though we are obviously meant to side with Stormgren against Wainwright, we cannot altogether discount the latter's protest that the Overlords "have taken our liberty" (2). Karellen refers to himself as "a civil servant trying to administer a colonial policy" (2), and all our usual doubts about colonialism come into play. Humans "felt, with good reason, much as a cultured Indian of the nineteenth century must have done as he contemplated the British Raj.²⁵ The invaders had brought peace and prosperity to Earth—but … even the most peaceable of contacts between races at very different cultural levels had often resulted in the obliteration of the more backward society" (3). The Overlords' "window into the human past" served to take away the divinity from "all mankind's multitudinous messiahs"—"all the world's religions cannot be right," Karellen had said (2)—and "the fall of religion had been paralleled"—surprisingly enough—"by a decline in science." Though human curiosity remained, "the heart had been taken out of fundamental scientific research," since "it seemed futile to spend a lifetime searching for secrets that the Overlords had probably uncovered ages before." At the same time "the end of strife and conflict of all kinds had also meant the virtual end of creative art" (6). As Karellen puts it in his speech disclosing the Overlords' true purpose, "We have … inhibited, by the contrast between our civilizations, all … forms of creative achievement." This was "a secondary effect" of their presence and Karellen thinks it "of no importance" (20).

But some humans do find it important that "when the Overlords had abolished war and hunger and disease, they had also abolished adventure" (8), or degraded it to the level of a "kind of game—almost a planetary sport" of rescuing people from the dangerous places they have built their houses "under the summit of Everest, or looking out through the spray of Victoria Falls" (10). Sports of various other kinds now accounted for "nearly a quarter of the human race's total activity" and "entertainment, in all its branches, was the greatest single industry" (10). True, man had been freed from "the last remnants of the Puritan aberration" in his sexual life (6) and had discovered "there was nothing sinful in leisure as long as it did not degenerate into mere sloth" (6). But the hints of decadence, purposelessness, and spiritual decay are real: "among all the distractions and diversions of a planet … well on the way to becoming one vast playground," there are still some who ask, "Where do we go from here?" (10). Even "when the external world has granted all it can, there still remain the searchings of the mind and the longings of the heart." (8) Jan puts it somewhat differently but feels the same frustration: "Probably the Overlords have their reasons for keeping us in the nursery…." (12).

Jan escapes from the nursery on the Overlord ship; George hopes to trade the frustrations of one utopia for a greater sense of fulfillment in another utopia. Though Jean thinks the people at New Athens are "a lot of cranks," George thinks they should at least investigate this colony that has been established especially for artists.

New Athens, the second evolutionary direction suggested by the book, contrasts with the rest of civilization at that point in history; for it is purely a social utopia rather than a social and technological one. It looks backward to values that have been lost, rather than forward to benefits that technology could bring. It attempts to give its citizens some of the best things from the human past by providing independence from the Overlords, freedom from the tyranny of mankind's technology and prosperity, and an opportunity "to build up an independent, stable cultural group with its own artistic traditions" (15). It attempts to make life more natural, less dependent on machines, by removing "unnecessary frills" and reinstituting certain kinds of human activity. Jean finds it "slightly disturbing" at first that there is a kitchen (rather than service from Food Central) and she "wondered darkly if she would be expected to make the family's clothes as well," though that proves not to be required (15).

Professor Chance says enthusiastically that only in New Athens is there "initiative." The rest of the human race "has peace, it has plenty—but it has no horizons" (17). But ironically "New Athens was not a natural and spontaneous growth" (15). It was "a piece of applied social engineering," worthy of B. F. Skinner's Walden Two, which, incidentally, had appeared five years before Childhood's End, and with which New Athens shares some similarities.²⁶ "Giant computing machines" had been used in planning New Athens and "some exceedingly complex mathematics" had determined the desirable size of the colony, its mix of types of people, and the nature of its constitution (15).

The colony represents a vigorous response to the fear that the Overlords, perhaps inadvertently, are "destroying the soul of man" (15). Its citizens each have an ideal—"to do something, however small it may be, better than anyone else" (17). And the "conflict of minds with similar interests" has "produced worthwhile results in sculpture, music, literary criticism, and film-making…. Time played an essential part in the colony's most successful artistic achievements" (15). The reason for the concern with time is probably that the Overlords have forbidden the exploration of space and humans feel inhibited even from exploring the space around them. Thus painting, a spatial art form, "still languished," while the cartoon film, a temporal one, has produced New Athens' "most successful experiments." But the group of artists and scientists that has "done least" but has "attracted the greatest interest" and also produced "the greatest alarm" is working on "total identification." The goal is to make an audience forget it is an audience and become "part of the action." Thus "a man could become … any other person, and could take part in any conceivable adventure, real or imaginary. He could even be a plant or an animal…. The prospect was dazzling," but "many also found it terrifying" (15).

This brightest possibility of New Athens also suggests where the colony's weakness lies. Its evolution has not been natural, but everything has been carefully planned; and there is a kind of hothouse artificiality about all its achievements. George asks Jean what kind of fish to catch for dinner, yet he "had never caught anything" (16). The "archaic occupation" of knitting has been revived and become a "craze," but "such fashions came and went on the island with some rapidity" (16); they do not become a truly functional part of a way of life. Though each person has the ideal of excelling at something, actually achieving it is not regarded as very important (17). Inhabitants of New Athens may be happier than they would be elsewhere, but their life and art are not really so much more vital than those of the rest of mankind: the cartoon film is a rather artificial and nonhuman form. To compare total identification with Total Breakthrough is at once to see the paleness of life in New Athens—evolution cannot flow backward and aim at recapturing the glories of the past, nor can it be satisfactorily programed—even by a giant computer. The Overlord Inspector, Thanthalteresco, sums it up well when he says New Athens is "an interesting experiment, but cannot in any way affect the future" (17).

The third kind of evolution is that of the children who achieve Total Breakthrough. This evolution is spontaneous and erratic, not planned. It is not social nor technological but spiritual and ontological. It is achieved largely without the Overlords' help, for they can only watch, assess its coming symptoms, and protect the children so they may at last reach a totally different state, in which both body and individual personality are left behind. It thus leads to the end of their childhood and also terminates the childhood of the human race itself; for, as Karellen says, "There is no way back, and no future for the world you know…. You have given birth to your successors" (20).

Mankind has been presented throughout the book as in its childhood, thus making possible the final irony that the children can evolve into a more advanced state than the adults are capable of achieving through their utopias. We are often reminded of childish characteristics of individuals. Stormgren thinks Joe resembles "an overgrown baby" (3) and there has been "childish" criticism of Stormgren by members of the Freedom League (4). Stormgren himself has a childish fascination with "violent physical action." The fascination must have arisen during his kidnapping, he thinks, unless "he was merely approaching second childhood more quickly than he had supposed" (4). This same childish fascination with violence has been characteristic of mankind generally: if the Overlords had not "banned nuclear weapons and all the other deadly toys" man was accumulating, mankind would have destroyed itself. Though Thanthalteresco suggests that the Overlords' relationship with mankind is more like that of colonial power and colony than that of adult and child, actually the two come to much the same thing: colonial powers tend to treat their colonies like children.

Yet although we might expect the Overlords to help mankind grow out of childhood, quite the opposite is true: Jan frets at being kept "in the nursery" (12), and in order to grow up he has to travel forty light years away to the Overlords' planet and back. George doesn't want to grow up and is "terrified" at the "mystery" of the universe, though he is honest and recognizes his own situation clearly. It seemed to George "that men were like children amusing themselves in some secluded playground, protected from the fierce realities of the outer world. Jan Rodricks had resented that protection and had escaped from it…. But … George … had no wish to face whatever lurked in the unknown darkness, just beyond the little circle of light cast by the lamp of Science" (16).

Childish adults will not part with the comforting lamp of science, but the children have no such reluctance. Or, to put it more precisely, they are more receptive to paranormal forces, since their lives have not been so fully conditioned by science as yet. They are at first presented—largely through Jeffrey and Jenny—as normal children, though Jeff's experience during the tidal wave makes us realize that there is a mystery connected with him. But even after that there is "nothing unusual" about Jeff, at least for a while; and meantime we get a picture of him as a normal, though perhaps in some ways rather precocious seven-year-old boy. Like the rest of the New Athens colonists, Jeff thinks himself part of the elite. They will "take mankind to the heights that the Overlords had reached—and perhaps beyond" (17). He has no premonition of the much more unusual destiny that awaits him and the other children.

Then the dreams begin and it is obvious, as Karellen and Rashaverak observe Jeff and identify the places he visualizes, that the boy is "dreaming" of real places far away in space. Rashaverak explains to George what is happening. Jeff's and Jean's telepathic powers have enabled them to merge with other minds and "carry back memories of the experience when they are isolated once more." It is as if "every man's mind is an island … linked [to other islands] by the bedrock from which they spring." If the oceans should vanish they "would all be part of one continent, but their individuality would have gone." At the end of the interview his advice to George to enjoy the children while they may—advice which could be given to any parent under more normal circumstances—has special poignance: "it contained a threat and a terror it had never held before" (18).

The stages leading to Total Breakthrough are unpredictable: they are erratic, seemingly purposeless, and different in different individuals, if we are to judge from the cases of Jeff and Jenny. Jenny sleeps in a "chrysalis state," but "round her now was a sense of latent power so terrifying that Jean could no longer bear to enter the nursery," and even in sleep she can control objects at a distance. Jeff, on the other hand, "no longer slept," and unlike Jenny he possesses "no abnormal powers over physical objects." George and Jean realize that Jenny is "beyond their assistance, and beyond their love," and they cling to Jeff, who still knows them, though they can see his personality "dissolving hour by hour before their very eyes." Knowledge is flooding into his mind "from somewhere or somewhen" which will completely destroy his separate personality (19). Meanwhile, Jeff and Jenny are no longer alone, as the metamorphosis spreads like an epidemic to all the children of mankind.

Karellen, in his final speech to mankind explains what is happening to the children as they "make the jump to the next stage" through the development of paranormal powers. The Overmind is shaping the children as a potter shapes clay on his wheel, in order—the Overlords believe—to "grow" and "extend its powers and its awareness of the universe." It is "by now … the sum of many races" and it has "left the tyranny of matter behind." The transformation of the children "will be cataclysmic" and humans "will never understand them—will never even be able to communicate with their minds," for they will not possess separate minds but will have become "a single entity," just as men are "the sums of [their] myriad cells." Karellen concludes: "You will not think them human, and you will be right," for the last step in human evolution will take the children totally beyond the human realm. Yet though they may become "utterly alien" and look on mankind's "greatest achievements as childish toys," they will be "something wonderful" and mankind can take pride and comfort in having created it (20).

The rest of the process of Total Breakthrough is shown to Jan on the television screen when he has returned from the Overlord planet to find himself the last human survivor on Earth. The first phase, which Jan is not shown, is presumably a continuation of the process we have seen in Jeff and Jenny. Five years later, Jan is told, the second phase had begun and as the camera swoops down Karellen warns him that he is "not watching human children," and hence that human standards no longer apply. We share Jan's shock as we see these beings that are supposedly evolving into a higher, more spiritual state "naked and filthy, with matted hair obscuring their eyes." They "might have been savages," Jan thought, "engaged in some complex ritual dance." Most shocking of all are their faces—"emptier than the faces of the dead…. There was no more emotion or feeling here than in the face of a snake or an insect." Karellen warns Jan that he is "searching for something that is no longer there," since "they have no more identity than the cells in [the human] body. But linked together, they are something much greater than you." The pattern of the dance seems meaningless and the dance ends when the third phase begins and they stand motionless, "their faces … merging into a common mold." Then suddenly they exert their powers and all the forms of life, both plant and animal, surrounding them "flickered out of existence and were gone." They have continued to test their powers, Karellen says, "but they have done nothing that seems to have any purpose" (23). Our preconceptions that spiritual development should have purpose, order, and beauty have been thoroughly shaken—yet we realize in retrospect that if the body and the physical world are to be left behind, it is appropriate that they should be neglected as of no importance and should even become ugly.

Total Breakthrough ends with the destruction of the world in a scene which recalls though it does not parallel the Book of Revelation. The children—now really no longer children—have continued to test their powers, and Jan waits, sitting before the electronic piano and filling the air "with his beloved Bach." Then the Overlords leave as "they [emerge] from their long trance" and begin to tamper with the Moon's motion. "They are still playing," Rashaverak tells Jan. "What logic is there to the actions of a child? And in many ways the entity that your race has become is still a child. It is not yet ready to unite with the Overmind." But that union comes soon with the apparition of the "great cloud" that looks "as if the stars are tangled in a ghostly spider's web," which begins "to pulse with light, exactly as if it were alive." The children are "on their way at last," leaving the last remnants of matter behind as "a great burning column, like a tree of fire" appears. There are spectacular displays of color in an auroral storm. Then everything movable follows out into space, the earth itself looks like glass and begins to dissolve, and there is the final blinding flash of light. But just before the end Jan has felt "a great wave of emotion … a sense of fulfillment, achievement." (24)

Clarke describes these final wonders with a vividness that makes them truly awesome. In general his style is at its best in describing events in space, whether it is the lights of New York that "glowed in the skyline like a dawn frozen in the act of breaking" (3) or the wonders of distant planets that are glimpsed in Jeff's dreams. These have a beauty and fascination that is overpowering—the world with six colored suns and the world with "a searing ghost at the frontiers of the ultra-violet," the scene in space with "only the stars in the velvet night, and hanging against them a great red sun that was beating like a heart" (18). At the conclusion the possibility of destruction that has hovered over the entire book has come to pass—and it is both more terrible and more beautiful than we could have imagined, partly because it is of a piece with the other wonders of the cosmos that Clarke has described. Both Jan and the children have indeed recaptured the sense of adventure that had been lost in utopia and hardly recaptured in New Athens, even though Jan cannot follow the evolutionary line to Total Breakthrough. Human evolution, Clarke seems to be saying, cannot be predicted, hurried, or controlled. It may lead ultimately to a change even more vast than that in, say, the fall of man in Milton's Paradise Lost or the attainment of heaven in Dante's Divine Comedy.

When Clarke describes the way the Overlords ended discrimination in South Africa, soon after their arrival on earth, he says, "All that happened was that as the sun passed the meridian at Cape Town it went out…. Somehow, out in space, the light of the sun had been polarized by two crossed fields so that no radiation could pass … the next day the government of South Africa announced that full civil rights would be restored to the white minority" (2). The surprise at the end is one of Clarke's most effective stylistic devices—the matter-of-fact statement of a startling fact or truth about the future which is the opposite of what the reader would have supposed from his knowledge of the present. This little incident is almost a paradigm of the entire book. The Overlords, seen as powerful forces for good, turn out to have the physical form of devils. The utopia which brings peace and material prosperity leads not to universal happiness but to spiritual malaise and restlessness. The experiment at New Athens designed to recover and revitalize the old values proves instead the impossibility of doing that. The highest achievement of mankind has a nonhuman result—Total Breakthrough eventuates in the destruction of the world as well as the transmutation of human achievement into the realm of the Overmind. At every turn, the reader's expectations have been met with surprises. But those surprises are not arbitrary or misleading, because they have a logic rooted in the development of narrative, character, and theme.

James Blish says, "The writer or reader who still thinks an exploding star is inherently more wonderful than the mind and heart of the man who wonders at it is going to run out of these peripheral wonders sooner or later…."²⁷Childhood's End has its peripheral wonders but they come from a rich imagination which weaves them into the texture of the narrative where they become more central. And that imagination can also enter the human heart and the human brain and stir a real sense of wonder there.

Notes

1. Holiday magazine, as quoted in a biographical sketch of Arthur C. Clarke in Expedition to Earth (New York: Ballantine, 1975).

2. Thomas E. Sanders, ed., Speculations (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Glencoe Press, 1973), p. 2.

3. Arthur C. Clarke, Across the Sea of Stars (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1959). The quotation is from Clifton Fadiman's Introduction.

4. Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood's End (New York: Ballantine, 1976). The quotation is by Gilbert Highet.

5. James Blish (William Atheling, Jr., pseud.), The Issue at Hand (Chicago: Advent Publishers, 1964), p. 127.

6. Arthur C. Clarke, ed., Time Probe: The Sciences and Science Fiction (New York: Dell, 1966), pp. 9-10.

7. The opening sentence to the fairy tale I made up. The others are from Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar.

8. NOTE: Numbers in parentheses after a quotation indicate chapter.

9. And to lead to one of Clarke's wittiest touches when "The London Daily Mirror made matters much worse by suggesting that the Spaniards adopt cricket as a new national sport."

10. The Overmind, too, has its limitation, according to Rashaverak, and has failed when it has "attempted to act directly upon the minds of other races."

11. Blish, The Issue at Hand, p. 128.

12. Arthur C. Clarke, "Introduction," Across the Sea of Stars.

13. Clarke, Profiles of the Future (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. xv.

14. Clarke, The Exploration of Space (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951), pp. xi-xii.

15. Clarke, Profiles of the Future, p. 139.

16. Ibid., p. 141.

17. Ibid., p. 56.

18. Cf. the discussion of "The Quest for Speed," in chapter 6 of Profiles of the Future, esp. pp. 62, 68-69.

19. Clarke, Profiles of the Future, p. 128.

20. Clarke, The Exploration of Space, p. xii.

21. Clarke, Profiles of the Future, p. 229.

22. Ibid., p. 83.

23. Ibid., p. 185. Stapledon was indeed Clarke's predecessor in some of these ideas.

24. Clarke, Profiles of the Future, p. 209.

25. Later in the book Clarke has Thanthalteresco point out a major difference between the Overlords and the British in India: "The British had no real motives for going there … except such trivial and temporary ones as trade or hostility to other European powers" (17).

26. Among these are the method of selecting entrants to the colony and the government through committees with rotating membership.

27. Blish, The Issue at Hand, p. 127.

Merritt Abrash (essay date winter 1989)

SOURCE: Abrash, Merritt. "Utopia Subverted: Unstated Messages in Childhood's End." Extrapolation 30, no. 4 (winter 1989): 372-79.

[In the following essay, Abrash examines the nature of Clarke's vision of an utopian world in Childhood's End, relating its objectives and effects with regards to other literary manifestations of utopia.]

Science fiction, dealing as it frequently does with societies removed in space or time from our own, includes portrayals of many utopias. The great majority of these, however, are incomplete in scope and superficial in content, for the simple reason that their raison d'etre is to serve as setting or plot device rather than present a serious utopian vision. A science fiction story which chances to take place in a utopian setting is a very different matter than one in which a utopian society in its fullness is integral to plot or theme; only the latter is properly designated utopian literature as well as science fiction.

Among the few science fiction stories featuring a detailed utopia inhabited by human beings is Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, of which the entire middle third—subtitled "The Golden Age"—takes place in a society which meets many criteria of an ideal society in the secular Western tradition. But despite its breadth and depth of presentation, which can stand comparison with the general run of serious utopian fiction, utopian scholars have ignored Childhood's End —no doubt looking askance at the utopian pretensions (as they see it) of a work which is, taken as a whole, science fiction through and through. Science fiction scholars, meanwhile, spare little attention for the utopian element, whether from lack of interest or because it is easily viewed as mere background for the novel's primary themes.

Background, yes, but mere, no: Clarke's vision of a near-future utopian earth is as thoughtful, consistent, and plausible as most which have been admitted into the utopian canon. At first reading, to be sure, the utopia seems little more than an ingenious compilation of utopian ways and means familiar from various earlier visions, notably the Marxist. If this were so, seriousness of intent and clarity of analysis would hardly be sufficient to justify calling Childhood's End a significant utopian work. But careful consideration reveals that, alongside the obvious similarities in material conditions and human options, Clarke's vision differs fundamentally from Marx—and, by extension, from the entire utopian tradition of which Marx was part—through messages subtly woven into the larger plot which it serves.

The attractions and shortcomings of Clarke's utopian thinking in this novel are of more than academic interest. Childhood's End is, after all, an enormously popular book: the latest Ballantine paperback is a fifty-fifth printing, and there have been numerous additional printings in other countries and languages. As long ago as 1978, the cover of the Ballantine paperback boasted, "Over 1 Million Copies In Print," which of course means that the novel had already been read by many times that number of young readers. It is, in fact, almost certainly the in-depth utopia most widely read by the young during this past third of a century (counting Brave New World, the most likely challenger, as dystopian rather than utopian).

Many Childhood's End readers, past and present, possess little sophistication in the world of ideas, and will never in their lives read a utopian novel. For them, exposure at an impressionable age to a plausible utopian vision may be a significant influence. If one source of current popular attitudes toward utopia is a work by an author of Clarke's stature—a work, therefore, with a cachet of serious thought—in a genre with readers in all social classes, it is important to become aware of the messages conveyed. Once this is done, it will be apparent that the utopian condition carefully described in Childhood's End serves, in the context in which Clarke places it, to subvert major tenets of not only the Marxist vision, but the western utopian tradition as a whole.

A brief synopsis of Childhood's End: As technological advances increase the likelihood of humanity's self-destruction, alien spaceships representing an incomparably superior technology appear over Earth's major cities, and non-human "Overlords" take control of public policy throughout the world. The Overlords' only permanent direct interference is to prohibit war, but this one step enables humanity to pour its energies into productive channels, and in little more than half a century human society everywhere has become utopian, in the sense of complete material comfort and the maximum opportunity of individual fulfillment for all.

Utopia, however, proves to be only a temporary stage until the real purpose of the Overlords' presence manifests itself: the transformation of all human children into a superhuman entity destined to merge with the "Overmind," a cosmic force of supreme power and intelligence ceaselessly probing the universe to find promising races to gather into itself. The Overlords are revealed to be merely agents of the Over-mind, charged with the preparation of the chosen races for an ultimate transcendence by the latter's children. Out of pity for the adult generation which is destined to utterly lose its young, Earth's Overlords take pains to provide humans with the happiest possible conditions during the preparatory phase—hence the utopia. The novel ends with all children under ten years of age becoming an undifferentiated mass of energy which converts the planet itself into fuel for its cosmic union with the Overmind.

It should be obvious from this summary that the utopian aspect of Childhood's End is marginal to the main theme. Even as, in "The Golden Age" segment, the utopia is being outlined in considerable detail along with glimpses of the lives of characters living in it, both plot and theme are developing in quite other directions. Nevertheless, the space and care devoted to the utopian element as such invites consideration as more than mere background, and Clarke clearly intended to portray an unreservedly ideal society: "By the standards of all earlier ages, it was Utopia. Ignorance, disease, poverty, and fear had virtually ceased to exist. The memory of war was fading into the past" (71).

The basis of the utopia is unlimited production. "Production had become largely automatic: the robot factories poured forth consumer goods in … unending streams" (71-72). "Everything was so cheap that the necessities of life were free, provided as a public service by the community" (112). This is, of course, another way of saying "To each according to his wants," but goes all such communist formulations one better by eliminating the "From each according to his work" part of it. No one is bound by the constraints traditionally considered inseparable from industrial mass production.

This is because every person on Earth can choose to work either for the pleasure of it, to create desired luxuries, or not at all. The choice has no effect on personal economic security or on the pool of social wealth—the latter is so vast that the former cannot possibly come into question. As a result, participation in production of goods—a hallmark of virtue in socialist utopias—has no more social respectability than activities aimed at personal fulfillment. Constructive use of leisure has high status, although sloth does not. But even the slothful are unimpeded in their exercise of sloth (if there is such a thing): the huge conventionally motivated majority recognizes that the organization and officialdom required to relate reward to performance would be more of a social burden than supporting the "drones" could possibly be. And such parasites are few in number—understandably, since the average work week is only twenty hours and "no one worked at tasks they did not like" (85).

The politics of Clarke's utopia are less easily definable. National governments still exist, but lack sovereignty. The Overlords keep a constant eye upon them, but interfere only to prevent war or terminate oppression or corruption. Formally, therefore, the state does not wither away. However, in the total absence of armies, taxes, and commercial legalities, it is hard to think of what is left for the state to do (traffic regulations for the ubiquitous aircars?), and thus the survival of governments is reasonably compatible with the Marxist axiom that the state has no rationale without property-based functions of expropriation and control.

Thus, although the loss of effective sovereignty implied by Clarke is certainly not the same as the withering away of the state as forecast by Marx and En-gels (and although the role of the Overlords is an extremely doubtful analogy to the role in theory of the Community Party), the political outcome in Childhood's End is hardly distinguishable from the Marxist vision: the administration of things replaces the government of persons. Differentials in wealth, power, and opportunity have no chance to develop, and individual fulfillment can proceed free of institutional pressures and influences.

Most other aspects of the utopia stem from its economic foundations, which is what any Marxist socialist would expect. Crime is greatly reduced: crimes of property vanish entirely, of course, while those of passion become rare because humanity, with its economic-anxiety-based psychological problems resolved, behaves more rationally. Traditional vices are viewed as nothing but eccentricity or bad manners, since no economic levers exist to utilize them for exploitation. General sex mores, wholly dissociated from economic considerations, are the logical outcome of universal availability of oral contraceptives and paternity tests, both infallible. The freedom to travel anywhere at any time, without cost, breaks down the remaining distinctions between geographical segments of humanity, a process also furthered by a planetwide language and intensive popular use of media. The historic religions have no followings in what has become a wholly secular era. The environment has been reshaped, with a marked reduction in the size of cities and their economic and cultural predominance. Finally, the tempo of life has slowed to a level allowing participation, without motivations of obsession or prestige, by all humans in whatever forms of learning, expression, and recreation attract them.

Clarke's delineation of utopia is therefore not only very much in line with the Marxist vision by positing a basically uniform worldwide society of high technological sophistication, but features several of the major (although not invariable) criteria of the broader Western utopian tradition: no armies, no taxes, free provision of necessities, enlightened political control (if any), and unfettered fulfillment of individual abilities. The novel expresses no reservations about the completeness of this utopian fulfillment—"Man-kind had achieved as much happiness as any race can ever know" (137)—but embeds it in a web of assumptions and implications which, in the final analysis, amounts to a profoundly negative judgment on the very notion of a human utopia.

The brief allusions to potential boredom and a planet "well on the way to becoming one vast playground" (113) are so perfunctory as to seem little more than pro forma homage to the most widespread real-life objection to any utopia promising free material comfort for all. And the paragraph which solemnly begins, "No Utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time," offers only brief cliches about the raising of sights and unsatisfied "searchings of the mind and … longings of the heart" (90). More serious is Clarke's insistence that the utopia results in both basic science and "really outstanding new works" of literature and art declining almost to the vanishing point. "The heart had been taken out of fundamental scientific research. It seemed futile to spend a lifetime searching for secrets that the Overlords had probably uncovered ages before," and, "the end of strife and conflict of all kinds had also meant the virtual end of creative art" (75).

These severe reservations are presented purely as assertions, unsupported by any serious arguments drawn from philosophy, psychology, or experience. As unconvincing as the triumphant increase in quality of culture may be in the Marxist scheme—or, for that matter, in Edward Bellamy's future Boston in Looking Backward ("no previous age of the world offers anything comparable" [116])—the claim that cultural creativity would drastically decline with the end of gross disharmony in human affairs seems even more unwarranted.

But quite apart from these obvious caveats on Clarke's part are four subtler aspects of the Childhood's End utopia which are at fundamental odds with the Western utopian tradition, insofar as the latter is embodied in the Marxist vision. None of these aspects are overtly stated in the novel, and may in part be unintentional by-products of plot and dominant themes. Nevertheless, they comprise a decidedly negative assessment of the significance and desirability of humanity's achievement of utopia.

1. There is no theoretical underpinning for the utopia in Childhood's End. Although unlimited production is its mainspring, economics as a factor in human behavior and organization is left floating in midair. All problems in the present world of scarcity evaporate in Clarke's world of abundance; the burgeoning of material production initiates an ideal society simply because that is what happens, without planning, method, or theory. Cause-and-effect seems reducible to this: abolition of war will lead to unlimited economic production which will lead to greater rationality and equitable relations among all humans.

It is difficult to take such a formulation, resting on no ascertainable theory of psychology, sociology, or his-tory, as anything more than novelistic license. It would be anathema not only to creators of comprehensive social analyses, such as Marx, but to utopian writers like Bellamy, Thomas More (Utopia), B. F. Skinner (Walden Two), and Ernest Callenbach (Ecotopia), who adhere passionately to particular theoretical assumptions as lodestars above the tangle of human experience.

2. Just as Childhood's End 's utopia has no roots in history or social science theory, so it has no issue in terms of an altered humanity. On the evidence of the novel itself, human nature is exactly the same after two generations of utopia as before. Of course people are more relaxed, less anxious, and have much less occasion for the exercise of troublesome emotions, but the participants in a cocktail party, to which Clarke devotes many pages of dialogue and description of personalities, are no different in word, deed, or character (romantic contretemps and the gossip about them are particularly familiar) than participants in such an event before utopia. The relationship between husband and wife presented in considerable detail not long before the novel's climax manifests frictions and emotional stresses quite as serious (or as petty, depending on taste) as comparable couples are likely to experience today.

Certainly the adults' reaction to the loss of their children—a vast tragedy for the parents, although a glorious transcendence for the children—does not reveal any enhancement of psychic resources. Many kill themselves: the inhabitants of New Athens, an experimental community intended to restore artistic creativity, blow themselves up with a nuclear bomb. Those who stay alive rapidly degenerate, and without exception refuse to have more children. Utopia seems to have had no other effect on humanity than to enable individuals to live happier lives. This is undoubtedly a criterion of most utopias, but as the only result is an equally far cry from pre-nineteenth century utopian writers, who usually considered the development of good character the primary objective, and the Marxists' approach, in which "human nature," to them always an outgrowth of economic stages, cannot help but alter markedly under an economy of abundance for all.

3. It is true that economic and political competition has ended in Childhood's End, and the replacement of competition with cooperation is one of the changes anticipated by socialist utopian writers. However, what replaces competition in the novel does not square with traditional concepts of cooperation. Under a regime in which the output of robot factories (cooperations not essential for economic objectives) enables everyone to satisfy material wants without institutional constraints (cooperation not essential for political objectives) as a precondition for unfettered individual fulfillment (cooperation not essential for individual objectives), cooperation serves no necessary function. This is sharply opposed to the socialist vision in which cooperation is valued as a form of human interaction for its own sake.

But, of course, all socialist scenarios demand cooperation in the first instance as an indispensable prerequisite for the transition to utopia, and the habits thus implanted could reasonably be expected to carry over into the achieved utopia. In Childhood's End, however, there has been no need for such habits to develop, because it is not human hands, thought, and will that effected the transition. The concept of utopia is inevitably distorted if an ideal society is imposed by extra-human forces; objective conditions identical with traditional utopian projections will be both effect and cause of profoundly different states of mind and behavioral attributes.

The Overlords do not prescribe the human utopia in detail, but explicitly rescue humanity from its fatal inadequacies—"Without our intervention, the Earth today would be a radioactive wilderness" (136)—and prevent humans from engaging in their penchant for cruelty, oppression, and corruption. Under such circumstances, the resulting utopia is far from a monument to human vision and skill: it is a gift to an ill-disciplined and not particularly worthy race, and a gift motivated by pity, not respect. (Clarke carries this theme even further in 2001, where human intelligence itself results from an Overmind-like power's manipulation of humanity's primate ancestors.)

Creators of utopias in the Western tradition would react angrily to the claim that utopia is beyond the power of human achievement, but that—to further the insult—humanity might, if it is very lucky, have utopia imposed upon it by paternalistic superior aliens. In particular, Marx, a vastly knowledgeable social scientist who spent his life arguing that man makes his own history, would be affronted—perhaps driven to devise a new slogan, "Utopians of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your humiliation!" Clarke's utopia, whatever his intentions, is in this respect a mockery of the utopian tradition.

4. Finally, the utopia in Childhood's End has no abiding value or even significance. Rather than being the ultimate product of the human brain, heart, and hand, it is a mere phase, fortuitously (thanks to the Overlords' kindness) filling the gap between humanity's blunderings and the Overmind's gift of transcendence. In both plot and theme, it is no more than a transition to what really matters for humanity. Not only does man not make his own history, but it would have no lasting importance even if he could.

Perhaps nothing in the novel challenges the utopian tradition more than this downgrading of utopia from fulfillment of humanity's highest aspirations to brief stop on the way to spiritual destiny. Marx would have almost all utopians for company in his outrage, and their ranks would surely be swelled by many who do not consider themselves utopians but simply take pride in human vision and initiative. One does not have to be a utopian to reject a portrayal of utopia as dispensable stage in a destiny outside human control, rather than an idealistic goal inspiring human accomplishment.

Childhood's End 's message about utopia is bleak. Utopia, the novel implies, is not achievable through human effort. Even if it were, the benefits it can bring humanity go no deeper than physical security and rather simple-minded pleasure. Even if it did somehow bring something more, this would weigh as nothing compared with a spiritual transcendence (conceived in terms of "mind" rather than religion), which it is, incidentally, powerless to initiate. At the same time as the millions of readers of Clarke's novel have been absorbing his fascinating science fictional concepts, they have been exposed to a subtle but decisively negative judgment on the Western utopian tradition, picturing the latter, even in a maximally humane and attractive realization, as harmful to the deeper qualities of human beings and irrelevant to more exalted forms of destiny for the human race.

Works Cited

Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward. New York: New American Library, 1960.

Clarke, Arthur C. Childhood's End. New York: Ballantine, 1953.

Robert H. Waugh (essay date spring 1990)

SOURCE: Waugh, Robert H. "The Lament of the Mid-wives: Arthur C. Clarke and the Tradition." Extrapolation 31, no. 1 (spring 1990): 36-53.

[In the following essay, Waugh analyzes how, throughout the various incarnations of Clarke's Childhood's End—which was originally released as a short novella—the various subplots reflecting the roles of men coalesce into a stronger and more successful narrative.]

In the nearly forty years since its publication the popularity of Childhood's End shows little sign of diminishing. The variety of its subplots and the fascination of its main character Karellen may offer a partial reason for that popularity, as may the peculiar élan of its climax; but the coherence of the subplots, the import of Karellen, and the significance of the climax remain disputed. Yet the subplots parallel one another closely—both in pattern and in the two types of characters from which they are constructed—and illuminate the imagery and themes of the novel, centering on Karellen. An analysis of these patterns confirms and extends the contention of several critics that the novel succeeds through an intricate coherence. It creates a manifold lament for human inadequacy and isolation, rooted in bureaucratic specialization and sexual failure.

I

These several subplots may be identified as a series of quests by different characters: in the prologue, Hoffmann and Schneider; in part I, Stormgren; in parts II and III, Jean, Jan, and the children—Jeffrey and Jennifer; and, overarching all, Karellen. The alien's quest, however, only becomes apparent after we have clarified the other characters and their interactions.

Hoffmann and Schneider may seem a special case, occupying barely five pages; yet they form a significant addition to the original novella, "Guardian Angel." Their quest may be taken as a paradigm of those comprising the rest of the novel. Isolated from each other and from their colleagues, they represent "the cleavage" (4) between East and West and every other distance from itself which humanity suffers. Though isolated, however, they are not without aid from the intelligence officers Sandmeyer and Grigorievitch, each of whom assumes the blindness of his counterpart: "The Russian research departments probably don't know what their own people are doing," Sandmeyer claims, and Grigorievitch echoes him, "They don't know a thing about us" (5). To the extent that both happen to be wrong they seem a parody of second-rate minds guessing at what lies beyond them. Hoffmann and Schneider need these men for their organizations and equipment—the two visionaries cannot transcend earth and its days and nights for "the eternal sunshine of space" (3) without them—but such utility has limits.

The quest begins in the sleep of a volcano forming an island in the center of the Pacific, Earth's largest ocean; Hoffmann is associated with its mountain peak. Schneider, on the other hand, is introduced standing beside Lake Baikal, the deepest lake on earth, lying in the middle of its largest continent. The two landscapes form mirror images, suggestive of the ascents and descents shaping the following narrative. These images fuse in the image of the iceberg at the end of the Prologue, a floating mountain with one-ninth of its mass breaking the waves and eight-ninths of its frozen waters submerged.

Between them Schneider and Hoffmann exemplify reactions to the appearance of the Overlords, ranging from the futility Schneider feels to the assent Hoffmann brings as they confront the supersession of human achievement as "nothing now" and the expectation of being "no longer alone" (7). The cleavage seems healed. A visionary, who has needed the help of a blind assistant, descends and ascends to accomplish a quest that results in the abrogation of human effort, human isolation, and human time. In such an abrogation opposites join. This is the pattern structuring the novel in its several subplots.

The oldest section of the novel dealing with the quest of Stormgren has the pattern twice. Several of Clarke's additions clarified the structure, but it was already present in the novella. Stormgren's quest, of which he is at first hardly aware, begins when he is in his chilly office at the top of the United Nations Building considering whether he ought to work so high above the people. Initially four men aid him, all of whom suffer from various limitations. Van Ryberg, while inventive in his various theories, is "not the man to take" (45) Stormgren's role when he is gone. Wainwright, who accuses other men of blindness, cannot see the Overlords (14); but he stirs the desire to see them in Stormgren, so that feelings of his own finitude rise with an evening meteor (26). The Welshman, who suggests that "instruments could be devised" (45) to detect Karellen, is blind. Even Joe, "an overgrown baby" (36), puts his finger "on the one weak spot in the Overlords' rule" (33) and shakes Stormgren out of his passivity. Waking in his captors' mine after their sleight of hand, Stormgren later escapes through the Overlords' control of personal time and returns to his tower rejuvenated with the idea that a quest to see the alien is possible.

To fulfill this quest he descends twice to see Duval—whose name means of the valley—in the basement of the United Nations, hoping the scientist can construct an instrument to detect Karellen. To Duval the request presents "a very pretty problem" that appeals to his pragmatism (47). To Stormgren success means the end of human isolation, for humans and the Overlords can "go together into the future"; in his personal isolation success means that "Karellen had trusted him" with "affection" and will someday "stand beside the grave of the first man ever to be his friend" (60). He is like the dog Fey to Jeffrey Gregg-son later in the novel—and in neither case does a reunion occur. Earth no longer exists when Karellen salutes those he had known (216). Notwithstanding Stormgren's satisfaction, we must wonder how successful his quest has been.

The next quest is Jean's, although she may be the character least aware of the quest she initiates. Nor does she impress the reader as a visionary; the novel follows the other quests closely, but Jean is shown mainly through the eyes of George Greggson, rather as Karellen is shown through the eyes of various humans. Though George seems more of a protagonist than she because of the thematic reason that moves him to the center of the novel, it is she, rather than he, who undergoes the pattern of the quest.

When introduced, Jean is coming down to Boyce's party in George's flyer, the Meteor, not out of any joy at Boyce's marriage (she is rather catty through most of the affair), but out of an interest in George—a successful interest as long as she does not tell him of previous psychic episodes "and perhaps scare him away" (102). Her other reason for coming, the séance that Boyce has arranged with her connivance (92), is less immediate; and the séance will not succeed unless they surrender to the apparently random motion of the plate across the hypnotic board. She is "flushed and excited" (94), perhaps "credulous" (93), drawn by what George regards as a "naïve and uncritical wonder" (148) like that of a child. But he nods off (96), and at the crucial question, whose answer is not open to her, she also seems asleep and faints (97). The séance is secondary to her contact with George, which they confirm in the flyer.

George initiates her second quest by proposing that they move to New Athens, despite its primitivism and the odd interest of its founders in time (145), upon an isolated island in the Pacific. Though the founders of New Athens are concerned with the human future, their plan seems regressive to her, but she agrees to move if the children love it (140). This part of the quest is fully realized through Jeffrey's fascination with the sea (147). When he is saved from the tsunami she takes a more active role, going to the psychologist with her own psychic experiences in mind. The children's dreams and the "strange synco-pation" (171) of Jennifer's rattle (another experiment in time) wake Jean to the discovery of her children's separation, so it is she, weeks later, who realizes when the random moment of the destruction of New Athens has arrived. George, who has helped bring her to this point, who was necessary to the conception of the children, is allowed only enough time for "a brief astonishment" before the island ascends atop its nuclear explosion (186). It becomes the volcano that lay quiescent at the beginning of the novel.

Jan passes through this pattern four times, first when he descends from the roof at Boyce's after he has seen the significant meteor (Hollow 74-76) to ask the all-important question at the séance, receive its answer with Jean's unconscious help, and visit the Royal Astronomical Society, set on the top floor of the Science Center by "some humorous civil servant" (105), to interpret the answer. In the second quest he consults Sullivan, as Stormgren had resorted to Duval, and sees another meteor in a luminous fish (114). With the pattern in mind, Sullivan's remark, "Aren't you going in the wrong direction?" (116) must seem misplaced: Jan must descend in order to ascend, hibernating (129) in the belly of the whale and suffering the distortion of time of a relativistic speed. The third time, he descends to the Overlords' planet, a clearly underworld experience: "If a man from medieval times could have seen this red-lit city, and the beings moving through it, he would certainly have believed himself in Hell" (191). Several commentators have explored this infernal imagery, especially Samuelson (199-202), Huntington (217), and Goldman (197-206); for our purposes, however, it is indifferent to the pattern whether the descent be to water or fire, and we may see in this fact, as often in the novel, a union of opposites that overarches its particulars. After enduring this place of specialization (192) and the "single giant eye" (194), he is brought to the surface to see, with his human eyes and senses, the integrative vision of the mountain-eye-volcano-cyclone, or whatever it is, and to interpret it for the Overlords, who cannot see as he can (197). Finally, he descends with them to the earth transformed, becomes as a child again "on a vast and empty plain" with a great parental voice booming out above (208), and accepts their help to sit in their place, to climb "into the great chair" (211), to see the end, and like the people of New Athens to rise upon the detonation of the planet. It is clearly in the subplot of Jan that the pattern receives its fullest elaboration.

The quest is also at work in the children. A minor version is Jeffrey's adventure on Sparta, an extinct volcano (138) which offers physical, pragmatic daring in contrast to the intellect of New Athens. Significantly, it is a fairyland (149)—just as his dog is named Fey, which by a folk-etymology has been associated with fairies, whereas its actual meaning designates one about to die. When he sees the ocean peel from the shore, its treasures revealed, and rushes out "eager to see what wonders would be uncovered next" (150), the Overlords rescue him. He must close his eyes not to see a boulder fused, though his feet feel the heat. The full descent for the children, the descent which all the others of the novel prepare and interpret, proceeds through the dreams with their odd time-distortions; the ascent is the mountains and the other visions they see in the dreams. Their ascent in the last chapters, after the dance and stasis, simply makes the outward sign of the interior vision the dreams hint at; their faces "emptier than the faces of the dead" (200), that vision is necessarily opaque to us. Towards the end of this paper we can offer the outline of a reading of it.

II

An important result of this analysis is its clarification that there are only two kinds of characters in the novel: the visionaries, who despite their detachments are capable of insight and breakthrough; and their helpers, the specialists, who cannot integrate knowledge without them and who frequently remain ignorant of the insights they themselves have prepared. Hoffmann and Schneider are kept by the superpowers in an isolation they do not seem to regret. Stormgren's detachment is emphatic as the novel opens; with his wife dead and his children grown, his connection to humanity has weakened (25). Jean is a special case, given her marriage, but her interest in psychic possibilities may stem from a need to feel connected, a need sharpened by the extrasensory apprehensions she receives from her unconceived children. In any case, the marriage diminishes to simple fondness (162); George does not seem to answer any passion in her. Jan too is isolated from others. His first love-affair has come to nothing; the serious detachment of incomprehension, of not being able to "imagine what had gone wrong," preoccupies him when his story opens (88). Later he asks his sister Maia to admit that "we never had very strong ties" (123). As for the children, long before breakthrough their concerns lie outside adult ken; Jennifer Anne is too young to say a word. And for all these visionaries—the rehabilitated Germans, the widower, the rejected lovers, the pre-pubescents—the breakthrough isolates them even further: it is a shearing asunder in loneliness (7), a sunlight dying on the edge of a lake (58), a sitting in a high chair, a standing with dead faces, a "seeking the union they could never achieve" (186). Breakthrough does not humanly connect.

Passion is sublimated into the integrative insights received in the various quests; the greatest passion these characters experience seems to be the rejuvenation and new zest for discovery that follow their descents. Shortly before he sights the ships, Hoffmann's mind returns to the Schneider he knew in his youth (3), and his feet "unconsciously … accelerated to the rhythm" of dance music (6). We have noted Stormgren's renewal and the renewal implicit in Jean's betrothal. Jan returns to London, which he has not visited since childhood, feeling "a schoolboy zest" (103). The children, of course, are children and become indistinguishably embryonic. A part of these characters' childlike recovery lies in their amused superiority to the specialists: the V-2 men feel it towards their intelligence adjuncts; Stormgren feels it towards Van Ryberg, Duval, and Joe; Jan feels it towards Boyce; the children feel it towards adults; and Jean feels it towards Rasheverak, so much that she must suppress her laughter at an incongruous image of the alien that suddenly occurs to her (78). In order for childhood to end, the visionary must return to it. In every case life takes on a new shape and meaning, sharply contrasted to the quotidian experience of the other characters. After such peak experiences, however, they collapse to a state that lies beyond pessimism and optimism.

One further, minor point may be made about the visionaries: so many of their names begin with the letter J—Jan, Jean, Jennifer, and Jeffrey—and most of these names are cognates of John/Yohanan, the Lord is gracious. I appreciate Hull's suggestion of the Janus nature of Jan (17), but surely more apt is John of Patmos and the apocalyptic vision. Jennifer's middle name, Anne, in Hebrew Hannah, is the element in Yohanan that means gracious. It is impossible not to sense in these names a knotted relation that has to do, from the viewpoint of the Overlords, with the gratuitous nature of breakthrough.

What can be said of those who help the visionaries? Clearly Duval, Sullivan, the Welshman, and Salomon are all capable as scientists and men of action, but in every case something is lacking. Duval and Sullivan are parodied by the dilettante Boyce, and the Welshman and Salomon by the nationalist Joe; the sectarianism of the latter group may be emphasized in Ruth Shoenberger who at the séance "had some objection to taking part,… which caused Benny to make obscurely sarcastic remarks about people who still took the Talmud seriously" (93). Yet like a scholar Ruth takes impeccable notes. With his narrow program which the Overlords obviate so simply, Wainwright is another of this group. Duval and Sullivan, especially, lack flair: it seems curious that the one "had never made a greater mark in the world of science" (48) and that the other had not achieved the "fame that sends a scientist's name safely down the centuries" (118). None of them will enter the promised land (143, 184). But since George best represents this kind of role among the human characters, it is important for the novel's central concerns that most of the narrative in the middle of the book should be experienced from his point of view and not Jean's.

Hull believes that the characters are hardly "memorable as individuals" (16), yet an homme moyen sensuel like George is consistent and memorable as a type. For instance, like the intelligence agents, like Duval and Boyce, like Sullivan who is associated with the gigantic eye of Lucifer, like the blind Welshman who suggests detection devices to Stormgren, like Karellen whose insufficient instruments are handed over to Jan, George is connected with visual imagery, as a professional scenic designer cursing television (137-38). The helpers seem imperfectly visual.

In the Golden Age which the Overlords inaugurate much of humanity seems to become this kind of character; there are "plenty of technologists, but few original workers" (71). Because of "an enormous efflorescence of the descriptive sciences such as geology, botany, and observational astronomy," earth is busy with "so many amateur scientists gathering facts for their own amusement—but … few theoreticians correlating these facts" (72). In the arts a similar process is at work, which is the point of the satire on the epigones of New Athens: "There were myriads of performers, amateur and professional, yet there had been no really new works" (72). Observation and competence are the salient qualities of the generation and of the character, intent upon the niceties of visual discrimination, incapable of gestalt perception.

The confidence that flows from such limitations—even the blind man emanates reserves of power in his "piercing gray eyes" (37)—may affect what seems in some cases a sexual nonchalance. The Sullivans and Shoenbergers seem comfortably married; though Boyce and George have played the field, and George continues to do so, a part of the narrative is devoted to their settling into a matrimonial norm. The novel hardly suggests that they enjoy any startling romantic love; only Jan, a visionary, suffers from that, and the voice of the novel which can rise to solemnity at the children's transfiguration is content to call his condition "the romantic illusion" (88), a view that concurs in the worldly wisdom of the older George. Some characters, like Duval or the Welshman or Wainwright or Van Ryberg, may or may not be married; it is a matter of indifference to the narrative. But that indifference is the very point: they are sexually comfortable, capable, unremarkable. Nothing startlingly creative comes of their relations. In Jean's clinical observation that males are "fundamentally polygamous" (76), we see that these relations lack intensity. Sexual love supports neither passion nor meaning. Parallel to this passionlessness is a further lack: the helpers encountered by the visionaries in their descents cannot themselves descend to any depths, nor can they ascend; they are static. Boyce would have liked to have visited Sullivan "if it weren't for his claustrophobia" (116). The helpers inhabit a middle ground, risking little hurt.

To consider this lack in them is also to realize that, though very much about family relations, the novel has a dearth of women. Jean and Maia, the only significant ones, have a certain impact, but the impact of a mother rather than a lover. George ceases to see Jean as a lover rather soon in the novel. As for Maia, though we do not hear of children in her marriage, she certainly seems a mother towards Boyce, whom we must regard as boyish. She does not seem insubstantial, a Hindu Maya (Hull 27); she seems more akin to the Greek Maia (whose name means mother or grandmother or nurse or midwife), the goddess whose son Hermes, according to the Homeric hymn, stole the famous cattle herd of Apollo by drawing them into a cave (Shelley 680-99). The myth is a model of the quest of the novel. Maia and Jean, whose maiden name Morrel means nightshade or black mare, then represent a rich but passive Mother Earth, which gives up its children in the powerful birth at the end of the novel: "There was nothing left of Earth: they had leeched away the last atoms of its substance. It had nourished them" (215). To awake to such a potential the Mother needs the mediation of a man, any man; the person is a matter of indifference. Perhaps the novel shows "a sharing union which retains respect for free, informed choice" to be better than a "cold, selfish isolation" (Hull 30), but a union of that sort does not seem possible. So it is for mediation that Jean needs George, whose name means farmer or, more precisely, worker of the earth, to stir her potentials, of which she is vaguely conscious. Though the meteor seems to rise, it in fact falls through the air to earth and points the downward path. George, like all those other helpers who sire the visionary, serves his purpose, but that is little consolation. So little contact is made that both parents might say with Karellen, "We are the midwives. But we ourselves are barren" (173).

The Overlords are the main example of this character. We know very little about them, however, even by the end of the novel, and much of our knowledge is negative: they are "neither mammals, insects, nor reptiles" (79), neither fish nor flesh nor fowl. Even their sexuality remains a blank, though the male pronoun is applied to them (Menger 97). It is Karellen, however, who uses the image of the sterile midwife, and nearly all the characters who have the role of midwife are male. With "no fear of gravity" (193), not even an indication that the gravity of earth has any ill effects on them, the Overlords have no fear of flying or of falling; sex has no terrors: it is nonexistent. They are comfortable.

The demonic imagery seems connected to a number of qualities. Like the other helpers they are intensely specialized and on their adopted planet dwell underground, apparently incapable of ascent. But they are also incapable of descent in that they do not seem to sleep (26). This eternal vigilance is related to their perfect memory which implies total recall; they have no unconscious lying irretrievable to conscious control, liable to surprise them at random moments. Their incomprehension of reflex actions is a part of this lack of an unconscious (194), also symbolized, as is their sterility, by the absence of an ocean on their planet (126); lacking reflexes they also lack the surprise of a body. This unqualified consciousness, the "scholarship and virtuosity" and "overwhelming intellectual power" (15) which they display, are part of the Satanic promise in the discrimination of good and evil that precedes Deity; the snake, however, is left in the dust, as is Karellen, who remains in the isolation of his "vast and labyrinthine mind" (216). Those immense eyes that must be shielded with sunglasses (131) symbolize an intelligence limited to the analytic.

Those large, shaded eyes also suggest the figure who may have been most decisive in Clarke's characterization of the Overlords. In the Apology Socrates compares himself to a gadfly who rouses the lazy horse of the State from its sleep. He is a myops, that is to say "one that closes its eyes," and he stings into enlightenment those who encounter him (30e). The dialogues frequently allude to his ugliness. But the most extended self-characterization he makes is in the Theaetetos, where he points out that his mother Phaenerete was "a noble, sturdy midwife" (149a). Midwives aid at births and make marriages; they are skillful, with a hint of the awesome (149d). And he is like them:

I have this in common with the midwives: I am sterile in regards to wisdom, and the reproach which many bring against me, that I question others but never reply myself about anything, because I am not wise, is true; the god forces me to act as a midwife, but forbids me to bear.

                                        (150c)

The word for midwife that Socrates uses is maia. The self-deprecating form of the most typical intellectual of Western culture stands behind the sterile, myopic Overlords.

To understand them we must not ignore Rasheverak, Thanthalteresco, and Vindarten. It seems clear in their conversations that Rasheverak plays the role of Van Ryberg to Karellen as Stormgren. His name seems suggestive of the biophysicist Nicolas Rashevsky, to whom the novel alludes as "Rashavesky," as it also seems to refer to the cyberneticist Wiener as "Weiner" (144). Through the nineteen-forties Rashevsky's works, Mathematical Theory of Human Relations, Mathematical Biophysics, and Mathematical Biology of Social Behavior, presented simplified mathematical models of phenomena such as "the formation of closed social classes, the interaction of military and economic factors in international relations, 'individualistic' and 'collectivistic' tendencies, patterns of social influence, and many others," although Abraham Kaplan argues that these treatments were "so idealized as almost to lack all purchase on reality" (278). In an oblique manner the limitations of Rasheverak imply a criticism of the dream represented in science fiction by Asimovean psychohistory. Thanthalteresco's name suggests death and transfiguration, with that odd suffix echoing the arabesque or picturesque or the fresco; we cannot quite take him seriously. Vindarten may recall the rigor of Latin law, but perhaps more obviously has to do with wind, swiftness, and art, in his agility at languages. But Karellen's name teases us the most, referring clearly to a carillon, parallel to that voice calling out over Jan in his dreams. A Christmas carol may also lie in his name; but with a slight change of accent the name becomes Carolyn—and the name of George's mistress is Carolle (162). In this series are combined an analytic treatment of human relations, death and change and whimsy, rigor and speed and language, the ringing of bells from a height, and a sexual ambiguity.

But if the Overlords are sexually ambiguous, it should come as no surprise that they are not only helpers but visionaries also. Coming from Carina in the constellation Argo, they are as surely as the Argonauts upon a quest. They descend upon earth and at the end ascend from it. The emissaries, Rasheverak, Thanthalteresco, and Vindarten, go to the humans for help, as Karellen must depend upon Stormgren. They suffer distortions of time: Vindarten must speak more slowly than his custom (190), as must all the Overlords (98), and all the aliens in their mission to earth must isolate themselves from their society since "the Relativity time-dilation effect worked both ways" (197). Even their sterility is qualified slightly by Karellen's remark that they "till the field" (204). Karellen may not be rejuvenated at the end of the novel, but his sense of meaning is affirmed. He has moved beyond intellect into passion when oppressed by "a sadness that no logic could dispel" (215), a further indication of Slusser's claim that Karellen has been "humanized" (52), that in him the human has been retrieved as lament (8-9). As Wolfe saw, in his discussion of iconic images such as the alien, they "contain in themselves the dynamic tensions between known and unknown" (16). Clarke's Overlords are an example of that pattern as they fuse in one complex figure both the visionary and the midwife, the mother and the father. Karellen is Hermes, the psychopompos trickster and "shepherd of thin dreams" (Shelley 680), who brings the herd of the human race (in Greggson we may see Gregory, to awaken, or grex, the herd) back into the cave so that the new words, the prophetic words, may ring out. And he is Apollo, solar deity albeit fallen, who at the end of the hymn to Hermes exchanges gifts with that chthonic power (Shelley 697-99). His power and elusiveness come from his comprehensive nature.

The corollary to the double role of the Overlord as midwife and visionary is the double role of Jean as visionary and midwife. The children that she bears have an odd relation to her, being potent in her life before their conception: her mind has been a mere "channel that, if only for a moment, let through knowledge which no one alive at that time could possess" (172). The narrator emphasizes that the children will not belong to any parent; the orphaning to the parents is "a threat and a terror" (174). Karellen reminds Jan, "You are not watching human children" (200). The only mother seen from a child's perspective, Jan's, cannot be told of his leaving because "she would get hysterical, and I couldn't face that" (121). So Jean is incidental to the real life of the children, as though their conception were outside both her ken and her body; it is an implicit point that becomes explicit four years after Clarke's novel in John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos. The double role of midwife and visionary makes Jean difficult to read. She and Karellen, the two comprehensive characters, mirror each other's duality.

There is some evidence in Clarke's alterations to "Guardian Angel," the seed or first attempt towards its suggestive offspring, that he recognized these patterns of plot and character. Samuelson believes that the changes merely "removed some poor repartee, added more background, and diminished slightly the dependence on melodramatic effect" (233). But more was involved: the relation of novella and novel that Goldman has argued is more dynamic (207). The Prologue draws a clear line between visionary and midwife, doubling the pattern emphatically. The new first paragraph of Part I underlines Stormgren's detachment (11), reinforced in the new first paragraph of the third chapter, with further characterization of his widowhood (24). Wainwright's charge of blindness is new (14). A long addition on the treatment that the Overlords accord South Africa culminates in a reversal of expectations (17), materials important to the union of opposites the novel presents. Karellen's dismissal of Lord Acton's comment on power illustrates his own limitations as midwife (21-22).

In the episode of the kidnap, Stormgren hopes that his captors can "uncover something new" (38), a hope answered at the end of the sequence when "the words of his interrogator passed again through his memory" (45). The description of Karellen's probe is altered to "a small, featureless sphere" hovering "at eye-level," adding to the optical imagery (42). Stormgren's escaping "quite forty years younger" was also added (43). All of these details are small and cumulative.

But the episode with Duval was probably decisive for Clarke's purpose. Duval's pointing out, "Anyway, it worked" (54), underscores his technological concern; and a long addition epitomizes the plight of the midwife, from the amused perspective of the visionary:

Stormgren wondered why it was that a man like Duval—whose mind was incomparably more brilliant than his own—had never made a greater mark in the world of science. He remembered an unkind and probably inaccurate comment of a friend in the U.S. State Department. "The French produce the best second-raters in the world."

                                             (48)

It appears to have been important for the thematics of the novel to develop the character of the midwife, and we may see in these additions a preparation for that character to move into its center.

III

The novel works not only through the pattern of the quest and the relation of visionary and midwife. Coordinated with these structures of descent and ascent and of isolation and sterility is a complex of images amplifying them. One of these images, the tension between sight and blindness, has been treated at length by Hull in her catalogue of those uneasy eyes growing larger until the earth shines out like Emerson's transparent eyeball (24-25); we have seen how those eyes are associated with the midwives. They also look towards the images of sleep and waking and towards the oceanic images that are contrasted to barrenness and to the island.

To sleep is to arrive at insight. Karellen fails to sleep, but Stormgren, Jean, Jan, and the children must sleep in order to descend and to see; the midwives keep their eyes open in order to see minutiae. In Jennifer's sleep especially—"There was no other word to describe the state she had entered," the narrator says, emphasizing the metaphoric, inadequate nature of the language—there lay "a sense of latent power so terrifying that Jean could no longer bear to enter the nursery" (175). The little girl, "lately known as the Poppet," lying in her pupa-stage of transformation will not open her eyes again, "for sight was now as superfluous to her as to the many-sensed creatures of the lightless ocean depths" (171). Only midwives, like the squid Lucifer, need to evolve eyes for the abyss.

This ocean which fascinates Jeffrey and in which the children experience breakthrough signifies life and unity in addition to the unconscious. In the submarine Jan hears "a steady background, into which all individual sounds had blended … as if he stood in the center of a forest that teemed with life—except that there he would have recognized some of the individual voices" (113). Though unfamiliar and undifferentiated, the ocean is not placid: it is a "delirium" (125) or a "nightmare" (128) when human understanding reconstructs it, revealing "battles … fought in the endless night of the ocean depths, where the sperm whales hunted for their food" (125). It is a battle within the purely unknown, perhaps only known through the representation as an allegory of visionary and midwife, for the squid with its "great, expressionless eyes … stared at its destroyer [the whale that will bear Jan]—though, in all probability, neither creature could see the other in the darkness of the abyss" (125). It is not a life or a unity or a battle in which human life can survive. When the young boy stands with "eyes tightly closed,… into his mind was flooding knowledge—from somewhere or somewhen—which would overwhelm and destroy the half-formed creature who had been Jeffrey" (176). But if the ocean dries away, all its alien life dies, as it does when revealed to the analytic eye during the tsunami and as it has in the barren landscape of the Overlord planet.

The ocean expresses the islands' isolation by surrounding them; in the plans for New Athens "the ocean meant nothing as a physical barrier, but it still gave a sense of isolation" (143). In this aspect it is the earth under the ocean, the volcanic earth of "the burning darkness" (149), which contains disparate phenomena united in a new, oxymoronic creation. Karellen refers to this imagery indirectly when he compares total breakthrough to a chain reaction (172), prefiguring the destruction and elevation of New Athens. Remarkably, in this imagery even a midwife may be made new. George is suffering a volcanic disturbance in his decision to go to New Athens (137-38); and Karellen, in that duality we have seen, is identified by Duval as "a kink like the autograph of a mild earthquake" (54). But the breakthrough of this imagery, the land apocalyptically thrusting through ocean, is destructive; no midwife survives it. In this language humans are "seeking the union they could never achieve," and the isolated island meets the dawn shattered (186).

Karellen makes the most explicit use of the ocean and island imagery:

Imagine that every man's mind is an island, surrounded by ocean. Each seems isolated, yet in reality all are linked by the bedrock from which they spring. If the ocean were to vanish, that would be the end of the islands. They would all be part of one continent, but their individuality would be gone.

                                             (172)

The passage may sound reminiscent of the passage in Donne's "Meditation XVII," to which Hemingway in 1940 was indebted for the title For Whom the Bell Tolls. The more significant source, however, is Matthew Arnold's "To Marguerite, Continued," which opens with these words:

    Yes! in the sea of life enisled,
    With echoing straits between us thrown,
    Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
    We mortal millions live alone.
    The islands feel the enclasping flow,
    And then their endless bounds they know.
                                             (182)

The isolated islands feel "a longing like despair" in "their furthest caverns," insisting they were once "Part of a single continent!" (182). But the last stanza confirms their isolation:

    Who order'd that their longing's fire
    Should be, as soon as kindled, cool'd?
    Who renders vain their deep desire?—
    A God, a God their severance ruled!
    And bade betwixt their shores to be
    The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.
                                              (182)

The main difference between this formulation and the images of the novel is that the fires in the poem are damped down; in Childhood's End they erupt and destroy.

The inadequacy, unfocused lack of intensity, and vacillation lying behind these sexual failures may be discovered in "A Farewell," a lyric that occurs in the sequence Switzerland earlier than the poem we have just considered:

              This heart, I know,
    To be long loved was never framed;
    For something in its depths doth glow
    Too strange, too restless, too untamed.
 
    And women—things that live and move
    Mined by the fever of the soul—
    They seek to find in those they love
    Some strength, and promise of control.
 
    They ask not kindness, gentle ways—
    These they themselves have tried and known;
    They ask a soul which never sways
    With the blind gusts that shake their own.
                                           (178)

The protagonist recognizes a weakness and passivity in himself which the woman rejects because she suffers from it herself. To rephrase the confession, the lover fails because he regards himself as too much like a woman. He has longed for a "trenchant force, / And will like a dividing spear" (178), which always eludes him. His only hope for a union lies in gaining, "life past, / Clear prospect o'er our being's whole" (179). The hope is severely qualified. Only when dead may the lovers "be brought near, / And greet across infinity" (180). The only love possible, in "Isolation, To Marguerite," belongs to happier men who do not realize how isolated they are:

              For they, at least,
    Have dream'd two human hearts might blend
    In one, and were through faith released
    From isolation without end
    Prolong'd; nor knew, although not less
    Alone than thou, their loneliness.
                                          (181)

To these comfortable souls, like Boyce and Duval, Karellen does not belong insofar as the alien, like the poet, is quite aware of his separation. Descending from his "remote and sphered course / To haunt the place where passions reign—" but not to partake in them, he receives the order at the end of the novel, which is the lament of the poem, "Back to thy solitude again!" (181).

The sexual dysfunction that the lyric sequence represents surrounds the imagery Karellen uses and the basic relations of the characters, especially George and Jean. Their everyday life may be reminiscent of that of the parents in "Mimsy Were the Borogoves," which also shares with Childhood's End two children's desertion of their parents, the earth, and three-dimensional space for an oceanic experience (Padgett 253-56). In that story the father is "a youngish, middle-aged man with gray-shot hair and a thinnish, prim-mouthed face" (230), neither fish nor fowl, whom the story introduces with his wife at ritual martinis and chit-chat, a middle-class Thin Man and Nora. At the end of the story the ringing of the telephone suggests their marital distance (260). Quite possibly the story showed Clarke a way to deal with the theme.

The closest we come to a positive apprehension of the unity the children enjoy is in the dream Jeffrey reports: "the distortion of the time scale" (166) in his vision of the apparent volcanoes, initiating breakthrough; the acceleration of time in the pulsating variable (167); the freezing of time at the Pillars of the Dawn in the center of the Universe (168), a phrase that recalls Stormgren's perception before his descent of "a dawn frozen in the act of breaking" (25); the geometric life of Hexanerax 2, on a flat plane of two-dimensions (168-69); and finally the crystalline life in a time neither cyclic nor progressive, but "every moment … unique" (169). So time accelerates, stops, and proceeds in a direction unknown to organic life, as in the novel time has frequently taken another direction. Not only is this Golden Age at the end of history rather than the beginning, and not only have the Overlords, descending for this Apocalypse, been remembered as a part of the Genesis, but time seems to run backwards in the ages of the visionaries as we move from widower to mother to adolescent to pre-pubescent and baby. The materials of life as we know it, the images of mountain and ocean, fire and ice, and the ages, exist in this vision but not as we would order them or at least as we ever could order them. They seem, in fact, materials of expression rather than what is expressed. The dreams of the children employ the union of opposites, a motif we have already noted in the work: "This is the primordial condition of things, and at the same time a most ideal achievement, because it is the union of elements eternally opposed. Conflict comes to rest, and everything is still or once again the original state of indistinguishable harmony" (Jung, The Symbolic Life 119). This union is present in its purest form, the male-female polarity, in the marriage of Maia and Jan's parents: "Mrs. Rodericks, who was coal black, had been born in Scotland, whereas her expatriate and blond husband had spent almost all his life in Haiti" (87-88). What is united in this primordial state, however, seems compacted as a dangerous charge of energy (Jung, Psychological Types 202). Conscious human life approaches it only to retreat, as Jean retreats from the latent power of Jennifer's sleep, for it threatens transformation. This mythic energy represented by so many unions of opposites ensures that the climax of the novel is not merely melodramatic. From the first doubling of the Prologue the explosion of the planet at the end seems, in retrospect, inevitable.

Is that which ascends in the children human? Does the primordial state heal the isolation of the mid-wives? Although the text says that the Overmind has "drawn into its being all that the human race had ever achieved" (203), the claim lies in the middle of an extended indirect discourse passing through Jan's mind; he may be a visionary, with true visions—but the problem is whether such a vision can heal our inabilities to see or feel in union. I disagree with Hollow that "we identify … strongly with the Over-mind" (85). Recently Beatie has emphasized the incomprehensibility of that being. All that we know of it, as I have argued, is the way by which we try to conceive it. The novel in its plot, characters, and images offers little hope that humanity, in will or in works, can be lifted up: that which is lifted up is only a projection of health.

We are left with Karellen, the character in whom the others converge and to whom the reader has been moving, changing the unknown into the known, as Wolfe says, until thoroughly identified in him. He is looking up at that ascent:

Far off were the mountains, where power and beauty dwelt, where the thunder sported above the glaciers and the air was clear and keen. There the sun still walked…. And they could only watch and wonder; they could never scale those heights.

                                                  (215)

It is the same vision with which Shelley's "Mont Blanc" concludes, in a passage rich with the union of opposites:

    Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:—the power is there,
    The still and solemn power of many sights,
    And many sounds, and much of life and death.
    In the calm darkness of the moonless nights,
    In the lone glare of day, the snows descend
    Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there,
    Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun.
                                                  (534-35)

This represents the same hopeless search for the primordial energy that inspired an early passage in Arnold's Switzerland: he looks up at the Alps to "the stir of forces / Whence issued the world" (177). In each instance the energy remains inaccessible.

So like Karellen we are left. But if it is difficult to read the signs of breakthrough in relation to anything we know, the reason for our difficulty is painfully clear, insofar as we are midwives. The midwives are the main protagonists of the novel, to whom the narrative returns with increasing frequency, culminating in Karellen. In them, despite the novel's often bland manner, indeed through it, a fear of undistinguished, undramatic, passionless failure is revealed. Since breakthrough is promised, but excluded from our means, instead of achieved vision the book concerns that Anglo projection of the French as "the best second-raters in the world": barren, immature, unresponsive, shallow, merely intellectual, comfortable, incapable of contact, impotent. This is the area the book approaches repeatedly and transforms into a modicum of dignity in the ambiguous, self-deprecating figure of Karellen, "only a civil servant" (19). Clarke had opportunity to contemplate such a fate as an auditor in HM Exchequer and as an assistant editor of that compendium of specializations, Physics Abstracts (Clarke, Ascent to Orbit 19, 117-19). Although he has often seemed superbly confident of his abilities, we may recognize in him a man incapable of Heinlein's convictions or of Asimov's carefree productivity, a man developing his best work by inches, over years, a man elaborating his dreams through complex variations: the early Lion of Comarre foreshadowing so much in his fiction; the history of Against the Fall of Night and The City and the Stars; "Guardian Angel" and Childhood's End, of course, "The Sentinel" and the several variations of 2001: A Space Odyssey; and recently The Songs of Distant Earth are all cases in point. Any ease of inspiration, any breakthrough, may seem distant in such an experience.

And so Childhood's End remains a novel of lament, a lament sustained and prolonged through several quests and characters, a lament of the so human mid-wives isolated from each other and from their own ends.

Works Cited

Arnold, Matthew. Poetical Works. Ed. C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry. London: Oxford UP, 1950.

Beatie, Bruce A. "Arthur C. Clarke and the Alien Encounter: The Background of Childhood's End." Extrapolation 30 (1989): 53-69.

Clarke, Arthur C. Ascent to Orbit: A Scientific Autobiography. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1984.

―――――――. Childhood's End. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1953.

―――――――. "Guardian Angel." The Sentinel. New York: Berkley Books, 1986. 39-81.

Goldman, Stephen H. "Immortal Man and Mortal Overlord: The Case for Intertextuality." Death and the Serpent: Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Ed. Carl B. Yoke and Donald M. Hassler. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985. 193-208.

Hollow, John. Against the Night, the Stars: The Science Fiction of Arthur C. Clarke. New York: Harcourt, 1983.

Hull, Elizabeth Anne. "Fire and Ice: The Ironic Imagery of Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End." Extrapolation 24 (1983): 13-32.

Huntington, John. "From Man to Overmind: Arthur C. Clarke's Myth of Progress." Olander and Green-berg 211-22.

Jung, C. G. Psychological Types. Trans. H. G. Baynes and R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976.

―――――――. The Symbolic Life: Miscellaneous Writings. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976.

Kaplan, Abraham. "Sociology Learns the Language of Mathematics: Some Recent Studies Analyzed." Commentary 14 (September 1952): 274-84.

Kuttner, Henry. See Padgett, Lewis.

Menger, Lucy. "The Appeal of Childhood's End." Critical Encounters: Writers and Themes in Science Fiction. Ed. Dick Riley. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1978. 87-108.

Moore, C. L. See Padgett, Lewis.

Olander, Joseph D., and Martin Harry Greenberg, eds. Arthur C. Clarke. New York: Taplinger, 1977.

Padgett, Lewis [Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore]. "Mimsy Were the Borogoves." Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Ed. Robert Silverberg. New York: Avon, 1971. 226-60.

Plato. Opera. Ed. John Burnet. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1958.

Samuelson, David. "Childhood's End: A Median Stage of Adolescence?" Olander and Greenberg 196-210.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Poetical Works. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson and G. M. Matthews. London: Oxford UP, 1970.

Slusser, George Edgar. The Space Odysseys of Arthur C. Clarke. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 1978.

Wolfe, Gary K. The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1979.

Matthew Candelaria (essay date January 2002)

SOURCE: Candelaria, Matthew. "The Overlord's Burden: The Source of Sorrow in Childhood's End." ARIEL 33, no. 1 (January 2002): 37-58.

[In the following essay, Candelaria posits that Childhood's End functions as Clarke's literary justification of British colonialism, arguing that, "[c]oming at the end of the colonial era, following the independence of India and amidst cries for independence from Britain's African dominions, [Childhood's End] is a melancholy attempt to answer the lingering questions that plagued the conscience of Englishmen."]

In the novels of Arthur C. Clarke's most productive period, from Earthlight (1951) to Imperial Earth (1976), children appear as symbols of hope for the future. The image of the Star-Child at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey (his collaboration with Stanley Kubrick) is imprinted on the cultural eye of humanity as we cross into the twenty-first century, and this image is emblematic of Clarke's use of children in this period. However, Clarke's most important contribution to the science-fiction genre is Childhood's End (1953), and it concludes with a very different image of children, children whose faces are "emptier than the faces of the dead," faces that contain no more feeling than that of "a snake or an insect" (CE [Childhood's End] 204). Indeed, this inverted image of children corresponds to the different mood of Childhood's End: in contrast to Clarke's other, optimistic novels, a subtle pessimism pervades this science fiction classic.

What is the source of this uncharacteristic sorrow? What shook the faith of this ardent proponent of space exploration, causing him to declare, "the stars are not for Man" (CE 136), even when he was chairman of the British Interplanetary Society? In assessing his reputation in the introduction to their seminal collection of essays on Clarke, Olander and Green-berg call him "a propagandist for space exploration […] a brilliant "hard science fiction" extrapolator […] a great mystic and modern myth-maker […] a market-oriented, commercially motivated, and 'slick' fiction writer" (7). Looking at Clarke's work in this light, the tone of Childhood's End is inexplicable. However, what Olander and Greenberg do not note is that the myths that Clarke tells are colonial myths, and the relationship of Clarke's work to colonialism is essential to an understanding of Childhood's End.

John Hollow begins his book-length study of Clarke's work by stating, "An important thing to remember about the science-fiction of Arthur C. Clarke […] is that it was written by an Englishman" (1). Hollow uses Clarke's English identity primarily to stress the resonances between his writing and that of H. G. Wells. However, Hollow does not address the influence that the British colonial system had on Clarke's fiction. Nor do other commentators, except to note it in passing. In commenting on a relatively early novel by Clarke, The Sands of Mars, Bruce Beatie writes, "Clarke was at this point still subject to the prejudices of colonialism" (57), a statement that seems to sum up the view that most critics maintain of Clarke's work: if he were at one point "subject to the prejudices of colonialism," he grew out of them prior to writing his major works. In truth, Clarke's work is not merely subject to the prejudices of colo-nialism; colonialism is at the core of Clarke's novels. It is his chief concern, to which he returns again and again, not only to demonstrate the necessity and profitability of the colonial endeavour, but also to defend its ultimate morality.

Childhood's End is Clarke's most complete statement on British colonialism. Coming at the end of the colonial era, following the independence of India and amidst cries for independence from Britain's African dominions, it is a melancholy attempt to answer the lingering questions that plagued the conscience of Englishmen. According to a review of P. J. Griffiths' 1946 book, The British in India, these questions are as follows:

What in fact is the British record in India? Have the conditions of future Indian progress been established? Has India advanced as rapidly under British rule as she would have done had she been independent? Have Indian interests been heartlessly sacrificed to British interests as is so forcibly maintained by many Indian nationalists?

               ("India When the British Leave" 123)

Griffiths himself boils these questions down to one: "Has the British power in India […] given a square deal to the people of India?" (16). In The British in India, Griffiths concludes that, "In the course of their long association, Britain has done well by India" (221). Taking its cue from such a rationalization, Childhood's End is a colonial parable, deftly engineered to make the reader identify with the colonial administrators, the Overlords, and their self-sacrificing mission to better humanity. Throughout the novel, the Overlords are portrayed as British colonial administrators, but they are idealized representations. The Overlords are wholly noble in a way that might put to rest English minds that worried whether "Indian interests have been heartlessly sacrificed to British interests," and whether India has "advanced as rapidly under British rule as she would have done had she been independent."

In Childhood's End, humanity's first faltering steps toward space exploration are overshadowed and halted by the appearance of the alien Overlords in their thirty-kilometre-wide spaceships, which appear simultaneously all around the world. In the novel's first section, "Earth and the Overlords," these aliens quickly assert their dominance over the Earth, forcing humanity to accept a unified world state and a ban on travel beyond Earth. Through the unified state, the Overlords, represented almost exclusively to one man, UN Secretary-General Stormgren, by a care-fully veiled alien entity named Karellen, administer Earth, providing humanity with select technologies that bring about a "Golden Age" of peace and prosperity. Once humanity accepts the rule of the Overlords as being a normal part of their lives, the Overlords reveal their heretofore concealed form: they are ten-foot-tall creatures who resemble typical depictions of Satan. In the "Golden Age" that the Overlords initiate and oversee, humanity's latent psychic powers become manifest through its children. These children, born with tremendous telekinetic powers, are separated from the rest of humanity by the Overlords, who reveal that they were sent to Earth by an entity they call the Overmind to bring about this "Last Generation" of humankind. The children do not seem to age, but their powers grow, and they eventually destroy all life on the planet, then the planet itself, to help them grow and join the Overmind. Humanity dead and the Earth destroyed, the Overlords leave the solar system.

Through their words and actions, the Overlords are quite clearly characterized as European, and, ultimately, British colonial administrators. Alan Howes notes that the Overlords "represent the reasoning side of man, extracted from his other parts, purified and magnified many times" (156). For example, when Karellan is addressing human objections to Overlord rule, he explains, "We represent reason and science, and, however confident they may be in their beliefs, they fear that we will overthrow their gods" (CE 20-21). This sounds very much like a refiguration of Orientalism: "The Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, 'different'; thus the European is rational, virtuous, mature, 'normal'" (Said, Orientalism 40). This is consistent with beliefs that Clarke has exhibited in his other works. Richard D. Erlich notes, in contrasting Clarke with Ursula Le Guin: "[Clarke] has presented worlds in which transcendence is possible and can lead to true superiority: a universe in which masters may justify their status as part of the Order of Things" (122). As this Orientalist novel proceeds, it becomes increasingly clear who are the "virtuous" and "mature" characters, and who are the fallen children.

The representation of the Overlords as not just European, but distinctly English, imperial masters, is established in the description of the very first words spoken by Karellan:

Karellan, Supervisor for Earth, made himself known to the world in a broadcast that blanketed every radio frequency. He spoke in English so perfect that the controversy it began was to rage across the Atlantic for a generation. But the context of the speech was more staggering even than its delivery. By any standards, it was a work of superlative genius, showing a complete and absolute mastery of human affairs.

                                                (CE 15)

Karellan's "complete and absolute mastery of human affairs" is indubitably why the speech is delivered in English, rather than in a hundred different languages. While Clarke seems to think it very important that Karellan's broadcast "blanketed every radio frequency" so that it would reach everyone everywhere, it is apparently of less significance that the transmission be comprehensible to everyone. Instead, the Overlords decide on an administrative language and impose it on the world. Not coincidentally, this language happens to be English, and the use of the phrase "perfect," without any other qualifier to describe Karellan's English, seems a distinctly British touch. What constitutes "perfect" English? In the absence of any evidence, it must refer to standard, Oxford English, and "the controversy" alluded to above is probably the reining in of the colonies to speaking the King's Good English, which is why the controversy only "rage[s] across the Atlantic," and not through all the nations whose languages are not represented. The issue of language comes up again later, when Stormgren is asked if there is anything Karellan does not know. The Finland-born Stormgren replies that Karellan's shortfalls are "trivial": "For instance, English is the only language he understands completely, though in the last two years he's picked up a good deal of Finnish just to tease me" (CE 23). English is the colonial tongue, but the various aboriginal languages, such as Stormgren's Finnish, are used for occasional amusement.

Another similarity between the Overlords and the British is their administrative technique. The Overlords rule Earth using the British system of indirect rule: "They had taken the United Nations Organization as they found it […] and had issued their orders through the mouth of the Secretary-General" (CE 24). Indirect rule was a method approved by many administrators of the British Empire, considered, in fact, "the most valuable and successful of our Imperial experiments" (Stokes 233). The Overlords apparently believe that people respond best to being led by the structures of government with which they are familiar, but they are insufficiently concerned with the structures of that government to research whether it represents a reasonable one for all of humanity. Although "The Soviet delegate had quite correctly pointed out […] that this was not in accordance with the Charter," "Karellan did not seem to worry" (CE 24), because Karellan knows that he has the power to make a body of cooperation and arbitration into the sovereign government of humanity, so he does not have to worry about the propriety of this arrangement.

The Overlords also manifest a paternalistic affection for their charges, similar to that claimed by administrators in the British colonial system. In On Governing Colonies, Walter Crocker proudly identifies this as a trait that distinguishes British administrators from those of other nations: "A characteristic of the average British officer is his instinctive sympathy for the African […] he always has a genuine liking for his charges" (qtd. in "Britain and the Native African"). This "sympathy," or imperialistic paternalism, is manifest in the relationship between Stormgren and Karellan. As we have seen, Karellan teases Stormgren with Finnish, and he allows himself to be revealed, only briefly and only once, to the curious UN Secretary-General, despite orders that no human being is to witness his physical form. Meditating on this act, Stormgren thinks, "It was the final proof […] of Karellan's affection for him. Though it might be the affection of a man for a devoted and intelligent dog, it was none the less sincere for that, and Stormgren's life had given him few greater satisfactions" (CE 60). Here, Clarke indulges in and exposes the fantasies of colonial administrators. Not only is the affection of the Overlords for Stormgren that of "a man for a devoted and intelligent dog," but Stormgren accepts this condescending affection as one of the greatest satisfactions of his life.

Through this manifestation of paternalistic affection, Childhood's End begins to demonstrate its true nature. Clarke's parable, in which the Overlords come, apparently, only to serve the interests of their subjects and give them progress that would have been impossible to achieve had they not intervened, is a reinscription of the view of colonialism typified most succinctly, if somewhat ironically, by Kipling's "White Man's Burden":

   Take up the White Man's Burden—
     Send forth the best ye breed—
      Go bind your sons to exile
     To serve your captives' need;
       To wait in heavy harness
     On fluttered folk and wild—
   Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
     Half devil and half child.
                                                  (1-8)

This first stanza of Kipling's poem resonates throughout Clarke's novel. In particular, the line "Half devil and half child" seems to describe the novel as a whole, evoking images of the devil-shaped Overlords and the bedeviled children of humanity. Moreover, the Overlords indeed consider themselves bound into exile and are explicitly shown to be the servants of their human captives. In fact, by the end of the novel, Clarke has given us a strikingly detailed realization of the literal sense of Kipling's poem.

Karellan tells Stormgren, "I'm only a civil servant trying to administer a colonial policy in whose shaping I had no hand" (CE 20). While we never learn how much influence Karellan has in the shaping of policy, we do learn that he is "a civil servant" of the interstellar intelligence, the Overmind, sent to Earth to safeguard humanity. Stormgren accepts this as a reasonable excuse. A dictator who exercises arbitrary power is a criminal, but a "civil servant" is allowed to wash his hands of any guilt associated with exercising the same power simply because the "policy" was written by someone else. It is only later that it occurs to Stormgren to confront Karellan with the issue of corruption, and the Overlord replies, "There's no danger of that happening to me. […] The sooner I finish my work here, the sooner I can get back to where I belong, a good many light-years from here" (CE 22). Although we never find out where, exactly, Karellan belongs, it is clear that he considers himself "[bound …] to exile." Karellan's status as a reluctant servant of policy is only one of many ways in which Clarke identifies the Overlords with European colonialists taking up the white man's burden. The Overlords are servants of the Overmind, and Clarke takes pains to demonstrate that their every action is calculated for the betterment of humanity, not for their own ends.

Just as apologists for British rule in India have argued that the "most important effect of [this rule] has been the creation of the idea of nationality and the conception of India as a whole" (Griffiths 212), the Overlords' first goal in Childhood's End is to give humans a single unified state, which will inaugurate the "Golden Age." Initially, of course, there is some ineffective resistance to the aliens' attempt at imposing a global state. One major power attempts to annihilate an alien craft with a thermonuclear missile, which proves embarrassingly impotent. It is such a futile action that Karellan ignores the offending people; it is the expected "blame of those ye better, / […] hate of those ye guard" (Kipling 35-36). Even after the dominion of the Overlords has been largely accepted, protests continue. "Angry mobs" object to the Overlords' scheme to unite the Earth under the UN. Although they do "not necessarily quarrel" with the idea of a united Earth, they protest that "it must come from within—not be superimposed from without. We must work out our own destiny" (13).

Ultimately, however, the narrative teaches us that human beings are essentially incapable of working out "our own destiny," and we are therefore better off under the rule of the Overlords. The Overlords have come to save humanity from itself. As Karellan explains: "the human race was drawing slowly nearer to the abyss—never even suspecting its existence" (CE 182). The Overlords have come to help humanity find the bridge across the abyss, for "Few races, unaided, have ever found it" (CE 182). The abyss is the incipience of psychic powers, and the reader is never intended to accept objections to Overlord rule or even to take them seriously. The instant the alien spacecraft are sighted, the narrator notes that a scientist who had worked on the space project for thirty years, "felt no regrets as the work of a lifetime was swept away" (CE 6). In fact, only one person, Jan Rodericks, seems to respond negatively to the Overlords' formulation that "The stars are not for Man," which in effect has made humans "prisoners in their own land" (Said Culture 214), although, as we shall see, it is Jan's conversion to the Overlords' viewpoint that firmly establishes the reader's sympathy for the colonial administrators. Clarke wants us to believe that, among reasoning and reasonable people, there exists no antipathy towards the benevolent Overlords. In attempting to portray this situation, he creates an imperium such as never existed historically, in which the subject people become not merely "supine or inert" (Said Culture xii), but come eventually to be almost wholly enthusiastic for the Overlords' superior and beneficent rule.

What initial, feeble resistance there is to the rule of the Overlords consistently evokes a colonial context and an imperialistic mind-set: "As pygmies may threaten a giant, so those angry fists were directed against the sky fifty kilometers above […] against the gleaming silver cloud that was the flagship of the Overlord fleet" (CE 12). While Clarke here seems to be consciously thinking only of size and power, his reference to "pygmies" resonates with the "prejudices of colonialism." In other places, Clarke discusses human resistance to the Overlords as an analogue to a British colonial situation:

They felt, with good reason, much as a cultured Indian of the nineteenth century must have done as he contemplated the British Raj. The invaders had brought peace and prosperity to Earth, but who knew what the cost might be? History was not reassuring; even the most peaceable of contacts between races at very different cultural levels had often resulted in the obliteration of the more backward society.

                                                (CE 26)

The narrator's words reflect Clarke's belief in "true superiority," that social and scientific progress is essentially linear, with a single, discernible goal, and therefore he can speak about "different cultural levels" and "the more backward society" without hesitation. It is, however, quite troubling that Clarke's narrator equates the difference between the British Raj and the "cultured Indian" to the difference between twentieth-century humanity and aliens able to travel at ninety-nine percent the speed of light, who are essentially immortal, need no sleep, and can manipulate the fabric of time itself. Clarke's use of India as an example is timely and significant, as Childhood's End appeared in 1953, a mere four years after the release of India from the British Empire. Even as he wrote about Indian reluctance to accept British rule, the loss of India as a colony cannot have been far from his mind, nor from the mind of his readers, who might very well be asking themselves Griffiths' questions.

Karellen's human collaborator, Secretary-General Stormgren, gives full expression to the imperial rationale when he is kidnapped by people opposed to the Overlords, and he feels compelled to challenge his kidnappers: "I defy you to mention one act that, in the ultimate analysis, hasn't been beneficial" (CE 40). The kidnappers are unable to name one, and Stormgren presses his point about the beneficial aspects of the Overlords' regime by mentioning the Overlords' order against cruelty to animals: "You may kill one another if you wish and that is a matter between you and your laws. But if you slay, except for food or in self-defence, the beasts that share your world with you—then you may be answerable to me" (CE 41). From the beginning, the Overlords are portrayed as defenders of the weak and guardians of justice. Their method of preventing cruelty to animals is demonstrated at a bullfight when a bull is wounded and all the participants and spectators suffer the same pain as the bull. The Overlords never inflict punishment; they simply make the perpetrators suffer the pain of their acts. When Karellan liberates Stormgren from his captors, he further demonstrates his nobility by simply using a temporary paralysis field on the kidnappers, and inflicting no other punishment upon them.

The Overlords bring "peace and prosperity," and they usher in a "Golden Age" in which "Ignorance, disease, poverty, and fear had virtually ceased to exist" (CE 70), thereby fulfilling Kipling's call to action: "Fill full the mouth of famine / And bid the sickness cease" (19-20). Through plenty and through peace, the Overlords guide humanity safely across the abyss as human beings realize their full potential as psychic beings. Even seemingly trivial decisions of the Overlords are shown to have important and valuable reasons behind them.

One of the few major objections brought against the "colonial policy" of the Overlords even by those, such as Stormgren, who are sympathetic to their cause, is that the masters refuse to show themselves. No matter what arguments are adduced, the Overlords refuse, deciding to reveal their form only fifty years after the inception of their rule, when it has become so entrenched and accepted as to make it impossible to reverse. When a man objects to this policy precisely on these grounds, saying that in fifty years, Earth's "independence" and "heritage" will be dead, Stormgren thinks: "Words, empty words […]. The words for which men had fought and died, and for which they would never die or fight again. And the world would be better for it" (CE 53-4). This effect of the Overlords' rule is an ironic revision of the colonial endeavour, which was nothing if not nationalistic. Using this revision, Clarke shows that, even if the Overlords' policy of concealment were proven capricious and arbitrary, it is still superior to the arguments raised against it. But it does not prove to be arbitrary, for the Overlords' physical form matches that of the devil: "The leathery wings, the little horns, the barbed tail—all were there" (CE 67). When the Overlords eventually reveal themselves, Clarke makes sure we know that they have made the correct decision:

It was a tribute to the Overlords' psychology […] that only a few people fainted. Yet there could have been fewer still, anywhere in the world, who did not feel the ancient terror brush for one awful instant against their minds before reason banished it forever.

                                                (CE 67)

In light of this climate of universal terror, we must conclude that there would have ensued mass hysteria if the Overlords had revealed their Satanic form fifty years earlier. Although Karellan admits, "We have had our failures" (CE 58), alluding to an obviously much earlier, aborted attempt to bring enlightenment to humans, the Overlords do not fail in this, their fi-nal administration of the Earth. The Overlords rule with benevolence, rationality, and justice, and their rule results in tangible progress as humanity matures through the "Golden Age" to become fully developed psychic beings. The Overlords are everything the British would have liked to believe themselves to be in India and elsewhere, if only they had received the same kind of cooperation from their subjects. In this manner, Clarke may be suggesting that, while Britain's first attempts to impose order on the empire may have failed, they were not entirely misguided.

The metaphoric treatment of the Overlords as benevolent colonial administrators might otherwise be relatively benign were it not for the subtle racism that pervades the novel, clearly dividing the "dogs" from the humans. In The View from Serendip, Clarke refers his readers to Childhood's End for his views on racism. Ostensibly, Clarke seems to have egalitarian views, since the major characters are African, Finnish, Russian, German, or American, but a closer examination of the novel reveals that some characters are African not to show an Africa freed of colonialism, but rather to impose upon it a mark of eternal colonial power.

Clarke's narrator tells us that it is in South Africa that the Overlords take their only "direct action against a recalcitrant government" (CE 17), and he sets the scene in what seems to be a very reasonable fashion:

For more than a hundred years the Republic of South Africa had been the centre of racial strife. Men of good will on both sides had tried to build a bridge, but in vain—fears and prejudices were too deeply ingrained to permit any cooperation. Successive governments had differed only in the degree of their intolerance.

                                                (CE 17)

This describes the historical circumstances of apartheid in South Africa very well, placing the blame where it belongs, squarely on the government, which resisted many "good will" overtures from both sides. However, we learn that, after the Overlords put on an impressive display of power, "the next day the government of South Africa announced that full civil rights would be restored to the white minority" (CE 17). Howes describes this inversion of our expectations as "one of Clarke's most effective stylistic de-vices—the matter-of-fact statement of a startling fact or truth about the future which is the opposite of what the reader would have supposed from his knowledge of the present" (170). However, this inversion is more than a stylistic device. It does not really challenge or startle most of Clarke's readers in the 1950s, because, although it describes a situation different from the historical one, it represents a common assumption that was made about the future and used to justify continued white rule: if the African majority in South Africa gained power, it would inflict cruelty and injustice upon the "white minority." Further, it means that the only "recalcitrant" government is an African one, not a European one; only an African government has the insolence to maintain its structure in the face of the Overlord's command.

Howes' discussion of inversion calls to mind one of Clarke's short stories written between Childhood's End and The View from Serendip: "Reunion." In "Reunion," humanity is reunited with its cosmic relatives, the original settlers of Earth, most of whom fled when they were afflicted by "A disease that did no physical harm—but merely disfigured" ("Reunion" 70). At the end of the story, we learn the nature of the disease, "If any of you are still white, we can cure you" ("Reunion" 71). Although ostensibly a critique of notions of whiteness, the reversal reinforces those notions by taking, as a default position, the assumed belief that blackness is a disfiguration.

This demonstrates the problem with Howes' entire argument: that Childhood's End is important because it surprises our expectations by having us identify with the Overlords rather than with humanity. In truth, Childhood's End is a novel that fulfills the expectations of Clarke's audience, a primarily white audience, mostly in Britain, Canada, and the United States—it just fulfills them in a different way. We are supposed to identify with the roles that people play, not with their physical description. We identify with the Overlords, who represent the colonial administration, and not with humanity, which represents the "subject race." The Overlords are aliens, but they are distinctly "English" aliens, so we identify with them. In another way, Clarke fulfills our expectations about race through the character of Jan Rodericks, who is of African descent, as Clarke takes pains to establish:

A century before, his colour would have been a tremendous, perhaps overwhelming, handicap. Today, it meant nothing. The inevitable reaction that had given early twenty-first-century Negroes a slight sense of superiority had already passed away. The convenient word "nigger" was no longer taboo in polite society but was used without embarrassment by everyone.

                                                (CE 89)

In the utopia produced by the Overlords' intervention, "colour" is no longer a "handicap." This seems good, but some of the ancillary description that Clarke adds is somewhat troubling. For example, why would "twenty-first century Negroes" have "a slight sense of superiority"? It seems to be another manifestation of African insolence, similar in its effect to the South African "inversion."

Jan Rodericks' racial background is of further importance because he is the "insolent" human being who objects to the ban on the stars and stows himself away on a ship that travels to the Overlords' home world. When Jan is discovered by the Overlords, he is taken on a tour of their massive city and is confronted with this world's grandeur, its sheer scale. He is described as feeling "like a pygmy," a description which not only categorizes him in size relative to the ten-foot-tall Overlords, but also emphasizes his racial background. Here it is important that Jan is African, being taken on a tour of the city of the English Overlords, because when he "[finds] himself on the verge of unreasoning terror" (CE 195), it is not a challenge to the expectations of Clarke's British and American audience, but a repetition of a familiar scene, that of a primitive African marvelling at, and failing to comprehend, the wonders of Western technology.

Jan's voyage to the Overlord's homeworld is merely one instance of a common trope in Clarke's fiction. Inherently, a belief in "true superiority" produces in Clarke's fiction a dichotomy between the advanced, cultured centre—the colonial metropolis—and the primitive, naive periphery, a dichotomy that is emphasized by the journey from the periphery to the centre, and, ultimately, a recognition of some transcendental, superior, and, most importantly, beneficent power.

The novel 2001: A Space Odyssey provides the most famous example of this kind of journey in Clarke's work. In this novel, David Bowman travels through a "star gate," to "a Grand Central Station of the galaxy" (199) where he is rerouted to his final destination. As Bowman travels, he passes massive artifacts beyond the dreams of human technology, but derelict, abandoned by beings who have moved beyond building in mere metal to manipulating stars themselves. As Bowman approaches the red giant around which this artifact orbits, he notices more strange phenomena, upon which the narrator comments: "He was moving through a new order of creation, of which few men had ever dreamed. Beyond the realms of sea and land and air and space lay the realms of fire, which he alone had been privileged to glimpse" (207). The location of the colonial centre on the surface of a star is symbolic: not only is the star the centre about which the periphery orbits, but culture, like energy, radiates outward. These passages describing the alien technology make Bowman's journey very much like that of Jan Rodericks: a trip to the centre of the vast empire, characterized by technology and sophistication beyond the imagining of the peoples of the periphery.

In Childhood's End, the only thing that Jan recognizes on the Overlords' world is just such a characteristic marker of the imperial metropolis' sophistication: a museum. He marvels, "Here was the loot of planets, the achievements of more civilizations than Jan could guess" (CE 196), all uprooted and brought to the colonial centre of the Overlords' vast administration. Looking at the exhibit from Earth, Jan sees "art treasures from a dozen centuries grouped incongruously together," "modern calculating machines and paleolithic axes," "television receivers and Hero of Alexandra's steam turbine" (CE 197), all juxtaposed in a fashion that seems strange to the human's eye. This moment of estrangement inspires in Jan's mind the incipience of sympathy for the Overlords, as he wonders whether they, "for all their superb mental gifts, could really grasp the complete pattern of human culture" (CE 197). Indeed, the idea of an incomplete, or fragmentary, comprehension is reinforced in the artifacts from other worlds, such as the "single giant eye" (CE 198) almost one hundred meters across. This disembodied eye is reminiscent of the contents of many European museums, whose collectors have assembled various bits and fragments of statues—disembodied hands, limbless decapitated torsos, half-busts—which are revered for their iconic value. The giant eye reveals the terms under which Clarke wants the reader to feel sympathy for the Overlords: "There seemed no limit to what Nature could do if she was pressed, and Jan felt an irrational pleasure at discovering something which the Overlords would not attempt" (CE 198).

However, when Jan returns to Earth to witness the final apotheosis of humanity and the resulting melancholic retreat of the Overlords, his "irrational pleasure" is transformed into a full-blown sympathy, a sympathy that Clarke manoeuvres his readers into feeling as well. With the apotheosis of humanity, Clarke performs yet another "inversion" of our expectations: that humanity will grow out of childhood into a mature adulthood under the guidance of the Overlords. When people object to the uniting of Earth as an historic impossibility, Stormgren points out the childishness of such an argument: "When I was a boy, the Federation of Europe was a dream—but when I grew to manhood it had become reality" (CE 13). As this statement implies, the title of the novel alludes to the possibility that we will see an end to the childhood of humanity, see human beings progress from their primitive state to a more advanced one. Further, Stormgren's phrasing recalls the famous Biblical passage: "When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me" (NIV I Cor XIII:11). On one level, this is what happens in the novel. Human beings find the bridge across the abyss with the aid of the Overlords, then sublimate to join with the Overmind. However, what we actually see is humanity progressing from adults into children. The means by which this is accomplished are somewhat complex. The human characters in the novel at the beginning are adults. There is hardly any mention of children, but halfway through the novel, human children suddenly become the focus of the narrative, for it is through its children that humanity will achieve apotheosis. The children have access to psychic powers, and the awakening of these powers leads to the end of the old humanity and the birth of a new, collective entity whose nature is rather akin to that of the Star-Child at the end of 2001. This ironic reversal of the title puts distance between the reader and the children at the end of the novel.

This distance is accentuated by Clarke's descriptions of the children. In keeping with the Orientalist paradigm, the colonial subjects in the novel are capricious, depraved children, while the Overlords become more and more explicitly adults whose mission is to care for these children. When Jan Rodericks looks at the children, his first thought is that humanity has regressed: "[The children] might have been savages, engaged in some complex ritual dance. They were naked and filthy, with matted hair obscuring their eyes" (CE 204). The subject race is savage, primitive, unsanitary, and inscrutable. Upon closer examination, Jan is struck with horror:

Then Jan saw their faces. He swallowed hard, and forced himself not to turn away. They were emptier than the faces of the dead, for even a corpse has some record carved by time's chisel upon its features, to speak when the lips themselves are dumb. There was no more emotion or feeling here than in the face of a snake or an insect. The Overlords themselves were more human than this.

                                                (CE 204)

Here we see an explicit comparison that makes the Overlords less alien, more sympathetic than these hideous children who are more horrific than "the faces of the dead."

In addition to describing their disturbing physical appearance, Clarke makes these children fallen and depraved. In one instant, the children destroy "all the trees and grass, all the living creatures" (CE 206) on Earth. The only explanation offered for this capricious act of juvenile sadism is that "Perhaps the presence of other minds disturbed them" (CE 206). Further, even their "complex ritual dance" is revealed to be a true product of primitivism: "We've analyzed [the] pattern [of the dance] endlessly, but it means nothing" (CE 205). Nor do the children gain in understanding and sympathy as they grow in power. Soon the Overlords are forced to withdraw in fear: "It is no longer safe for us to stay. They may ignore us still, but we cannot take the risk" (CE 213). The Overlords are afraid of the possibilities that a capricious intelligence entails. The children have not spared the Overlords thus far out of sympathy; they have simply ignored them, and who knows what the future holds. Clearly, these irrational, Oriental children, the descendants of humanity, are "devilishly" incapable of moral actions or moral formulations. Their initial murders leave them unmoved, and they may kill again at any time.

In contrast to these savage inhuman children, Clarke presents the Overlords, who, in addition to being "civilized," are consciously characterized as adults watching over these children. This role is foreshadowed when the Overlords first reveal their Satanic shape to humanity. Karellan calls out, before stepping into the light, "There are some children by the foot of the gangway. I would like two of them to come up and meet me" (CE 66). A boy and a girl rush up the gangway, into the darkness, and the first glimpse humanity and the reader have of an Overlord is of Karellan carrying two children, one in each arm, a strange inversion of Christ, who said "Let little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these" (NIV Matt XIX:14). Here we see the opportunity Clarke had to give a different picture of colonialism, to meld the Overlords as "devil" and humans as "child" into two halves of a single people. However, instead, he chooses to remove the demonic qualities of the Overlords through their benevolent actions and this parallel with Christ, while making humanity both more childish and more devilish.

Clarke re-emphasizes the relationship between the adult Overlords and the childish humans when one Overlord describes his people "as midwives attend-ing a difficult birth" (CE 176), the birth of the new generation of human children. Karellan later elaborates on his role: "My task and my duty is to protect those I have been sent here to guard. Despite their waking powers, they could be destroyed by the multitudes around them—yes, even by their parents. […] I must take them away and isolate them, for their protection, and for yours" (CE 185). The Overlords are mature, rational, English adults charged with the care of these new children. In the end, even Clarke's title is an echo of Kipling: "Take up the White Man's burden—/Have done with childish days" (49-50), but it is to the Overlords that it refers and not to a colonized humanity.

It is possible that Clarke intended this as an inversion of our normal assumptions about adulthood and childhood, savagery and progress, just as the Overlords' appearance with children is an inversion of Christian imagery. However, this does not seem to be the case: "For many, many readers given a choice between the fate of the Overlords and the fate of humankind, the Overlords and their future seem preferable" (Goldman 205). It is not accidental that readers choose the Overlords' fate, because the narrative itself chooses to identify with them. As Robert Waugh writes, "The midwives are the main protagonists of the novel, to whom the narrative returns with increasing frequency, culminating with Karellan" (52). The novel begins with the arrival of the Overlords, viewed from Earth, but it ends with Karellan watching the departure of the new humanity from the Overlords' orbiting craft. The children are always viewed from without, and we see their horrific faces, their unkempt persons, and their strange, incomprehensible behaviour, as something to be feared and perhaps held in awe, but never as something to be admired.

While the children are portrayed as capricious monsters with growing power, the Overlords are given the dignity and sympathy of martyrdom. It is perhaps fitting that Jan Rodericks, after his trip to the Overlords' home world and his conversion to their mission, should express the full tragedy of the Overlords' situation:

They were trapped […] in a cul-de-sac from which they could never escape. Their minds were ten—perhaps a hundred—times as powerful as men's. It made no difference in the final reckoning. They were equally helpless, equally overwhelmed by the unimaginable complexity of a galaxy of a hundred thousand million suns, and a cosmos of a hundred thousand million galaxies.

                                                (CE 207)

All of the Overlords' achievements, all their vast en-deavours—their mighty ships, their indescribable intellect—all this is as nothing before the immensity of the universe. The Overlords are not, however, pathetic, for they are noble. Jan muses on them further: "He understood their purpose now, what they had done with man and why they still lingered upon Earth. Towards them he felt a great humility as well as admiration for the inflexible patience that had kept them waiting here so long" (CE 207). Although the Overlords are trapped, they continue "In patience to abide" (Kipling 10), not just working with "man," but for "man," so that in the end we feel "admiration" for the Overlords, and fear of the children of humanity.

We must turn again to Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey in order to understand fully the conclusion of Childhood's End. In both novels, humanity is raised to a transcendent state by nurturing aliens. However, there is an important difference between them. In 2001, Bowman is remade in the image of the colonial power, but in Childhood's End, humanity becomes fundamentally unlike the Overlords. The different ending of Childhood's End makes it a more sympathetic and human portrayal of the nobility of colonialism, for it allows the Overlords to avoid being subject to the mimicry/mockery slippage noted by Homi Bhabha (361). The different ending also emphasizes Kipling's formulation. The Overlords are not really masters, but, rather, servants of the Overmind. When humanity becomes part of the Over-mind, they are demonstrating that the Overlords were in fact in service to their subjects, in service, indeed, to a much higher, incomprehensible even to them, cultural destiny.

But the conclusion of Childhood's End, in fact, more closely resembles Clarke's short story, "Superiority," published in 1951. The story is often seen as a parable of the perils of technology, since it tells of an army defeated by its desire to research newer and better weapons that prove to be difficult to implement. However, there is also a cultural bias built into "Superiority," for the enemy's decision to stick to older weapons is never described in any positive fashion, but only as "stubborn conservatism" and "a complete lack of imagination" (90). Thus, when the narrator describes the defeat of his army, he declares: "We were defeated by one thing only—by the inferior science of our enemies" ("Superiority" 83). The implication is not that they were defeated by the superior application of inferior technology by their enemy, but by their own superiority. Similarly, Rodericks' cata-logue of the Overlords' characteristics seems a statement on their superiority, the very superiority that has placed them in a "cul-de-sac," a situation that Clarke portrays as analogous to that of Britain at the end of the colonial era.

The ending of the novel is what sets Childhood's End apart from most of Clarke's work. Generally, Clarke's novels end with a promise for the future, a promise of progress and life to come. Waugh identifies the Overlords' role in establishing the overall mood of the novel's conclusion: "In them, despite the novel's often bland manner, indeed through it, a fear of undistinguished, undramatic, passionless failure is revealed" (52). The Overlords face that which Kipling promised to those who "Take up the White Man's Burden": "Come[s] now, to search your manhood / Through all the thankless years, / Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom" (53-55). Clarke attempts to imbue the final scene of the novel with a kind of pathetic poignancy, as the Overlords decide to "await without despair whatever destiny was theirs" (CE 219), and they, the masters that nobody wanted, that nobody invited, thrown off by the growing power of their charges, turn their backs on our star and head home to resume their interrupted and (presumably) important intellectual work. As a result, the final image in Clarke's reader's mind is not transcendent humanity, but the sacrifice of colonial administrators.

When we look back at the questions that the Times Literary Supplement claimed were on the minds of all Englishman, we see that Clarke has responded to every one of them. Not only have "the conditions of future [human] progress" been established, but humanity has transcended its former state to join with the galactic Overmind. Moreover, not only "has [humanity] advanced as rapidly under [Overlord] rule as [it] would have had [it] been independent," but the Overlords have saved humanity from the perils of progress that faced them. Further, we know that human "interests [have not] been heartlessly sacrificed to [Overlord] interests," for the Overlords never wished to come, and have made tremendous sacrifices of time and effort while receiving no personal gains. Ultimately, then, by analogy, we are forced to conclude that "The British record in India," and elsewhere is one of courage, patience, and selfless sacrifice for which praise, not scorn, is due. But Clarke was trying to do more than exonerate the colonial system of the past: he was trying, through Childhood's End and other works, to extrapolate a colonial future, to give hope for future glory to a people whose past had trapped them in a cul-de-sac of history.

Works Cited

Beatie, Bruce A. "Clarke and the Alien Encounter: The Background of Childhood's End." Extrapolation 30.1 (1989): 53-69.

Bhabha, Homi. "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse." Modern Literary Theory. Eds. Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh. 3rd. Ed. New York: Arnold, 1996. 360-7.

"Britain and the Native African." Rev. of On Governing Colonies by Walter Russell Crocker. Times Literary Supplement 17 April 1947: 166.

Clarke, Arthur C. Childhood's End. New York: Harcourt, 1953.

―――――――. "Reunion." 1964. The Wind from the Sun. New York: Signet, 1973.

―――――――. "Superiority." 1951. Expedition to Earth. New York: Ballantine, 1953.

―――――――. 2001: A Space Odyssey. New York: NAL, 1968.

―――――――. The View from Serendip. New York: Random, 1977.

Ehrlich, Richard D. "Ursula K. Le Guin and Arthur C. Clarke." Extrapolation 28.2 (1987): 105-29.

Goldman, Stephen H. "Immortal Man and Mortal Overlord: The Case for Intertextuality." Death and the Serpent: Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Eds. Carl B. Yoke and Donald M. Hassler. Westport: Greenwood, 1985. 193-208.

Griffiths, P. J. The British in India. London: Robert Hale, 1946.

Hollow, John. Against the Night, the Stars: The Science Fiction of Arthur C. Clarke. San Diego: Harcourt, 1983.

Howes, Alan B. "Expectation and Surprise in Childhood's End." Arthur C. Clarke. Eds. Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg. New York: Taplinger, 1977. 149-71.

Huntington, John. "From Man to Overmind: Arthur C. Clarke's Myth of Progress." Arthur C. Clarke. Eds Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg. New York: Taplinger, 1977. 211-22.

"India When the British Leave." Rev. of The British in India by P. J. Griffiths. Times Literary Supplement 22 March 1947: 123.

Kipling, Rudyard. "The White Man's Burden." The Portable Kipling. Ed. Irving Howe. New York: Penguin, 1982. 602-3.

Olander, Joseph D., and Martin Harry Greenberg. Introduction. Arthur C. Clarke. Eds. Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg. New York: Taplinger, 1977. 7-14.

Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993.

――――――. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979.

Stokes, Robert. "New Dangers to Our Colonial Empire." The National Review 130 (1948): 225-36.

Waugh, Robert H. "The Lament of the Midwives." Extrapolation 31.1 (1990):

RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA (1973)

Nicholas Ruddick (essay date March 1985)

SOURCE: Ruddick, Nicholas. "The World Turned Inside Out: Decoding Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama." Science-Fiction Studies 12, no. 1 (March 1985): 42-9.

[In the following essay, Ruddick attempts to decipher several of the more compelling unanswered questions of Rendezvous with Rama, concluding that, "[t]he strength of Rendezvous with Rama derives ultimately from the eternal human fascination with questions of origin, destination, and purpose."]

From the unprecedented number of awards that Rendezvous with Rama received on its publication in 1973, we might suppose that the book would be, in the words of William H. Hardesty, "one of those novels obviously destined to become instant classics" (p. 1759). However, the first flush of enthusiasm quickly faded, so that in John Hollow's recent book-length study of Clarke's fiction, Rama receives about as much attention as the early Sands of Mars (1951) and the undistinguished Glide Path (1963).¹ The novel has not been neglected, but it has never been given the sort of attention it deserves. It is not hard to see why: Rama fails to offer, it seems, a vision of human transcendence coming as a result of the alien encounter, a vision that has proved so appealing that it has led to what Hardesty has called the "almost cult status of Clarke's other works about aliens" (in particular Childhood's End [1953], 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968], and 2010: Odyssey Two [1982]). Instead, the alien artifact Rama,² indifferent to the stir it has caused among the United Planets, departs the Solar System and leaves the reader with a sense of bathos and frustration as a result of all the enigmas left unsolved. We may praise Clarke's sophisticated techniques of estrangement based on rigid extrapolation, and feel awe at his vision of an insignificant human race, still crudely homocentric, suddenly gaining a glimpse of the unknowability of the cosmos, but we still feel let down. Awe is all very well, and won the novel its prizes; but in the long term we want solutions to the riddle of Rama, and there Clarke seems to fail us.

Yet while Rendezvous with Rama is full of enigmas, they are of human manufacture and so have human solutions. If we forget that the alien artifact is the product of a human imagination, we are in danger of missing the point of the novel. Clarke's strategy in Rama is different in kind from, and far more daring than, the more characteristically Clarkeian alien encounters in Childhood's End and the Odysseys. We note, first of all, that there are no aliens in Rendezvous with Rama. This hardly seems an insight; yet if we combine this idea with the now well-accepted one that there are no such things as aliens in good SF,³ we may watch as the apparent difficulties caused by the unresolved elements in the novel all but evaporate. We must, therefore, either attempt to decode Rama or merely seek consolation, like Eric S. Rabkin, in the idea that because the Ramans seem to do everything in threes, there may perhaps be another chance to explore Rama and that next time (perhaps) we will be readier.⁴

What Roland Barthes (p. 17) calls the hermeneutic code dominates the text of Rama. The novel's energy lies not in plot or character, but in the posing of a riddle, followed by the discovery of an apparent solution, followed by the realization that a deeper riddle is implied by this solution—and so on until the very structure of the universe seems to founder ("There Goes Newton's Third Law" [44:266]). After Rama's departure, everything is changed for mankind in the 22nd century, but nothing is understood. Some critics have confessed to a disappointment similar to that suffered by Commander Norton, leader of the explorers of Rama: "a sense of anticlimax and the knowledge of opportunities missed" (46:274). E. Michael Thron, for example, speaks of his own "sense of emptiness at the end of the book," a result of "the gap between satisfying plot and the closure of an idea" (p. 81). George Slusser finds the bathetic ending to be part of Clarke's rather unattractive satiric intent: the "tongue-in-cheek transcendence" is merely the last of the "deflating moments" whereby mankind is mocked as a "stupid tourist before the mysteries of the universe" (p. 61). But while Norton does indeed approach despair at Rama's inscrutability, Clarke is continuously urging the reader to distin-guish between those enigmas which are capable of being solved and those which are not. The former lead to important truths; the latter are merely irrelevant.⁵ If we do so distinguish, we find that Clarke does offer us a transcendent vision in Rama, but one far less reliant on supernatural intervention and so more accessible than is to be found elsewhere in his oeuvre. We find, too, a work comic without satiric bitterness,⁶ and one full of its creator's delight in having constructed an artifact awesome not in its strangeness, but in the uncanny sense of familiarity with which it is haunted.

Those critics indignant at Clarke's refusal to solve enigmas have not mistaken Rama for a mystery story, for in a sense it is. But they have simply failed to notice the restrictions Clarke places upon the tendency of the reader to identify with the explorers, Norton in particular. By the end of the novel, Norton has come to feel that humanity has just endured a supercivili-zation's "monumental indifference … worse than any deliberate insult" (46:273)—and is chided by the narrator for reacting thus ("he should have known better" [46:274]). Here, as elsewhere, Clarke addresses the reader behind Norton's back. For the reader, unlike Norton, may gain access to the key to Rama's enigmas, even though Clarke, in relying on the hermeneutic code to sustain interest, is not prepared simply to hand this key over on a plate.

The "Temple of Glass" chapter contains the most important clue as to how to go about decoding Rama. The explorers have broken into the artifact aboard Rama which they call London, only to discover, embedded in crystal pillars, "a completely random collection of hardware" in quasi-hologram form:

They had photographed the elusive images inside a score of the crystal pillars when the sheer variety of items gave Norton a clue. Perhaps this was not a collection but a catalog, indexed according to some arbitrary but perfectly logical system. He thought of the wild juxtapositions that any dictionary or alphabetized list will give …

                                            (42:251)

Norton lacks the Raman alphabet and will always do so, hence his gloom at the end of the novel. So of course do we; but this episode's function is not to frustrate us. Instead, it points the way towards a fruitful decoding of a Rama that is not an alien vessel at all (as it always must be for the characters in the novel).

The key to Rama is the name itself. Mark Rose has commented upon the importance of the act of naming in SF: "To name the nameless is to subdue the void to human meaning, to give shape to chaos" (p. 188). Here is indeed the motive behind the attribution of the name to the alien artifact by SPACE-GUARD in 2130. The name first appears in the novel's title, however, where it has been placed not by SPACEGUARD, but by Clarke. In such a position it becomes the first of the novel's many enigmas, and it is here we must begin our business of decoding. With deference to Barthes, then, we might begin with Rama where he begins with "Sarrasine": What is Rama? A noun? A name? A thing? A man? A woman? (vide Barthes: 17).

A sort of answer comes early: the "interstellar vagabond," first called 31/349 is dignified with a name as soon as astronomers guess its significance: "Long ago, the astronomers had exhausted Greek and Roman mythology; now they were working through the Hindu pantheon. And so 31/349 was christened Rama" (2:6). The name Rama is different from any other important name in the novel in that Clarke deliberately suggests to us that it has been chosen by humankind according to a system that is "arbitrary but perfectly logical" (see 42:251 cited above). We may assume, then, that Rama comes between, say, Raktavija and Ratnapani on SPACEGUARD's current alphabetic list of available names. Consider, on the other hand, the Endeavour, Norton's ship. There is nothing arbitrary or logical here: the name bespeaks a long tradition of heroic exploration stretching back to the original Endeavour, the Whitby collier of Captain James Cook (see 16:92). Within the context of the novel, the name was presumably chosen in the hope that the spaceship would thereby be invested with something of the magic of names, and perhaps also to assert a sort of human historical solidarity in the face of the extraordinary and alienating distance that humankind has travelled between 1768 and 2130.⁷ That is to say, within the context of the novel there is a rationale for the name Endeavour that is lacking in Rama's case. Of course, the names were actually bestowed by the author. We may assume he chose Endeavor to point to an analogy between Norton and Captain Cook, but the reader is prepared to accept the illusion that the vessel was named by some historically-minded Committee of the United Planets Solar Survey Research Organization in the 22nd century. But because of the supposed randomness behind the naming of Rama, we become aware that a direct, though covert, link between author and reader has been established. The extreme prominence accorded the name Rama in the novel (such as its appearance in the title) suggests that the name is a key to an authorial attitude towards the artifact itself and to those enigmas over which the author has some measure of control.⁸

As the Hindu pantheon is not well-known in the West, the curious reader will probably have to go to a mythological dictionary to learn that Rama, seventh avatar of Vishnu, is a man-god whose rescue of his wife Sita from the demon-king of Lanka forms the basis of the great epic Ramayana. We may therefore speculate that Rendezvous with Rama, like The Fountains of Paradise (1978), owes its inspiration to Clarke's adopted homeland of Sri Lanka (to which Rama is dedicated) and that there is, perhaps, some autobiographical allusion in the choice of name (see Rabkin: 48-49). Perhaps, too, Clarke is (quite characteristically) trying to get his readers interested in Hindu mythology and so help bridge the gap between East and West. Leaving aside for the moment the mythological dimension of the novel, we may decide that the choice of a heroic name for the alien vessel is an attempt to influence the discerning reader (who is curious enough to pursue the allusion) favorably towards it and to invest the narrative with a sense of the epic (compare the title A Space Odyssey ). Given that a rendezvous (as opposed to an encounter or a confrontation) suggests a pleasant, though perhaps brief and secret, meeting between lovers, we have a title that surely points us beyond the sense of bathos and frustration experienced by Norton (and the critics) at the novel's end.

Strangers are unlikely to arrange a rendezvous, and I have already suggested that the power of the novel owes much to the uncanny familiarity of the alien. We arrive at the commonplace that, in good SF at least, there is no such thing as the alien. Darko Suvin has put it well: "though mutants of Martians, ants or intelligent nautiloids can be used as signifiers, they can only signify human relationships, given that we cannot—at least so far—imagine other ones" (p. 71). But how does Clarke make the fictional novum in Rendezvous with Rama reflect back on the zero world of the author? One way to ensure the fruitful "interaction of estrangement and cognition" (Suvin: 7-8) is to implant familiar mythic elements in the alien landscape, and to a certain extent this is what Clarke has done in Rama. ⁹ The space-probe, apprehensively launched from Phobos (Greek: fear) to make the first rendezvous with Rama, is rechristened Sita (3:11). Ravi McAndrews, leader of the "simps" or customized chimps aboard Endeavour, may be identified with Hanuman, the monkey-king of the Ramayana. The mythological Rama turns out to be an avatar of Vishnu the Preserver, while the alien Rama is associated, in the minds of its explorers, with both divinity and a preserving function.¹⁰ These parallels lead Betty Harfst (pp. 107-14) to make a sustained attempt to decode the novel through the Hindu myth. Yet when the explorers on Rama try to use ready-made codes to solve the problems, they are confounded. The Raman airlocks at first refuse to budge, not because of human powerlessness, but because they open counterclockwise while men from habit are trying to force them in the other direction (5:21-22).¹¹ Norton has to continually remind himself not to draw "dangerous analogies from Earth" (17:99) and to keep his mind open (20:120), even while he is aware that he must attain a consistent point of view adapted to the strangeness of the Raman topography if he is to fend off madness (8:35, 18:106).

If ready-made patterns of thought are so unreliable on Rama, then it is unlikely that explorers or readers could satisfactorily decode the vessel through myth. Myths do help Norton in first coming to terms with Rama (as when faced with the Cylindrical Sea he recalls the myth of Oceanus [8:36]), and they help the reader in determining the attitude of the author to Rama. But the familiarity of Rama is closer than myth. It might seem deeply significant that the Ramans do everything in threes, until we learn in passing that humans do so too, when it is expedient (10:47).¹² But what about the "strange coincidence" that the proportions of Rama are repeated on a smaller scale by the Hermian bomb sent to destroy it (40:238)? This can hardly be an indication of the universality of the Laws of Motion, if the Ramans can refute Newton with their space drive. It must surely instead be a hint about an analogy that underlies the surface contrast between the Ramans' world and ours.

The analogy begins when we encounter Rama as a "lonely wanderer [with its etymological association with the word planet] among the stars" (2:5). Rama dominates the novel much as the "hypnotic disc" (6:23) of the Earth dominates the consciousness of the colonized Solar System in the 22nd century. The exobiologist Perera, pursuing the theory that Rama is a space ark, comments: "Naturally the system would have to be rigidly closed, recycling all food, air and other expendables. But, of course, that's just how the Earth operates—on a slightly larger scale (9:42; cf. the Clavius base in 2001 :62). It soon becomes plain to Norton and his crew that Raman evolution, originating in the "dilute organic soup" (16:90) of the Cylindrical Sea, is nothing less than a recapitulation, "on a trillionfold swifter time scale, of the early history of Earth" (22:132). McAndrews' hypothesis that "New York is a factory for making … Ramans" now consciously derives from this analogy: "After all, that's how it all happened on Earth, though in a different way" (23:137). Even the absentee Ramans are disconcertingly familiar, considering that they are probably trilaterally-symmetrical superbeings who can certainly easily refute a central axiom of what Clarke (in 2010: 40) has recently called "the greatest single achievement of the human intellect, [Newton's] Principia." For do they not use domestic utensils which "apart from their size would not have attracted a second glance at any terrestrial table" (42:251)? Karl Mercer has a convincing explanation for why the intelligent biots are so unthreatening to the explorers: "They think we're Ramans. They can't tell the difference between one oxyeater and another" (42:248). We recall that the Raman atmosphere becomes more breathable as evolution reaches the point at which complex organisms can develop—just as it did on Earth.

Rama, as befits something which first reminds its explorers of a tomb (5:19; 7:32,33; 10:55), is both figuratively and literally haunted with the familiar. Two of the explorers experience strong feelings of déjà vu,¹³ which they can only rationalize away by recalling earthly experiences (13:73; 27:158). Once a real ghost appears, the "small whirlwind or dust devil, about the size of a man" (29:174; my emphasis) spotted by Jimmy Pak at the bottom of the pit Copernicus. Pak dismisses it as a hallucination—he doesn't believe in ghosts. Were he a cold rationalist, this scene might be read as satire upon the human tendency to refuse to accept the evidence of our senses in the face of the paranormal. But Pak is full of youthful enthusiasm and intrepidity, and I think we are meant to interpret his inability to confront the truly alien as an inevitable limitation that serves in a positive way to define his, and our, humanity. Although Clarke is well aware of the vast mythmaking potential of the human mind,¹⁴ he is also prepared to accept the likelihood that the truly alien does exist and may be defined as something which the human mind cannot process effectively through mythopoesis. What is the ghost that Pak sees? If it is alien (and not, in its human dimensions, a reflection of the self that the human observer is fated to discern in all alien landscapes in SF) then we can never know, for it exists on a plane forever inaccessible to us while we remain human. Jimmy Pak and his companions can make nothing of what is truly alien about Rama. Nor can the author himself, for the truly alien, while it undoubtedly exists, is also inaccessible to the imagination of the writer of SF, who, like the rest of us, is fated to recreate the universe in his (or her) own image.

It is not surprising, then, that when Norton puts his ear to the great machine called New York, "He could hear nothing except the pounding of his own blood" (23:138). It is also true, however, that the Ramans aren't any better at bridging the gulf between themselves and humanity. In fact, they seem to do worse, for there is no evidence that they make the slightest attempt to communicate with the explorers. (Perhaps the Ramans see the human intruders as ghosts, in which they too cannot believe?) It will never be clear whether they are arrogantly aloof or simply oblivious to the human intruders: the Hermian ambassador's likening of Rama to a termite colony (38:229) might be more convincing, did the analogy not so obviously cut both ways.¹⁵ These superbeings are fortunate, though, to escape the Solar System intact; in Rodrigo's salvation of Rama from the Hermian giga-ton bomb, humanity scores, I think, a moral victory over itself and over the perfect indifference of the Ramans.¹⁶

If Rama is so familiar and if what is alien about it is irrelevant, to what end is the deep analogy Clarke draws between it and Earth, and how does the analogy survive the obvious differences between the worlds? Is Rama not a ship powered by a space drive far beyond the scope of even future human physics to explain, a ship with a quite unearthly topography? ("If Galileo had been born on this world … he'd have gone crazy working out the laws of dynamics" [21:126]). Yet it seems to me that these differences serve actually to strengthen the moral structure of the novel, a structure we have already glimpsed in the fact that the name Rama is the author's choice. For Rama is Earth turned inside out. A person on Rama, unlike her counterpart on convex Earth, can take in the whole world at a glance (see 8:35). If she cannot assimilate every detail of what she sees, she can at least perceive it as a unity, once she has reoriented herself to "a new system of coordinates" (8:35). For Clarke, humanity must make that difficult—though by no means impossible—reorientation if it is to survive and develop. Rama and its invisible inhabitants are paradigms of possibility for the Earth and its dwellers, as yet so remote as to be almost inconceivable, so strange as to be almost alien.¹⁷ Clarke has noted that "any race intelligent enough to conquer interstellar space must first have conquered its own inner demons ("When Aliens Come": 112). Perhaps a spiritual or even a literal refashioning of the Earth in a Raman manner would be a step on the way to human transcendence. This could be achieved without the necessity of actual alien intervention, and here is the real reason why there are no aliens on Rama. Rama is entirely the product of a human imagination, and the refashioned world it represents is, for Clarke at least, entirely within the scope of unaided human potentiality. The image in the "Phoenix" chapter of Rama's regeneration in the solar fire (45:268-70) should surely serve to dismiss our doubts that the vessel might, after all, be merely a tomb aimlessly drifting among the stars. Rama becomes instead an artist's impression of what a human civilization might look like that has embraced technology, used it to achieve unity through refashioning its world, and taken upon itself a patient yet purposeful quest for meaning across the gulfs of interstellar space.

The strength of Rendezvous with Rama derives ultimately from the eternal human fascination with questions of origin, destination, and purpose. Rama, like Earth, is an entity whose creator's hand is everywhere but whose presence is nowhere. Norton's despair stems from his expectation, all along, of some sort of revelation from this absentee creator. Consequently, he has never assumed the necessary responsibility for attempting to decode the vessel himself, and he is properly chastised for it. We, on the other hand, from the moment we grasp the significance of the naming of Rama, are continually reminded that the artifact has an identifiable creator in the author himself, whose task is to reflect the human through the alien. If we ask ourselves, finally, what is the real significance of Perera's insight at the very end of the novel (why do the Ramans really do things in threes?) we can only conclude that the competent human creator, as opposed to his inscrutable fictive counterpart, should at least have the artistic sensibility to avoid triple redundancy. Lesser writers might go for a trilogy; I suspect that Rendezvous with Rama will have no sequels.¹⁸

Notes

1. Hollow devotes 16pp. to Childhood's End, 17pp. to 2001, but only 6pp. to Rama.

2. Following Clarke's practice, I use the unitalicized form Rama when referring to the artifact; Rama I adopt as the short title of the book.

3. See Rose, passim, and also note 9 below.

4. Rabkin (p. 51) is enthusiastic about Rama, but uncertain how to resolve the paradox that "although [Rama] defies homocentrism, [it] seems to uplift us." He is content to offer platitudes: "we readers feel the challenge of discovery and the exhilaration of using our minds, of encountering the new."

5. Hardesty (p. 1762) lists most of the irrelevant questions, but notes that "The mystical but perhaps too pat answers of the earlier Clarke 'first contact' books are wholly absent here."

6. The humor of the novel often serves to add to the sense of Rama's familiarity: "from a distance, when there was no sense of scale, Rama looked almost comically like an ordinary domestic boiler" (3:12).

7. Many of the names on Rama, such as those of the six "cities," are chosen for a similar reason.

8. Hardesty (p. 1763) complains that Rama, unlike Clarke's other alien encounter novels, seems contrived. But this is the point: the book is consciously a contrivance, an artifact, in the way that Childhood's End and the Odysseys are not.

9. This is a point missed by Scholes and Rabkin when they compliment Clarke for having constructed in Rama an environment which is "genuinely alien from human experience but solidly convincing nonetheless" (p. 86).

10. Hollow acutely observes: "Even the fact that the cylinder turns out to be a sort of 'space ark' … makes the name Rama, the name of one of the incarnations of the Hindu god Vishnu the Preserver, more appropriate than the humans who chose it anticipated" (p. 160).

11. Clarke is probably cheating here: surely the explorers would be more likely to begin with an unscrewing (counterclockwise) motion to open the airlocks? Harfst (p. 109) is useful in this regard.

12. Multiple redundancy, as Clarke has pointed out elsewhere, is a design feature of the human brain. See his 2001, p. 156; for the preservative function of triplication in human society, see p. 84 of the same work.

13. The déjà vu that the transformed Bowman experiences when he confronts the skulls of early man in the Leakey Memorial Museum (in 2010, p. 195) indicates the vast distance humanity has travelled in the intervening three million years: the episode is alienating. In Rama, by contrast, the déjà vu has the opposite effect: of closing the gulf between Rama and humanity. In 2010 humankind has become alien; in Rama the alien becomes human.

14. See Clarke's "When Aliens Come," p. 101.

15. Compare this argument with the one advanced earlier during a session of the Rama Committee, in which the humans try to see things from a Raman perspective: "We [i.e., the Ramans] may have no malevolent intentions toward an ant heap, but if we want to build a house on the same site …" (19:110).

16. Cf. Hollow: "To allow the bomb to be used against the ship would be to say that there is no difference between the human race and the unthinking universe" (p. 62).

17. Remote and strange, certainly, but not impossible: "Fifty years is ample time in which to change a world and its people almost beyond recognition" (Childhood's End, p. 65).

18. So does Hardesty (p. 1763) … but he gives no reason for this suspicion.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. S/Z, trans. R. Miller (NY, 1974).

Clarke, Arthur C. Childhood's End (NY: Ballantine, 1953).

――――――. Rendezvous with Rama (NY: Ballantine, 1974).

――――――. 2001: A Space Odyssey (NY: Signet, 1968).

――――――. 2010: Odyssey Two (NY: Ballantine, 1982).

――――――. "When Aliens Come," in Report on Planet Three and Other Speculations (London: Pan, 1984), pp. 100-14.

Hardesty, William H. "Rendezvous with Rama," in Survey of SF Literature, ed. Frank N. Magill (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: 1979), pp. 1759-63.

Harfst, Betty. "Of Myths and Polyominoes," in Arthur C. Clarke, ed. J. D. Olander & M. H. Greenberg (NY, 1977), pp. 107-14.

Hollow, John. Against the Night, the Stars: The SF of Arthur C. Clarke (San Diego, NY, London: 1983).

Rabkin, Eric S. Arthur C. Clarke (Mercer Island, WA: 1979, 1980).

Rose, Mark. Alien Encounters: Anatomy of SF (Cambridge, MA & London: 1981).

Scholes, Robert & Eric S. Rabkin. SF: History, Science, Vision (NY, 1977).

Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of SF: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven, CT: 1979).

Thron, Michael E. "The Outsider from Inside: Clarke's Aliens," in Arthur C. Clarke, ed. Olander & Greenberg (NY, 1977), pp. 72-86.

IMPERIAL EARTH: A FANTASY OF LOVE AND DISCORD (1975)

Regina Minudri (review date March 1976)

SOURCE: Minudri, Regina. Review of Imperial Earth: A Fantasy of Love and Discord, by Arthur C. Clarke. School Library Journal 22, no. 7 (March 1976): 119.

YA—In the year of the Quincentennial, 2276, civilization remains strikingly similar to that of 1976 [in Imperial Earth ]. Duncan Makenzie, a cloned descendant of Titan's founder, sent back to Earth to participate in the festivities, gets involved with a long-lost love and witnesses an old friend's needless death. The story culminates in Makenzie's plea for civilization to look forward and reach out to other galaxies. The details of Makenzie's trip and the technical advances in all fields are absorbing; however, the author has paid very little attention to the plot. Still, this reads effortlessly, will present no censorship problems, and undoubtedly will be gobbled up by sci-fi and Clarke fans.

Steve Ownbey (review date 14 May 1976)

SOURCE: Ownbey, Steve. Review of Imperial Earth: A Fantasy of Love and Discord, by Arthur C. Clarke. National Review 28, no. 7 (14 May 1976): 519.

Travel with Duncan Makenzie, scion of Titan's important hydrogen industry, as he accepts an invitation to speak at the July 4, 2276 festivities in Washington. Duncan has, appropriately, five reasons for making this journey: diplomatic, since the Makenzies dominate the political life of Titan; romantic, since the lost love of his youth, the glamorous Calindy, is a Terran; sentimental, since he was cloned on Earth, but can't remember seeing it before; intellectual, since, like most offworlders, he's curious about the civilization from which all human communities in the solar system sprang; and, perhaps most important of all, domestic, since only on Earth can he arrange for the cloning of an heir. This novel has as many angles as the geometric figures that so fascinated Duncan as a boy. Its dozen or so noticeable faults are extremely minor, although some readers may be offended by the futuristic treatment of sex, which is, to put it mildly, startling. All such reservations aside, Imperial Earth is a book nobody should miss. It's an utterly delightful tale, suspenseful and moving, full of unexpected chuckles and stunning surprises right up to the last sentence, all related with wry humor, scholarly intelligence, and extraordinary charm.

THE VIEW FROM SERENDIP: SPECULATIONS ON SPACE, SCIENCE, AND THE SEA, TOGETHER WITH FRAGMENTS OF AN EQUATORIAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY (1977)

R. W. Ryan (review date 1 October 1977)

SOURCE: Ryan, R. W. Review of The View from Serendip: Speculations on Space, Science and the Sea, Together with Fragments of an Equatorial Autobiography, by Arthur C. Clarke. Library Journal 102, no. 17 (1 October 1977): 2054.

Clarke's name has become a household word, perhaps as much for his space travel evangelism as for his science fiction. But for 20 years or more he has been an enthusiast also of the sea and of Ceylon (or Sri Lanka, or Serendip). This collection [The View from Serendip ] includes articles, speeches, prefaces, fiction, and testimony (in two senses), and touches on all of these interests, as well as a few others—the tax problems of a divorced expatriate, for instance, and one-up-manship among prolific science writers. Most of these pieces are of interest, and there is certainly variety, but there is also considerable repetition; we are told about six times of the special TV antenna which the Indian government installed on the roof of Clarke's home. But this is a minor quibble. Larger libraries, and those with an interest in science or space, will want to purchase this book.

THE FOUNTAINS OF PARADISE (1979)

Tim Myers (review date 24 March 1979)

SOURCE: Myers, Tim. Review of The Fountains of Paradise, by Arthur C. Clarke. New Republic 180, no. 12 (24 March 1979): 40.

Arthur C. Clarke has seen the future and it works too well. A prolific writer of science fiction, Clarke continues in his new novel, The Fountains of Paradise, the struggle of his brethren to humanize the fearsome offspring of modern science: technology. To put his effort in perspective it is important to remember that the largest part of the 20th-century literary tribe have felt like aliens in what they consider an increasingly artificial world. Attempts to deliver the image of man from the prison of technology have resulted, at best, in desperate failures like that of Hart Crane in The Bridge.

Now in science fiction writing we have what is perhaps the dying end of the literary impulse to forge the spirit and the computer into a religion of science. In The Fountains of Paradise, Clarke attempts to forecast a future where technology has again become man's hope for salvation. The hero of the novel, a scientist-cum-Siddhartha by the name of Vannever Morgan, has a vision that he can link the earth with the rest of the solar system by means of a towering "sky elevator" that would soar from the equator to a synchronous orbiting satellite, which, in turn, would serve as a stationary staging area to the stars.

If Morgan's ambition seems Promethean, Clarke cheats himself and his readers by not giving the scientist the complexity of character—a fatal flaw, at least—that would make him a tragic figure heading for a fall. Morgan's audacity is initially paralleled with that of an ancient Indian king, a usurper who is destroyed in his effort to make himself a god. The dual narrative is ended quickly, however, and the Indian king, the only character with nobility, is taken from us. We are left with Morgan, a pathetic egotist who is also hopelessly stereotyped, choosing, in a stock response, to turn his back on a woman because she would take him away from his other mistress: work. Morgan's petty narcissism wouldn't be so bad if Clarke didn't want us to admire the poor fellow, who really is nothing more than a machine minus the shiny covering. Without a trace of irony, the author has created a world where the rage for order has robbed even its heroes of personality.

Writing in a genre whose strength is supposed to lie in its imagination, Clarke has given us cant instead, and succeeds only in encouraging disbelief. When the spaceship leaves, I for one am going to light out for the territory of earth, because technology is out to civilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before.

J. Ron Brown (review date September 1979)

SOURCE: Brown, J. Ron. Review of The Fountains of Paradise, by Arthur C. Clarke. School Library Journal 26, no. 1 (September 1979): 166.

YA—[In The Fountains of Paradise, ] Vannevar Morgan, chief engineer of the bridge linking Europe and Africa, sets out to build an elevator to the stars to replace traditional travel by rocket. Armed with a new material, Morgan faces one last obstacle: obtaining a suitable land mass on which to anchor the project. His calculations lead him to a mountain in Taprobane (Ceylon) occupied by Buddhist monks, believers in an ancient legend that when golden butterflies (which normally die on the lower slopes) reach the temple, it will be time to abandon their domicile. After the mountain becomes Morgan's, the story is taken up with mechanics, the only dramatic moment being a rescue when several people are trapped high up in the "basement" of the structure. This is not one of Clarke's greatest stories; there is little action and too much technical detail.

2010: ODYSSEY TWO (1982)

Mary Jo Campbell (review date February 1983)

SOURCE: Campbell, Mary Jo. Review of 2010: Odyssey Two, by Arthur C. Clarke. School Library Journal 29, no. 6 (February 1983): 94.

YA—2001 enthusiasts, rejoice. HAL, Dave and all the gang are back in a worthy sequel [2010: Odyssey Two ]. The year is 2010 and the deserted Space Ship Discovery is again in trouble. Her orbit (set by astronaut Dave before he disappeared) is erratic and she is in danger of falling into Jupiter. If she goes, all information aboard relating to the last (2001) trip will perish as well. To save the ship and discover what happened to it and its crew, an expedition of Russian and American scientists heads out to Jovian space. This compatible group includes Dr. Heywood Floyd, the project director for Discovery's last trip, and Dr. Chandrasegarampillai, HAL's programmer and surrogate daddy. Although both are put in suspended animation for the first part of the journey, Dr. Floyd is awakened early. Someone is trying to get to Discovery before them and it looks like that someone will make it. From then on a nonstop adventure begins. Questions left unanswered by the first novel are answered here, including: What happened to Dave Bowman? What is the Star Child? What are those monoliths? Clarke's narrative is wonderful. The description of Dave's journey through Jupiter is alone worth the price of the book. Europa may become a household word. Suspenseful, thought-provoking and lots of fun, 2010 is a winner.

THE SENTINEL: MASTERWORKS OF SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY (1983)

Susan L. Nickerson (review date 15 November 1983)

SOURCE: Nickerson, Susan L. Review of The Sentinel: Masterworks of Science Fiction and Fantasy, by Arthur C. Clarke. Library Journal 108, no. 20 (15 November 1983): 2174.

Byron Preiss, editor of the series, is seeking to make "Masterworks" a collector's edition, so it's the production and not the content that is important. All of these nine stories [in The Sentinel ] have been published elsewhere, some many times, and Clarke's introduction is the only new writing in the book. Any library needing a representative collection of good Clarke should buy this; otherwise, for collectors only.

ARTHUR C. CLARKE'S JULY 20, 2019: LIFE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY (1986)

Dorcas Hand (review date March 1987)

SOURCE: Hand, Dorcas. Review of Arthur C. Clarke's July 20, 2019: Life in the Twenty-First Century, by Arthur C. Clarke. School Library Journal 33, no. 7 (March 1987): 178.

YA—Arthur C. Clarke and a team of expert consultants have put together a factual projection of life in 2019 [in Arthur C. Clarke's July 20, 2019 ], based on scientific trends today. The "Letter from Clavius" offers a novelistic view of an imaginary future moon settlement where an elderly Arthur Clarke lives; the low gravity helps his heart condition. Chapter 1, "July 20, 1969: a 2019 interpretation of the Apollo moon landing (an excerpt from the inaugural speech of the President of the United States in … 1993)" provides wonderful insight into events of the 1960s from a 1986 perspective, as well as possibly a future one. Other topics include robotics, education, space stations, entertainment, and sports, all approached in readable prose that clearly traces one possible/probable path from 1986 technology into the future. Students will enjoy seeing the possibilities raised; others may wish for other results by 2019. Everyone will benefit from this glimpse into a possible future.

THE SONGS OF DISTANT EARTH (1986)

Education (review date winter 1987)

SOURCE: Review of The Songs of Distant Earth, by Arthur C. Clarke. Education 108, no. 2 (winter 1987): 262.

[In The Songs of Distant Earth, ] Paradise Lost is just a few islands in a planetwide ocean, Thalassa was a veritable paradise—home to one of the small colonies founded centuries ago before by robot Mother Ships when the sun had gone nova and mankind had fled earth. Mesmerized by the beauty of Thalass and overwhelmed by its vast resources, the colonists lived an idyllic existence, unaware of the monumental evolutionary event slowly taking place beneath their seas…. Then Magellan arrived in orbit carrying one million refugees from the last, mad days on Earth. And suddenly uncertainty and change had come to the placid paradise that was Thalassa.

THE GHOST FROM THE GRAND BANKS (1990)

Jackie Cassada (review date 15 November 1990)

SOURCE: Cassada, Jackie. Review of The Ghost from the Grand Banks, by Arthur C. Clarke. Library Journal 115, no. 20 (15 November 1990): 95.

As the centennial of the sinking of the Titanic approaches, rival corporations vie to be the first to raise the ship from its graveyard in the North Atlantic—engaging in a race that becomes an obsession and a rendezvous with the unknown [in The Ghost from the Grand Banks ]. One of sf's most enduring authors brings his spare and graceful style to bear in this sf tale that is part adventure, part tribute. For most sf collections.

THE GARDEN OF RAMA (1991)

Jackie Cassada (review date 1 August 1991)

SOURCE: Cassada, Jackie. Review of The Garden of Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke. Library Journal 116, no. 13 (1 August 1991): 150.

Trapped aboard the massive Raman spacecraft as it leaves Earth's solar system, three cosmonauts begin a 13-year voyage toward an unknown destination [in The Garden of Rama ]. Combining the best of space adventure (as the spacefarers encounter other life forms within the multihabitat vessel) with human drama (as children are born and raised in an unearthly environment), this third novel in the Rama cycle asks as many questions as it answers. Recommended, along with Clarke's classic Rendezvous with Rama and Rama II (Bantam, 1989, coauthored with Lee), for most libraries.

THE LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS (2000)

Gerald Jonas (review date 30 April 2000)

SOURCE: Jonas, Gerald. Review of The Light of Other Days, by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter. New York Times Book Review (30 April 2000): 28.

Arthur C. Clarke, the dean of living science fiction writers, has lent his name in recent years to a number of collaborative projects, with mixed results. In The Light of Other Days (Tor/Tom Doherty) the 82-year-old Clarke joins with the British science fiction writer Stephen Baxter to tell the story of an invention that changes the world. By taming anomalies in the structure of space known as "wormholes," scientists working for a technology tycoon, Hiram Patterson, find a way to connect any two points in the universe instantaneously. While no matter can pass through a wormhole, light can. It soon becomes apparent that this is the perfect eavesdropping device. When everyone gains access to easily operated "WormCams," privacy as we know it ends. The only way to hide from WormCam surveillance is to live in total darkness, as some mavericks attempt to do. Others defiantly act as if they have nothing to hide, going naked, copulating in public and so on.

But as if exploring the psychological and cultural ramifications of life without privacy is not enough of a challenge, Clarke and Baxter keep upping the technological ante. Revealing that WormCams can also see into the past, they invite us to peer over their shoulders to discover how humans evolved and what really happened in Jesus' day. Meanwhile, a giant planetoid nicknamed Wormwood is on a collision course with Earth. And the two sons of Hiram Patterson are locked in a deadly battle with their demoniacal father, who … I confess I lost interest in who was doing what to whom before the book was half over. Even in the most imaginative science fiction, sometimes more is less.

TIME'S EYE: BOOK ONE OF A TIME ODYSSEY (2004)

Jackie Cassada (review date 15 November 2003)

SOURCE: Cassada, Jackie. Review of Time's Eye: Book One of a Time Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter. Library Journal 128, no. 19 (15 November 2003): 101.

A large, round artifact makes its way through space to Earth and transports an Australopithecan female and her child far into the future [in Time's Eye ]. In addition, men and women from the present find themselves suddenly transported into the past. SF Grandmaster Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey ) and Baxter (the "Manifold" series; Evolution) have collaborated on a time-traveling companion series to the various "Space Odyssey" novels, this one concerned with the dimensions of time and space. Baxter's panoramic visions and Clark's lucid and precise storytelling combine to form a series opener that belongs in all sf collections. Highly recommended. [The finished book will include a bonus bound-in CD-ROM, featuring a conversation between the two authors, the complete text of Baxter's Manifold: Time, and more.]

Marcus Chown (review date 31 July 2004)

SOURCE: Chown, Marcus. Review of Time's Eye: Book One of a Time Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter. New Scientist 183, no. 2458 (31 July 2004): 52.

The army of Alexander the Great (with a few English Tommies and Rudyard Kipling) face the hordes of Genghis Khan (with a few Russian cosmonauts) [in Time's Eye ]. Oh, and there are some alien artefacts hovering about too. Echoes of 2001 abound as Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter take us on their latest space—or, rather, space-time—odyssey. Hang on for a highly entertaining ride.

SUNSTORM: BOOK TWO OF A TIME ODYSSEY (2005)

Publishers Weekly (review date 17 January 2005)

SOURCE: Review of Sunstorm: Book Two of a Time Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter. Publishers Weekly 252, no. 3 (17 January 2005): 39.

Set in the same universe as Clarke's 2001 and its sequels, Clarke and Baxter's second and final Time Odyssey book (after 2004's Time's Eye) [Sunstorm] will especially appeal to fans of hard SF who appreciate well-grounded science and humans with a can-do attitude to problem solving. In 2037, the same day the enigmatic alien Firstborn return Bisea Dutt, the heroine of Time's Eye, to her home in London, the city grinds to a halt as a sun storm sends a massive surge of energy to Earth, temporarily destroying the world's electronic infrastructure. This surge presages another, much larger sun storm, due to hit in 2042, which will utterly annihilate life across the globe. Against all odds, the nations of Earth come together to construct a huge space umbrella that will shield the planet from the worst of the barrage. The answer to why the sun's activity is being manipulated to wipe out life on Earth must wait, given the day-to-day difficulties and politics of the construction project. The five-year sweep of events, the plethora of characters and the cuts from Mars to Earth to the moon during the climactic sun storm give the story a movie montage feel, but the focus on the enormously challenging task at hand will keep readers turning the pages.

Jackie Cassada (review date 15 March 2005)

SOURCE: Cassada, Jackie. Review of Sunstorm: Book Two of a Time Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter. Library Journal 130, no. 5 (15 March 2005): 74.

British officer Bisesa Dutt, newly returned from a bizarre out-of-time experience on another world, now faces a crisis of world-shattering proportions [in Sunstorm ]. Along with Astronomer Royal Siobhan McGorran, Phillippa Duflot of the office of the mayor of London, and solar specialist and lunar resident Mikhail Martynov, Lieutenant Dutt must assemble an ambitious project to save Earth and its population from a fatal sunstorm just five years away. Sf grandmaster Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey ) and Baxter ("Manifold" series) deliver a page-turning sequel to Time's Eye and conclude the "Time Odyssey" series. Combining the best of disaster fiction and hard sf, the authors maintain their focus on the compelling characters caught in the midst of a cataclysmic cosmic event. Most libraries will want this.

Gerald Jonas (review date 19 June 2005)

SOURCE: Jonas, Gerald. Review of Sunstorm: Book Two of a Time Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter. New York Times Book Review (19 June 2005): 20.

Genre labels like "science fiction" and "fantasy" are conveniences for publishers, booksellers and readers in a hurry to pick up a reliable entertainment at an airport newsstand. What these labels actually mean is a prickly question. A friend in publishing argues that the distinguishing mark of fantasy is the presence of magic. But what counts as magic? No less an authority than Arthur C. Clarke has observed—in a dictum known to his legions of fans as Clarke's Third Law—that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I was reminded of this while reading Sunstorm: Book Two of a Time Odyssey (Del Rey/Ballantine), a highly satisfying collaboration between Clarke and Stephen Baxter. At the age of 87, Clarke continues to publish with the help of younger writers like Baxter, whose finest solo work (like his ambitious novel Evolution) owes much to Clarke's patented blend of scientific rigor and speculative daring. Sunstorm is a sequel of sorts to last year's Time's Eye, in which awesomely advanced aliens ransacked human history for representative characters like Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, then dumped them on a patchwork planet to fight it out for dominance. Now we learn that this cruel experiment was prologue to an even crueler intervention: the cleansing of life on earth in the name of some universal greater good. To accomplish this goal, the aliens rely on nothing so crude as a Star Wars-type battle fleet; they prefer to act from a safe distance by triggering a deadly eruption of our sun. What they have not counted on is the resourcefulness of 21st-century humans, who respond to this threat by building what amounts to a world-size parasol.

In the early chapters, Clarke and Baxter introduce us to the key players in the global rescue effort, notably the British astronomer royal, Siobhan McGorran, and a "maverick boy genius," Eugene Mangles, the physicist who alerts the world to its impending doom. But it's the engineering details of designing and constructing the enormous sunshield that most concern the authors. Clarke has spent his long career wringing suspense and poetry from scientific facts. His and Baxter's explanation of why the shield must be made of glass manufactured on the moon is more enthralling than any number of space opera shoot-'em-ups. Their persuasive account of the physics behind the prodigious alien intervention draws on accessible metaphors like "a Ping-Pong ball rebounding off the windshield of an 18-wheeler truck" and "a pebble thrown into a pond." And yet, for all its scientific content, the narrative periodically reminds us that the powers of the aliens (which include time travel) are, to our pitiful human minds, indistinguishable from magic.

FURTHER READING

Criticism

Bernstein, Richard. "The Decline and Fall of the Monoliths." New York Times (11 May 1997): C29.

States that, while 3001: The Final Odyssey is imaginative, its plot and scientific devices "seem forced and detached."

Candelaria, Matthew. "The Colonial Metropolis in the Work of Asimov and Clarke." Journal of American and Contemporary Cultures 25, nos. 3-4 (fall-winter 2002): 427-32.

Studies the nature of imperialism in the works of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke.

D'Ammassa, Don. Review of The Light of Other Days, by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter. Science Fiction Chronicle 21, no. 4 (August-September 2000): 40.

Evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of The Light of Other Days.

――――――. Review of The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke, by Arthur C. Clarke. Science Fiction Chronicle 22, no. 2 (February 2001): 41.

Offers a positive assessment of The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke.

Lawler, Donald L. "Imperial Earth." In Survey of Science Fiction Literature, Volume Three, edited by Frank N. Mag-ill, pp. 1019-025. Englewood Cliffs, Calif.: Salem Press, 1979.

Offers a critical reading of the thematic elements in Imperial Earth.

Paulos, John Allen. "Space Jam." New York Times (9 March 1997): 7.

Compares 3001: The Final Odyssey to 2001: A Space Odyssey, noting a shift in Clarke's treatment of technology and social issues.

Additional coverage of Clarke's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vols. 4, 33; Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biography and Resources, Vol. 1; Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Vol. 13; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 1-4R; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 2, 28, 55, 74, 130; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 1, 4, 13, 18, 35, 136; Contemporary Novelists, Eds. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; Contemporary Popular Writers; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 261; DISCovering Authors Modules: Popular Fiction and Genre Authors; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Junior DISCovering Authors; Literature and Its Times, Vol. 5; Literature Resource Center; Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults, Eds. 1, 2; Major 20th-Century Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Major 21st-Century Writers, Ed. 2005; St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers, Ed. 4; St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers; Science Fiction Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Short Stories for Students, Vols. 4, 18; Short Story Criticism, Vol. 3; Something about the Author, Vols. 13, 70, 115; and Twayne Companion to Contemporary Literature in English, Ed. 1:1.