RIP Arthur C. Clarke

[crikkett]

Arthur died today -- well he died tomorrow, in Sri Lanka.
http://www.deadnotforgotten.com


One of my favorite Arthur C. Clarke stories was "Childhood's End". Here's the Cliff Notes from Wikipedia:


This article is about a novel. For other uses, see Childhood's End (disambiguation).
Childhood's End


Childhood's End is a science fiction novel by Sir Arthur C. Clarke. It was originally published in 1953, and a version with a new first chapter was released in 1990 due to the anachronistic nature of the opening chapter (the first attempts to launch rockets into orbit by both the Americans and Russians are in progress but aborted suddenly when aliens arrive, with a sense of the death of a dream). This story was originally a short story dubbed Guardian Angel which Clarke first published in 1950 for the Famous Fantastic Mysteries magazine. It is basically the novel's section after the prologue, Earth and the Overlords but with some different text in certain places.

Plot summary

Childhood's End is about humanity's transformation and integration to an interstellar hive mind, the Occult, man's inability to live in a utopian society, cruelty to animals, and the idea of being "The Last Man on Earth".

The 1953 edition of the story begins when enormous alien spaceships one day appear above all of the Earth's major cities. The aliens, who become known as the Overlords, quickly communicate by radio, announcing benign intention and desire to help mankind. They quickly end the arms race and colonialism. They also arrange personal, though not face-to-face, meetings between Secretary General of the United Nations Rikki Stormgren and Karellen, the Overlord leader, albeit via one-way mirror, so that the earthman cannot see the extraterrestrial alien. Karellen has a special relationship with Stormgren, though short of traditional friendship. The Overlords promise to reveal themselves in fifty years, after which time mankind will have lost their prejudice, becoming comfortable with their presence.

Mankind enters a golden age of the greatest peace and prosperity ever known, but at the expense of some creativity and freedom; not every Earthling is content with the bargain, nor accepts the beneficence of the Overlords' long-term intentions. Although Stormgren, with Karellen's help, survives kidnap by subversive humans suspicious of the Overlords, he secretly harbours lingering curiosity about the real Overlord nature and smuggles a device aboard Karellen's spaceship to see behind the screen. Yet, he later tells questioners the device failed; the novel strongly hints that Stormgren agrees with the Overlords that mankind is unready for what he saw revealed.

True to their word, fifty years after arrival, the Overlords appear in person. They are beings resembling the traditional human folklore image of demons: bipeds with large wings, horned heads, and tails. The Overlords are taller than humans and of proportionally more massive bodies covered with a hard, black armour shell. They are greatly photosensitive to yellow sunlight, because they are from a planet with a dimmer light spectrum, and, though they can breathe Earth air, they prefer their own specific atmosphere gas. Mankind accept them with open arms, and with their help, create an utopian world.

[crikkett]

1. the rest of the story.....

Not sure what happened in the abv post, but here's the rest of the NOT COPYRIGHTED wikipedia article.

Although humanity and the Overlords are in good relations, the spread of equal goods and the ban on building space ships that can travel past the moon causes sects of humanity to believe their innovation and independence is being stagnated. In response, those sects establish the New Athens island colony.
1968 edition of Childhood's End.
1968 edition of Childhood's End.

After one hundred years on earth, human children (starting in New Athens) begin displaying telepathic and telekinetic abilities. Because of that, they soon become distant from their parents. Karellen then reveals the true purpose of why the Overlords came to Earth. They are in service to the Overmind, an amorphous being of pure energy. It has charged them with the duty of fostering humanity's transition to a higher plane of existence and merger with the Overmind. Also, the Overlords' resemblance to the devil of human folklore is explained with the concept of racial memory unlimited by humanity's linear concept of time; hence, fear of them was based upon instinct, the foreknowledge that they herald the end of the human species.

Karellen announces that the children will be quarantined on a continent of their own and because of them, all hopes of humanity are over because it will only be the children who will merge with the Overmind. The Overlords are also shown to be trapped in an evolutionary dead end who will never merge with the Overmind, and thus are doomed to forever do its bidding. Because of this, Karellen states his race will forever envy humanity. Despite how the Overlords are trapped in their current forms, Karellen hopes that his race will learn what causes the stage that will be taken by the Overmind and that eventually his race will discover how. Following the quarantine, no more children are born; the narration subtly hints that most of the parents commit suicide, while their children evolve towards merging with the Overmind. New Athens is then destroyed by the leaders detonating a nuclear bomb on it.

The last man alive is Jan Rodricks, a physicist, who will witness mankind's final evolutionary transformation. He stowed away on an Overlord supply ship earlier in the story in a successful attempt to travel to the Overlord home planet, which he correctly guessed orbits a star of the Carina constellation. As a physicist, Rodricks knows of the relativistic twin paradox effect: however brief the round trip to the Overlord planet is in his subjective, personal time-frame, the shortest time elapsed on planet Earth, for a "twin" person of the same age, would be the round trip light-travel time. Given that the Overlord planet is forty light-years distant, at least eighty years elapsed on Earth before his return (eighty years is the lower limit, the actual time is longer).

Therefore, when Rodricks returns from the Overlord home world, he expects no one on Earth will remember him, nevertheless, he is unprepared for the return: mankind, as he knew it, died. About three hundred million naked young beings, physically human but otherwise with nothing common to Man, remain on the quarantined continent. They are the final, physical form of human evolution before merging with the Overmind. Life — not only human life, but all other forms on the planet — was exterminated by them, and the vast cities that Jan remembers are all dark, worldwide.

Although no human beings remain on Earth, some Overlords remain, studying the evolved children. The two whom Rodricks knows are Karellen and Rashaverak; they expected his return. They briefly remain after Rodricks's return, trying to understand mankind's transformation, which is denied to their race despite its great achievements in other realms. It also is revealed here that the Overlords have met and conditioned other races for the Overmind, and that humanity is the fifth race the Overmind will collect.

When the evolved children exploit their powers — altering the Earth's rotation, effecting other, dangerous planetary adjustments — making it too dangerous to remain, the Overlords prepare to leave. They offer Rodricks the opportunity of leaving with them, but he chooses to remain as witness to Earth's dissolution; mankind's offspring evolved to a higher existence, requiring neither a body nor a place, so ends mankind's childhood.

The story's last scene details Karellen's final backward look, through space, at the doomed Solar System. He is emotionally depressed, having seen yet another race evolve to the beyond, while he and his race are limited to their current form. Despite that, he renders a final salute to mankind, considering whether or not conditioning them for the Overmind helped his goal of deciphering the evolutionary secret for his race to merge with the Overmind. He then turns away from the view, the reader presumes, to await the Overmind's next order.

[I Have A Dream]

3. That sounds like a wonderful book!

RIP, Arthur Clarke.

[Fire Walk With Me]

2. God Bless Mr. Clarke.

Thank you sir for sharing your amazing sense of wonder with the rest of us.

[Why Syzygy]

4. That's an amazing story.

Have you read it?

It reminds me a little of "Enders Game".
http://books.google.com/books?id=MvwAmLjUDBAC&dq=enders+game&pg=PP1&ots=jUSFcOCi6s&sig=yyimAWIippowXB3zL2sSBEiTgnE&hl=en&prev=http://www.google.com/search?q=Enders+Game&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title&cad=one-book-with-thumbnail#PPR9,M1


This is from your link >

I think of Clarke when I hear people talk about the possibility of life other than on earth. He summed it up well when he said, “Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.”

[pink-o]

5. I admit I've always been partial to AC Clarke

Initially, because I was born on his birthday: December 16. So as a fellow Saj I read with great curiosity his writings, looking for mental commonalities. But I soon realised the man was far more of a visionary than I could ever be.

But I understood his methodology.